Tech & Biz

Email is So 2 Seconds Ago: ID-Based Conversations

by Jordan Yerman | March 1, 2008 at 11:33 am

416 views | 10 Recommendations | 1 comment

So now they're talking about how email is old-school. Great. Just when I was getting used to pruning my inbox...

"E-mail has died away for a group of users. For the younger generation, they don't use e-mail," he said, talking about the young Web users who have started to abandon e-mail for Facebook messaging and mobile texting. "They see it as this noisy spam-filled thing that annoys them every day...they see it as how you talk to the university, how you talk to the bank." Marks pointed to technologies like OpenID that promote the notion that online identities these days are defined by so much more than e-mail addresses--URLs and social-networking profiles, to name a few.

True, I use NowPublic PM and Facebook for a lot of communication, but what happens when spammers figure out how to get into that user-to-user world? It's only a matter of time before the ephemeral world of ID-centric communication becomes clogged with junk. Also, Facebook-type messaging is permissions-based and harder to share than an email-- perhaps that's a good thing- get many chain letters in your inbox lately? Still, API-based web apps are prone to similar attacks of crapadelic forwards.
Maybe I'm just bitter.

(API-- application programming interface-- is the protocol that lets interfaces talk to each other: applications can communicate with websites [which are hosted clumps of code], operating systems, and other applications. If you want to intimidate your non-geek friends, drop "API" into a sentence without defining it. I do...)