

The Future of Email - prakash
http://www.gaborcselle.com/blog/2008/10/future-of-email-talk-in-sydney.html

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orib
_lists of disconnected emails sorted by arrival time. Clients have no sense of
priority, urgency, workflows, or connectedness._

Really? All the mail clients I can think of off the top of my head have at
least threading and urgency flags. While I can think of some improvements, I
don't think that there's anything significantly better out there for managing
large volumes of incoming information.

------
thwarted
The future of email has been greatly exaggerated.

~~~
unalone
I disagree. I think that email is still extremely important because of how
vastly basic-level it is.

I love Facebook's messaging system. I think Twitter is a waste of time, but I
think that for what it is it's done perfectly. Neither holds a candle to
email, because it's site-specific.

Texting is huge, of course. That's a messaging system that is quite possibly
as big as email. But it relies on the same decentralized system as email. It's
vulnerable to the same things. This presentation is just as relevant for
texts.

Then there's IM, which isn't decentralized (not the popular types, anyway),
and which has the exact same productivity problem but amplified.

Either way, I think that the chart in this slide (urgent/important) is the
central problem that any sort of inbox, be it email or texting or feed or IM,
needs to prepare itself for. And I think that whoever solves it has a pretty
huge userbase ripe for the plucking.

But don't bet against decentralized systems, because they take forever to go
away (look at how much Panic is getting for Unison, their UseNet client), and
don't bet against email until there's a better existing system in place that
doesn't rely on walled information.

