

Ask HN: I Predict the End of Email in 5 Years, What Do You Think? - epynonymous

Email's a standard dating back to the 1970's, but amazingly continues to be widely used by enterprises as well as consumers.<p>My contention is that the email standard hasn't  evolved much over the last few decades and that it's quite crude, take for example the process of responding to questions in an email; most users reply with the original text quoted and then proceed to answer inline with a colored tag to distinguish text author--1970's??<p>So upon thinking about how to simplify this, I came to the conclusion that Social Apps like Facebook already have the answer!  Facebook provides a means to post and receive comments without having to quote text, the flow of conversation is much more contextual (and efficient in terms of text stored).  ever read an email with 20 or so replies that logarithmically expands because everyone's quoting the previous mail?  The concept of a social group and belonging to groups is synonymous with an email alias.  you can control access by deciding who's your friend.  Attachments can be added.  So what can't you do with Facebook or your favorite Social App that you can do with email??  For the record, Facebook has its own email service i'm certain for legacy purposes.<p>The only thing i could think of is that email is more anonymous in that you could send anyone an email so long as you had their email address.  With a Social App, you'd have to be befriended first before having an actual conversation.<p>So the ultimate question remains, is email still needed!  let's say your office got rid of email and adopted some Social App in favor, let's also say that there was some Social App standard so that they were all interoperable, i.e. you wouldn't have to join a Social App every time, you could just use your own.  There are a lot companies that use a CRM which is a natural integration point for a Social App Portal.<p>I'm predicting the end of email in 5-10 years, what say you hackers?!<p>And if email didn't exist anymore, what's a blackberry to do?  can you imagine the interface?
======
mooism2
Can you define what you mean by "the end of email" please. Do you _literally_
mean no use of protocols like smtp, imap and pop? Or do you _figuratively_
mean no use, so a 90%/95%/99% reduction in legitimate (non-spam) use?

It's worth noting that mailing lists could have been replaced by blogs and
web-based forums a decade ago, but they were not. Before that, usenet was
arguably superior to mailing lists, but it was usenet that died out{1} and
mailing lists survived and thrived.

It's worth noting too that though newspapers are being killed off by the
internet+tv+radio, they are still around, and will continue to be around for
much more than a decade, despite repeated predictions of their _imminent_
demise.

So, even if you can persuade me that e-mail will die out (you haven't), I will
remain sceptical that it will happen within 10 years. Certainly not within 5.

{1}: Usenet is still around. Apparently.

P.S. _"Email's a standard dating back to the 1970's, but amazingly continues
to be widely used..."_ AM radio dates back even further and continues to be
widely used also, despite the long-available superior technology of FM radio.

~~~
epynonymous
great points, it's more figurative, i just needed a catchy title ;)

i think social app communication features are much more usable than email,
there's also a linkage between users in social apps that can be leveraged to
provide even higher levels of usability: CRM integration with contact
management, calendar, customer support, etc.

imagine that your company got rid of email altogether and used something like
a facebook app for all communications.

i view facebook and social apps as a communication tool with multiple
dimensions as compared to email, a social app being a superset of email. so
why carry forward email, other than that it's a legacy standard being used by
a lot of users at the moment.

imagine business cards of the future:

Name

Social App ID

there would obviously be some time before this would effectively take hold of
the greater amounts of users, but i think that time is soon.

if facebook added an administrative interface and made it multi-tenented, the
pitch could be to throw out your exchange server over time. i'm not sure what
the worth to their strategy would be in the future to take on enterprise
users, but i imagine it's quite valuable.

~~~
mooism2
I think it is more likely that social network sites will incorporate e-mail
clients that come preintegrated with calendars etc.

E-mail would be part of how different social networking sites interoperate.

E-mail is a patchwork of _proven_ standards.

E-mail might vanish into the plumbing of the internet --- as ip addresses have
and urls might --- but it will still be there.

If my company got rid of e-mail altogether and used Facebook instead, we'd
lose customers.

Catchy titles grab attention, but they obscure meaning. I still don't know
what you are predicting.

~~~
epynonymous
i answered in another thread so didn't feel like repeating; but basically
you'd need a phased approach to get off email, it wouldn't happen overnight.
from day one at company x, you'd get an email address and social id, you'd
have both mechanisms for communication. over time the benefits of a social app
would most likely outweigh the benefits of email and a natural progression
would occur, i.e. lots of companies will start to adopt it.

i use email now only because it's a legacy standard though this is definitely
decreasing in favor of social apps. this is analogous to television and
internet.

my prediction is that a social app will take over email as the primary
internet communication method and you will start to see this manifest itself
very soon, even inside of corporations.

------
niccolop
A recent report by Comscore stated that: email usage declined among those aged
between 12 and 17 by 59%. (<http://bit.ly/eSiT93>) - perhaps social media will
be the answer?

There is of course a function question here as well, i.e. younger people are
simply communicating with each other socially (as you note), and so it makes
sense to go via facebook.

I think in the work place, email is still needed, as you say it's the only
'anonymous' method of communication. Unless collaborative tools such as group
chat, instant messenger, or others, become so ubiquitous that there is no need
to have a simple form of direct communication.

~~~
epynonymous
thanks for adding data points, and one thing i failed to point out is that
email is a standard. the standard is what allows different vendors to provide
interoperability. so a microsoft exchange server can talk to a mac mail app
and mail generated by lotus notes could be stored and processed by gmail.

until a standard is created to say what should be included in the
"communication tool to supercede email", you're stuck using email and loosely
coupled instances of apps x, y, z.

it would be pretty hard to get a large company to shift off email, perhaps
getting employees onto a social platform in conjunction with email will be a
nice transition path.

imagine stepping into a new job and on day one getting an email address and a
social app ID. i think this could be a big play that could get more and more
users off of email, the old way, and onto the new way.

------
PonyGumbo
Personal communications ("Hey, how are you doing? / Are you busy tonight?")
are increasingly drifting to text and social apps, but there are some
significant barriers (IMHO) to businesses adopting any existing social
_platform_ for communication (namely, loss of control). However, I think it's
very likely that mail clients will more closely resemble social apps. Google
Wave was a step in that direction, but it wasn't quite ready for prime time.

~~~
epynonymous
what's to say that facebook couldn't add an administrative interface and
multi-tenancy so that businesses could manage and use this without any privacy
fears?

~~~
brudgers
I think you made a typo because you have "business," "Facebook" and "no
privacy fears" in the same sentence.

------
deffibaugh
I don't think any Social App will be able to replace email unless it is just
as distributed and private as email is. Maybe if the Social App ran entirely
on the users machine or they could run their own servers then it would have a
chance to overtake email. Maybe something like Diaspora? The fact is, people
send IMPORTANT emails. People who send these emails aren't going to have their
correspondence in the cloud being raked through to squeeze advertising money
out.

~~~
epynonymous
i think the privacy issue could be very easily taken care of by providing
multi-tenancy and administrative access so a company could control everything
to do with the content.

your point about social app companies trying to make money out of the
companies using this is valid, however, today Salesforce.com provides software
in the cloud that stores tons of information about sales deals (including
dollar figures), contacts (which is priceless), user behaviors, etc. yet lots
of the fortune 500 trust them to host and keep this data.

~~~
deffibaugh
I think the difference, for me at least, is that I have to pay for
Salesforce's products. I trust a company with my data much more if I am paying
them than I do a company that is not charging but instead using my data for
advertising purposes. There is a lot more incentive to look at the data if you
need to target ads at people.

------
mike-cardwell
Do you have any evidence that email use is declining? Email isn't just the end
user application, email is a massively distributed and open messaging
infrastructure

~~~
epynonymous
social apps are also not just a an end user application, it's also a massively
distributed and open messaging infrastructure. :)

~~~
mike-cardwell
I wouldn't call any social messaging apps that I've seen "massively
distributed". "Painfully centralised and proprietary" maybe. I wouldn't use
the term infrastructure for them either.

If Facebook disappeared tomorrow, the Internet would continue to function just
fine. If email disappeared, we would be royally screwed.

Facebook could disappear for political, legal or financial reasons. Email
can't.

~~~
epynonymous
regarding facebook, it's just an example, it could easily be twitter, orkut,
mixi, etc. what i mentioned in other threads is that there should be a
standard created for the new communication method to supersede email. that way
vendors could start to produce their own solutions just like email does with
ms exchange, lotus notes, gmail, zimbra, sendmail, etc. different clients
could also be created: mac mail, gmail, thunderbird, pine, elm, etc.

i agree that facebook is proprietary, but i disagree respectfully that
facebook is centralized, they have many datacenters around the world, it's a
necessary when you're getting 400M page hits a day and whatever many TB's of
photos being uploaded. so do friendster, myspace, orkut, twitter, linkedin,
etc.

~~~
mike-cardwell
I was also just using Facebook as an example. The other examples you just
provided are the same.

What is wrong with the current group of email standards? And why can't those
problems be fixed by extending the existing standards?

Facebook is centralised. It is run by a single profit motivated company. I
can't set up a Facebook messaging server. I can set up an email server. Email
is distributed because anyone can set up a server.

------
jay_kyburz
Nobody I know interleves their response when replying. How about an email
client that doesn't allow this, like facebook.

~~~
RiderOfGiraffes
I _always_ interleave my responses:

    
    
      A: Because otherwise it doesn't make sense
      Q: Why do questions always come before answers?

