
The death of e-mail - "Email is increasingly for old people, as kids turn to IM etc." - nickb
http://slate.com/id/2177969/
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tx
Jesus... yet another email bashing BS. Email has always been for "old people"
because it's (mostly) a working tool. Kids don't like to do work, they like to
play.

It's like saying that _"doing dishes is dead. leaving them dirty all over the
place is the future"_.

~~~
edw519
I see you've been a guest in my modern kitchen.

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MaxwellTerry
I would like to abandon "email" as a metaphor. Its not like the -protocols-
are going anywhere, but I've thought before of routing all my email (= server,
Gmail, Y!mail, and college FirstClass) to IM. That would centralize all my
"messages", and make it easier to check all my accounts on my cell. IMs are
already logged and stored if I'm offline.

I just did a cursory search, and it doesn't seem there's a way to do it
directly in iChat or Adium. It'd probably be easiest to do it through Jabber.
I don't know enough about XMPP though... Anyone have an idea how to go about
this?

~~~
saygt
i'd love to have something like that, since most of the time I access
different sites and apps, I'm looking for a small amount of specific data,
such as the content of my most recent email, my facebook notifications, a date
from my google calendar, etc, and frankly don't need all the flashy UI and the
redundant clicking to access them. If i can access my email via IM by simply
sending "read newest gmail" to a specified SN, my life would be just a little
bit easier.

~~~
maxwell
Yeah, actually, a good bot would be really awesome -- I could ask for messages
from a specific account, person, by un/read status, etc. or delete spam, get
message history, and so on.

Hell, why not just make a "smart command line" bot-based web app? It's the
goddamn twenty-first century, why do we still manually navigate when we can
just concisely -ask- (in words, not "commands" or "actions") for portions of
sites, definitions, files, apps, etc.? This was how it was -supposed- to be,
but for some reason we're still just using glossed up versions of 1980s (or
earlier) paradigms. Why hasn't the A.I. scene done anything practical? Or are
those guys all just too enamored with the beauty of 1950s technology?

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staticshock
the article is garbage, but i gotta give the author props for his tremendous
indecision on this non-issue, as displayed in the subheading: "Teenagers are
abandoning their Yahoo! and Hotmail accounts. Do the rest of us have to?"

