http://www.tidbits.com/ The recent talk about how email usage is waning among certain populations misses two important points: email will never die because it's based on open standards that enable anyone to develop and run servers and clients, and, because of this, email remains the lowest common denominator for interpersonal communication on the Internet. en-us Copyright 2009 TidBITS Publishing Inc. Wed, 11 Nov 2009 11:02:10 PST Wed, 11 Nov 2009 11:02:10 PST editors@tidbits.com (TidBITS Editors) editors@tidbits.com (TidBITS Editors) http://www.tidbits.com/images/tb_logo_152x55.png http://www.tidbits.com/ 55 152 TidBITS badge http://db.tidbits.com/article/10700?rss#comments_1991 Tue, 10 Nov 2009 22:19:28 PST http://db.tidbits.com/article/10700#comments_1991
(There was, actually a local-machine-only sort of message system back in the 1960's that was similar in some ways to email, but it was to local users only).

I think you are confusing this newfangled GEE YOU EYE Web thingy as 'the Internet'. It's not, the web is only a part (albeit a rather large part) of the Internet. SMTP, POP3, IMAP, ident, BitTorrent, gopher, archie, telnet, ftp, irc, DNS%u2026 all these are part of the Internet and have nothing to do with the web, and nearly all of them predate the johnny-come-lately http by years if not decades.]]> http://db.tidbits.com/article/10700?rss#comments_1986 Tue, 10 Nov 2009 16:59:05 PST http://db.tidbits.com/article/10700#comments_1986 http://db.tidbits.com/article/10700?rss#comments_1969 Tue, 10 Nov 2009 05:06:26 PST http://db.tidbits.com/article/10700#comments_1969 http://db.tidbits.com/article/10700?rss#comments_1960 Mon, 09 Nov 2009 23:29:49 PST http://db.tidbits.com/article/10700#comments_1960 http://db.tidbits.com/article/10700?rss#comments_1931 Mon, 09 Nov 2009 09:27:43 PST http://db.tidbits.com/article/10700#comments_1931
Yeah, Xander gets quite a lot of mail, but getting him to check it is difficult. Mostly it's because he hates the old iMac DV we have for him to check mail on. He prefers the Mac Pro.

On the other hand, we can't get him to check the email on the iPod Touch either.]]> http://db.tidbits.com/article/10700?rss#comments_1924 Fri, 06 Nov 2009 07:10:41 PST http://db.tidbits.com/article/10700#comments_1924
And to be fair, though he actually has two email addresses (his original one is basically archival for when he's older), he almost never checks email at all, so no one sends him much. That's not a criticism of email specifically though, since he doesn't use Twitter or anything else either. Heck, we can barely get him to use the telephone.

We recently realized that he had essentially delegated all communications tasks to us. That will be ending soon... :-)]]> http://db.tidbits.com/article/10700?rss#comments_1923 Fri, 06 Nov 2009 07:01:51 PST http://db.tidbits.com/article/10700#comments_1923
That's not a tyop.
]]> http://db.tidbits.com/article/10700?rss#comments_1917 Thu, 05 Nov 2009 12:22:24 PST http://db.tidbits.com/article/10700#comments_1917 http://db.tidbits.com/article/10700?rss#comments_1858 Wed, 04 Nov 2009 14:26:04 PST http://db.tidbits.com/article/10700#comments_1858 The next question is if there will be an open API that will allow independent clients as well. And the question after that is if it will be given to a standards body of some sort, or open sourced appropriately such that no one company controls future development.

http://thenextweb.com/appetite/2009/10/30/breaking-google-wave-opened-federation-today-host/
]]> http://db.tidbits.com/article/10700?rss#comments_1893 Wed, 04 Nov 2009 09:20:45 PST http://db.tidbits.com/article/10700#comments_1893
"Pus, its approach of grouping messages..."]]> http://db.tidbits.com/article/10700?rss#comments_1856 Thu, 29 Oct 2009 19:34:28 PST http://db.tidbits.com/article/10700#comments_1856