

Mozilla Messaging team (Thunderbird) to integrate with Mozilla Labs - keyist
http://ascher.ca/blog/2011/04/04/the-future-of-messaging/

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pstack
I read too many uneasy references to modern "communication" and "the web" that
give me cause for concern about the future of the email utility, here.

Is this soft language hinting toward chasing the "nobody under thirty uses
email" tail? I may be reading too much into the post, but the use of any word
other than "email" whenever possible is unsettling.

Comments about the pending Firefox 5 already threaten my browsing experience
with a dump of "social" that I simply don't wish to have, so it seems feasible
that this could be a direction Thunderbird is following, too.

Personally, I want more innovative email functionality. Things that my feeble
brain couldn't even conceive of until someone else puts it in front of my
face. I could really do without having the client crammed full of Facebook
messaging hooks and twitter and FourSquare and other things popular amount the
self-indulgent attention-whore population.

Edit: Okay, the page went away for a bit and when it was back up, it was
edited to include a few more comments and a bunch of links to things like F1
and Raindrop, which seems to shed some light on where their heads are at.

Am I just being old and grumpy or do others feel it's reasonable to want a
light utility that performs one function superbly? Granted, Thunderbird is
more than a simple email client, but those things it currently includes
benefit the email experience (such as the very useful indexing and search
improvements). Do I just need to be five years younger to grasp how incredibly
necessary it is to have Twitter and Facebook and URL sharing services in my
email client (or all the social stuff Firefox 5 may be looking to include in
the browser)?

As long as these things remain extensions that you can add by choice to either
Firefox or Thunderbird, it of course isn't a problem. Choices and options are
a great thing. The more I hear, the more I suspect much of this will be slowly
embedded over time as part of the finished product. And the more activity I
see focused on these things, the more I have to wonder if there is actually a
demand among the user base for this or if it's just throwing throwing things
at the wall to see what sticks and hope something gives an edge over the
competition?

I guess the best comparison I can make is the swarming of the market with
media button keyboards. Remember how IBM mechanical keyboards were just fine?
Extremely good, in fact? And then someone got the bright idea that we needed a
button on the keyboard to load a home page for us. And load our email for us.
And set the volume for us. And shut down our computer for us. And bring up a
Google search page for us. I've never used the buttons. I've never known
someone who does. Never actually seen someone use one in front of me. Ever.
But they're on every keyboard. Even today. You have to go out of your way to
even find a standard keyboard without all the garbage on it.

Is that what all this social crap is going to be? Sticking a bunch of
superfluous limbs onto your creature in the Will Wright Spore Character
Creator, just for kicks?

~~~
starwed
Thing is, the way to tear down the walled facebook-style walled gardens around
social media is probably by making it a seamless part of the web.

Ultimately everything you do on facebook, twitter, and the like boils down to
just a few verbs. Someone posts a link or content, and then folk repost and
comment on it. Ways to organise and gate the content are provided, and it is
all tied together with individual identities.

All this stuff is pretty amenable to abstraction, and could be applied to any
sort of content on the web. But that requires protocols and an idea of
identity that is built into the browser itself.

~~~
pstack
If Facebook's messaging service was just their version of Gmail or Hotmail, I
wouldn't see an issue with it. Providing a way to use the Thunderbird
interface as a substitute to other interfaces for existing email protocols is
fine.

But providing an interface to perpetuate that walled-off Facebook-User-to-
Facebook-User experience seems counter-productive. And, really, what person is
going to both discover and use Thunderbird if their primary interface with the
world is Facebook? They probably find Facebook by typing it into Google every
morning.

Worse would be if they were talking about actually making the whole facebook
experience part of Thunderbird. That you could not only communicate through
Thunderbird via the Facebook messaging service, but actually read and post
"wall" updates. Talk about feature bloat.

(I know there's no reason to expect that they're going to do this - it's all
speculation . . . though I'm sure if it's not going to be part of Thunderbird,
it'll become part of Firefox).

When you get to the point that you're facilitating status updates on services
through an email client, is it still just about communication? Twitter
certainly isn't as much about communication as it is pimping your company or
self (or persona) to the world. A rather one-sided "look at me" conversation.

At that point, I don't know how we determine what Thunderbird _shouldn't_
facilitate. Should it provide a customized interface to updating your
Wordpress website? Or your Drupal site? (I know some things have APIs that let
you just send an email to a service and have the data added to it, such as the
add-by-email functionality that pinboard.in has - but I think we're talking
about specific added functionality beyond that in the client).

Where do we then differentiate the browser and the email client? It starts to
sound like Thunderbird isn't so much an email client for email communications,
but that Firefox as a "receive" device and Thunderbird is a "send" device.

