Esther Dyson on the future of email:
EDventure :: the future of mail - and other topics: by Esther Dyson | May 20, 2004 01:54AM (EDT) | # Gmail has made mail exciting again, but there's a lot more going on than that. I'm speaking at a conference called Inbox June 2 to 4 in San Jose, and having fun getting ready for it. There are two parts of mail, obviously: the back-end store and forward system, and the client side. The client used to be simply a place to present messages, and the whole function was moving documents/files/messages back and forth. But now, the back-end deals with things such as spam filtering and authentication and scaling, and the user side has expanded to include calendar and contact management, increasingly integrated.
More fundamentally, as the world becomes more real-time and connected, the virtual and increasingly the actual configuration of the system is changing. There's a rich, complex, shared data store in the cloud, and mail is simply the passing of notifications and alerts that tell you to pay attention to/download specific items in the cloud that are new or changed or that someone wants to share with you. this creates huge challenges in version control, updating and permission management. Mail (which may change its name) becomes not just a collaboration tool, but also a personal workflow manager. It's the inbox not just for messages, but for applications, for RSS feeds, for IMs and voice messages, and of course it helps manage (and integrate) SIP phone calls, too.
It's interesting in this context to hear people talk about Gmail. Although it's clumsy, it can be used not just to send messages but to store files. I already use it to send photographs with a cc to myself; then I can resend (i.e. forward the copies) the photos to other people without uploading them again. I also use it to back up large files by e-mailing them to myself. And if I were so minded, I could share my account with other people so that they could look at the same files (though if you want to change them, you have to mail a copy. whether it;s a bug or a feature, unlike in my Eudora mail, the file store is read-only. Of course, it's a really kludgy file system, but it's easy to use - in the sense of "you can figure it out," not "it's convenient."
I'm wondering what will happen when Google has millions of accounts and presumably millions of duplicate files that it knows about: i.e. one person e-mails the same file to several othe Gmail users. WIll it eliminate redundancies? is the saving in space worth the processing overhead? Certainly the reduction in user *reading* overhead produced by eliminating redundancies within e-mail threads - a much more complex task - is worth it... that's the kind of thing you'll see more of. The real value of the new mail, though, will be attention management rather than content management. In an iterative process based on explicit user instructions and watching of user behavior, mail will start to know what you want to see now, what you want to see later (and when), and what you want to see never. I'm eager to hear about actual examples of these kinds of tools, and I hope to see a lot of them at Inbox. More when I know more.
I'm starting to wonder how I'm going to get my email *out* of gmail. I will want to have a local store of it, after all...
Posted by DeLong at June 14, 2004 09:08 PM | TrackBack | | Other weblogs commenting on this postThe "processing overhead" of detecting duplicate mail is zero. gmail is already doing that, because they are filtering spam. Spam is just replicated mail with a minimum number of copies.
Indexing vast amounts of data is something that google is good at. Finding dups is one of the easier parts; there's a vast literature on the topic.
In fact, I don't understand why mail servers like MS Exchange aren't already doing this. When you are tied in to a corporate all-MS policy of Word docs everywhere, you regularly get megabyte mails. Any reasonably designed mail server would plan for this. Oh. Right. I got it.
There's a POP/SMTP bridge to gmail for Windows, Brad; I don't think there's anything similar for the Mac yet, but it's only a matter of time, whether from Google itself or a third-party developer. (Keep an eye on VersionTracker, I'd say.)
Posted by: nick on June 14, 2004 11:06 PMI don't see why anyone who seriously uses Email for work would risk using Gmail. Without a local store of your mail, you are permanently stuck with whatever application you started saving your Email in. What happens years from now when Gmail starts charging, or Google goes bankrupt?
Not to mention that I would think that having your mail history accessible to anyone who can get your password is really insecure. As long as your stuff is on your machine, you can take what security measures you feel are necessary, not those that Google thinks are necessary.
Posted by: Rich Puchalsky on June 15, 2004 06:15 AMWow, Esther Dyson. A nostalgic throwback to the late 90's.
Posted by: Kuas on June 15, 2004 11:25 AMOne of the Gmail interviews contained the promise that they'd provide IMAP/POP interfaces. That's how to get the mail to a local server. The promise didn't say they'd be free, I suspect they would be however.
I don't leave anything on gmail, however, that I'd miss significantly if it vanished.
Posted by: John Faughnan on June 15, 2004 05:42 PMYou'll probably be interested in this applet
http://jaybe.org/info.htm
it links outlook and other email programs to gmail. Not that I would know if it works, as google hasn't yet deemed me worthy of an invitation...
Good job on the site, I'm an avid reader and a fan.
Maybe not wholly relevant to the thread, but consider this development:
Once Google's email service began to attract subscribers, Yahoo! increased its free email storage from 4 MB to 100 MB.
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