[dspillett]

Caveat: email as we know it developed in frontier times when things could grow organically and/or by general consensus rather than being driven by commercial needs.

The frontier days for this sort of communication are over for the most part. Anything that shows signs of being significant will get jumped upon by commercial entities who will try to direct it in a manner that helps their larger goals (and if we are more cynical, expressly in a manner inconvenient to their competitor's goals) potentially (in fact most likely) at the expense of the overall scheme (despite publicly doing it to "help the users/community/public".

Anything new now has forces acting to shape it (for better or, often, for worse) that email never had to contend with until it was so widespread no one entity or collection of entities could wreck it for everyone (despite the best efforts of some such entities!).

[VladRussian2]

well, the new frontier is "dark mail" or more generally "dark net" where interoperability again is the key [as the only way to grow. It is like natural evolution - any non-interoperability efforts will just not grow, and only an interoperability based effort will produce the critical mass]. It is organically decentralized and by its nature a user is the owner of its data even though actual [meaningless to 3rd party] bits may be stored by one or spread around multiple distributed providers ("dark money" style as if you BT wallet is encrypted and replicated though the BT network itself). Content mining and "user is the product", and thus FB and Google as we know it, would be for some time problematic at best and it will be some time before segmentation era of the new net dawns and new Serge/Larry/Zuckenberg appear :)

[dspillett]

But it isn't an empty frontier that the thinkers/developers are entering alone. The existing problems both commercial and legal (and not-quite-so-legal-but-state-funded-so-good-luck-fighting-that-one) will be so close behind to stop/exploit/both as to make the exploration very inconvenient. I'm not saying it can't happen, but it won't happen organically over a period of time like email did.