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Nothing ambitious was mentioned in that article. And if you want a to-do list you should check out something like trello.com Otherwise, a spiral notebook and a pen is a great deal better than your inbox as a to-do list. --Please feel free to ignore the following email rant.-- Email is a pretty impressive digital translation of the written letter. And for cases where a letter written by hand on paper would work well, email works even better. As long as by better you mean faster and without paper or stamps or penmanship. The SMTP protocol is over 30 years old and still going strong; that's pretty amazing. But email kind of sucks, too. Frankly, most people aren't good at writing letters. Simply creating a meaningful subject line is difficult. And keeping a conversation germane to the stated subject is also difficult; folks often talk about multiple topics in a typical conversation. To review long conversations, one must read awkwardly from bottom to top, opposite normal English reading direction. Adding someone to a conversation in progress is also awkward. Sending another message (a correction or addition to your last message) before the person (or people) you're talking with replies creates confusion as a reply can only be made to one or the other message, dropping parts of the conversation. Attachments can be problematic. Clearly, spam the likes of which we see today was never anticipated by SMTP's authors, and neither has anyone come up with an especially successful solution to it. We've all just come to accept spam as part of the background noise, filtering the polluted stream, rather than removing the decomposing carcasses from the upstream source. Creating an alternative that addresses its shortcomings would be ambitious. And I think many people were frightened by Wave, which addressed many of email's shortcomings but was disruptive in the way so many people like to claim they admire but will almost always shun in practice (kind of like how folks always claim to love to root for the underdog, unless it's Haiti). I'm not saying Wave was perfect, but it had great potential. And as far as genuinely ambitious attempts at improving email (or the kind of conversing we typically do with email), I can't think of another example. |