

The future of email is Twitter - jharrier
http://www.virtualpants.com/post/28528584996/the-future-of-email-is-twitter

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forgotusername
_Create a whitelist. The follow model remains, which eliminates spam. You only
see updates from people you follow, and only mutual followers can correspond
using direct messages_

If it wasn't 4am I'd spend time explaining why this is the most poorly
considered article I've read all day. Instead I offer a quote:

> The reason that e-mail is uniquely useful is that you can exchange mail with
> people you don't already know. The reason that spam exists is that you can
> exchange mail with people you don't already know.

\-- John Levine ( <http://www.circleid.com/posts/replacing_smtp/> )

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freshhawk
How do people willing to make statements like "the future of email is X" not
understand that the decentralized standards based federated network is the end
goal for an electronic mail system?

If you think the use case of twitter type messages isn't going to eventually
be similar then you either think twitter style communication is a fad or you
think the tech community is going to stagnate and never move on from how to
send short messages to each other.

Maybe that eventual standard will expand to replace email, but twitter? That's
so silly it's in Poe's Law territory.

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jiggy2011
Ok so..

1) The reason for having @ in email addresses is to prevent collisions and
identify stuff like who you work for. Between billg@microsoft.com and
billg@gmail.com you know which one is the real Bill. Once you give everyone on
the planet who uses email a twitter account the name collisions will be
horrendous.

2) You're giving twitter a monopoly on the most ubiquitous communication
method on the internet. What happens if they delete your account and ban you?
What happens if they put something too evil for you in their TOS? You just cut
yourself off from communication?

3) .. I could go on

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damncabbage
And then Twitter goes down. Or starts doing nasty things as it runs out of
money.

The sort-of-federated email network we have now is a lot more resilient than a
Twitter will likely ever be.

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geofft
Geez, is it really time for this thing to make a comeback? _clears throat_

Your post advocates a

(X) technical ( ) legislative (X) market-based ( ) vigilante

approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work.
(One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may
have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal
law was passed.)

( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses

(X) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected

( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money

( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks

(X) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it

(X) Users of email will not put up with it

(X) Microsoft will not put up with it

( ) The police will not put up with it

( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers

(X) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once

(X) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential
employers

( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists

( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it

(X) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email

( ) Open relays in foreign countries

( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses

( ) Asshats

(X) Jurisdictional problems

( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes

( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money

(X) Huge existing software investment in SMTP

(X) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack

( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email

( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes

( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches

(X) Extreme profitability of spam

(X) Joe jobs and/or identity theft

( ) Technically illiterate politicians

( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers

( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves

( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering

(X) Outlook

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

(X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been
shown practical

( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable

( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation

( ) Blacklists suck

(X) Whitelists suck

( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored

( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud

( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks

(X) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually

(X) Sending email should be free

(X) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?

(X) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses

( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem

( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome

(X) I don't want the government reading my email

( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.

(X) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.

( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!

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rpicard
If the problem is that you have to change email addresses when you switch
providers, I think the easiest solution is to use your own domain. Then you
can use whatever mail client you prefer, and switch between them freely; you
really own your email.

As far as using Twitter in place of email goes, there's the issue of both
parties needing a Twitter account to communicate. If you opened it up so that
I could send you a message on Twitter without having one myself, you'd
probably end up with something like jdoe@twitter.com[1].

[1] Relevant xkcd comic: <https://xkcd.com/927/>

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ioquatix
This is the most ridiculous thing I've read this week.

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Mythbusters
Here's why it doesn't work:

Remove 140 character limit: That is the essence of twitter. The limit helps me
consume a lot more tweets than I can consume long winding emails or articles.

Whitelist: So make it difficult for someone to send you an email unless they
are pre-approved? That looks like solving the spam problem with too big a
hammer. I think the spam problem is mostly solved btw. I don't get it on
either my Hotmail, yahoo or gmail addresses and an occasional spa can easily
be marked and future emails get filtered

Hashtags: Google tried to do this in gmail as labels and I think failed. The
automatic classification that Hotmail started (to identify important email,
email from contacts, etc.) and probably is there in gmail too is the
direction. Why make me do the wok when a machine can do it for me?

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ditojim
Gmail labels did not fail..

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Mythbusters
what makes you say that?

Labels were originally pure labels like tags but now they have added sub-
labels and nested labels which is basically the same thing as folders. So they
are calling them labels but have basically abandoned that concept and are back
to folders.

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ditojim
you can label a message with multiple labels. you can only put something into
1 folder. that's the difference between labels and folders. gmail still has
the former, and it works.

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dfc
Even if you ignore the multitude of problems raised by funneling all email
through one company this suggestion is dead on arrival. Can you imagine
mailing lists via a twitter like platform, e.g. debian-devel or lkml? I do not
think debian or kernel development would be what it is today if twitter was
the communication medium of choice. Vulnerabilty submissions to @microsoft-
security?

I am surprised that this idea made it to the front page of HN.

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madrona
Twitter: * single point of failure * one namespace for all users (remember how
much AOL sucked? xXAllNamesAreTaken1998Xx) * the service is defined by its
terse 140 character limits and the core use case would degrade if this was
lifted.

Silly article.

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jcnotchrist
I don't know about others, but I am definitely using emails less these days,
but it has nothing to do with Twitter.

Perhaps because my job is relatively mobile, I am replacing a lot of emails
with WhatsApp and Line. I have even started to use voice messaging, because it
allows me to convey the tone of my message without having to go into an actual
"discussion" with someone.

Although after reading other's comments, I am not brave enough to say that
this is the future of email...

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codeka
I also don't really understand the benefit here. Who actually tries to
remember people's email addresses? For that matter, who even tries to remember
twitter handles?

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cdcarter
But...wait. Why is this in any way better than email?

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five18pm
This is more broken than email.

1\. This solution eliminates the decentralized nature of email. 2\. No
solution for corporate customers who would want to keep their emails private.
3\. How would new contacts form?

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jharrier
It's a good replacement for personal email. Corporate email would probably
need to stay the same.

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dfc
Probably? You think there is even the slightest chance that fortune 500
companies would consider this? I noticed in your profile that you are a patent
lawyer. What do you think would happen if you brought this suggestion up at
the next partners meeting?

Respectfully, I think you are mistakeningly assuming that your email use case
is representative of the rest of the worlds. Are you subscribed to any mailing
lists? Do you ever engage in long form conversations with people in another
timezone? Any non-corporate collaborative work with friends
(software/volunteer activities/fiction/nonfiction writing)?

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thinkingisfun
no. just no. protocols "continue to remain to be the future". not individual
"players".

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jharrier
How is Twitter offering a shorter, simpler, socially-integrated version of
email any different than Gmail or Hotmail?

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ghshephard
The obvious answer is anyone can run email. Only twitter can run twitter.

If the join.app.net team gets some inertia - that might change, but right now
- twitter is a single player (and point of failure) game.

