“Email is not going to disappear. Possibly ever. Until the robots kill us all.” – Paul Buchheit, creator of Gmail, co-founder of FriendFeed, currently doing vague infrastructure things at Facebook.
Today, at our RealTime CrunchUp event in San Francisco, Buchheit and Threadsy founder Rob Goldman sat down for a chat with our own Steve Gillmor and Erick Schonfeld. The topic was: Can We Kill Email Already? All Aboard The Micro-Message Bus.
So can we kill email?
Well if Buchheit’s quote didn’t tip you off, the consensus was “no.” Though there are some interesting things coming out that are helping to expand our communication, we’re just not at the point now where we can live without email. And in fact, for many of these services like Twitter and Facebook, you still need email to be notified about new followers or new messages.
Threadsy (which launched at TechCrunch50 this year) is trying to help the transition away from email by integrating it with other services like Twitter, but even Goldman acknowledges that the email notification problem remains an issue because people keep relying on it. At one point, a question from the audience asked about Google Wave, another would be “email-killer,” and Schonfeld noted that he was having a hard time getting into it because he wasn’t getting notified via email when there is a new Wave message. So you can see the problem.
Speaking of Wave, when asked about his thoughts on it, Buchheit noted that he hadn’t actually tried it yet, while laughing. “The invite is sitting in my inbox.” This is significant because Buchheit was instrumental in creating Gmail for Google. But Buchheit doesn’t consider Google Wave as a replacement of email or even Twitter or Facebook. Both him and Goldman agreed that it seemed more of a collaboration tool. And both felt that despite some great technology it was still a few years away from having a polished experience.
When asked if there would be a mashup of social and private streams, such as email and Facebook with Twitter, Buchheit said that he felt rather than one thing killing off another that we would just keep layering on new things. Goldman noted that the next step for Threadsy is to provide better context about the messages you’re getting and who you are talking to. He also noted that being able to search across all your messages is key.
So, no. Email isn’t dead yet, but it may be changing.
[photo: (cc) Kenneth Yeung - www.thelettertwo.com]
I wanna hire this guy!
mg, noone except you and the other google fanboys gives a shit about wave. now go play with the glorified chatroom that lets you embed videos while the rest of us laugh.
no invite, huh?
“no invite” means you dont have Google Wave account….. if not email me
“no invite” mean you dont havt any Google Wave account… if not email me
It’s not just fanboys who want Wave to succeed. It’s anyone who gets annoyed at email strings between more than two people. It’s dealing with current versions of documents. It’s wanting to reply to a tweet and not being able to.
A lot of the technology for communicating today is just hacked together on top of a 40-year-old backbone or — now — a platform designed for SMS.
Wave could fix all that. It’s not there yet, but it is trying to replace something that took decades to build, so it’s not surprising that it’s taking longer than a couple of months to build.
More here: http://www.examiner.com/x-25758-Google-Wave-Examiner~y2009m11d20-Google-Wave-may-be-the-future-but-the-future-is-not-Real-Time
Great !!!!
Hubris.
Sure, not today. Not tomorrow either. But give it time.
It may not be Google Wave but email, as it exists today, has some serious problems with it that new technology could fix.
Okay, but just because email has problems today doesn’t mean that it will up and disappear. Isn’t the point of expanding technologies to reinvent as much as replace?
Besides, what will thousands of old people do if they can’t email their grandkids through AOL?
What kind of “serious” problems are you talking about? Spam?
I find email pretty reliable and simple to set up.
i dont see any problems with email. is there a problem?
Obviously you guys have never been involved with the back end architecture behind email. There really is a lot of problems.
If you’re just an end user using gmail, maybe not so much.
one can’t understand the purpose of this interview.. especially when you start it with ““Email is not going to disappear. Possibly ever. Until the robots kill us all.”
so judgment day of droid – so what? Will this bring email to extinction?
“the wave invite was sitting in my inbox” – Sounds like we have a guy here who missed again an opportunity and who is trying to sound “dr know it all” but in fact he isn’t… Shenanigans I must say! There’s a thin line from acting “cool” to looking like a “fool”
On the contrary here’s the reason why google wave is one of the best: http://bit.ly/google-wave-why-should-you-use-it
eh. There are more ads on that page then in all of times square. A “fool” would be anyone taking that content seriously.
@s.j the only fool here is the person who didn’t understand what the guy is trying to say.. and that will be you my friend..
I have my Away Message set to autorespond when the droids kill us all.
EAT THAT, Buchheit
Wave is a radical shift from the concept of email. It is very new and of course everyone will bitch and moan in the starting. They are still figuring everything out. Even Facebook was just-another-social-network in 2005/2006 before they “figured it out” aka launched a few key products that changed everything (news feed and platform). Email won’t die (like IE6 — still alive), but over time, a better thing, if it works, really can change everything.
Paul may have been trying to be cool and ironic, but really he should be ashamed for not having tried Wave yet. Why slap the company that allowed him to be the force that he is?
“Even Facebook was just-another-social-network in 2005/2006″
Wrong. When Facebook came out, Friendster, Xanga, and Myspace was already out. Facebook was able to crack the industry in the beginning because of the Ivy league exclusivity in the beginning.
Wave is far more unique and perhaps to the detriment of adoption and business prospects compared to Facebook which was merely improving an already present business model.
Ted, I think you may have misunderstood me. My point wasn’t to compare Wave to Facebook as a business. I was trying to note that Facebook in 2005 was nothing special and was looking like just another social networking site that was picking up users (just like you said, there were already several similar players out there).
At that point, no one could have guessed the magnitude of the dominating impact it has made on the web today. Similarly Wave, perhaps even at a more nascent stage than Facebook was at then, seems to be full of long term questions and problems. However, after enough iteration of the product, and after there are a few of those “tipping point” features added (perhaps something like an easy way to transition from gmail to wave, or even merge the two), it could turn out to be a blockbuster new model for communication on the web. Perhaps even eventually compete with Facebook itself.
Facebook got his popularity by sending spam email to everyone
Agreed.
Can’t we all just go back to BBS’s and be happy.
Email won’t disappear because you can’t convey a complex thought in 140 characters or attach a large file to a tweet or a FB message. (Don’t talk to me about Google Docs – they choke on anything complex.) Additionally, people LIKE asynchronous communication, in case you haven’t noticed.
BTW, when will you integrate a Wave-like system into your comments section? If Digg did that, idiots around the world would never leave their basements.
Exactly, tweets and waves with attachments kinda defeats the point, as they are defined today.
Filtering, groups, bots and different UIs will make of Google Wave a total replacement for email, twitter, facebook, chat, blogs and everything.
Email is just the electronic version of a letter. Today I had to write out a complex plan and thought process for a customer review at work. It had to be distributed to 30 people. That can not be done in bits. There is a lot of information held with the prose of a written email/letter. Sorry Twitter is a bite of information not a meal.
It is not instant or bit size communication that is needed, but interactivity of the communication process between multiple people.
unless you use encryption every time you send a email, the emails are more like electronic postcards then letters…
i agree, if there;s such thing as killer app, that’s email
I just thought of a potentially great new thing for email: email notifications. Notifications would basically be any sort of message that didn’t need a full email to explain it (someone followed you on Twitter).
There would be a designated column or module that displays these notifications in a running list that simply un-highlights itself each time you visit your email. There is no need to delete the notifications, and rarely any need to click them for further info. They come and go without further cluttering your inbox.
Just like Facebook notifications, then!
sounds basically like whats needed is a way for the twitter/facebook/whatever client to notify that “hey, xyz is now following/commenting/something”.
why they dont i have no clue about…
Facebook already does that – http://www.facebook.com/notifications.php
in facebook, sure, but can a external app access that? As it seems things are becoming increasingly app-ified…
and no, not some official facebook app, but any third party app.
No, facebook provides no publicly-facing API to read notifications. The closest you can get is scraping the notifications page and scanning for the actual stories.
Surely the whole discussion is moot — isn’t Twitter or Facebook a form of public email?
Now … *Telepathy* <– Email/iPhone killer
s/b “Both he and Goldman agreed . . . ” –ed.
Goldman has his priorities skewed. Next thing for threadsy is keyboard shortcuts
Here’s our exclusive interview with Mr. Paul Buchheit: http://www.crazyengineers.com/mr-paul-buchheit-creator-of-gmail-adsense-friendfeed/
“And in fact, for many of these services like Twitter and Facebook, you still need email to be notified about new followers or new messages.”
Um, no you don’t, MG! If you stay logged into these services you do get notified, be that through their web interface or with third party apps. Facebook is a great example of that, with two parts of the page (Inbox on the top menu and the notifications in the bottom right) that alert you to new stuff (and this will go further to applications listed in the left column of the homepage in the future). E-mail is also a server-hosted service, and again you either use a web interface to access it or a third party app (like Outlook, Entourage, Thunderbird etc.). In the case of all of these traditional services, they are simply polling the server where the messages/notifications are stored at regular intervals to check for updates.
What’s great about Wave is that it uses XMPP with binding which is much faster and new data actually comes to you from the server without any polling, virtually instantly.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xmpp
To be honest, if all your communication takes place on Facebook and Twitter, and you use FTP/Bittorrent/Dropbox etc. to transfer files with people, you can pretty much live without e-mail. It’s only keeping in touch with people who don’t use either service (or other similar services) that is keeping e-mail in use. I do 80+% of my non-realtime communication with friends and family through Facebook, with a little bit through Twitter (which is incredibly awkward due to messaging limitations) and the remainder on e-mail to my parents and the work clients who don’t use them due to rules at their workplace.
“Schonfeld noted that he was having a hard time getting into it because he wasn’t getting notified via email when there is a new Wave message. So you can see the problem.”
Yes, I can – he clearly doesn’t get Wave at all. If he’s closing down his Wave window and not checking it for updates like he does with his e-mail window, he’s being really stupid. And if he can’t see/imagine how future Wave clients will have pop-up notifications (like most desktop e-mail and IM already does), he shouldn’t be working in technology.
I’m not a big fan of Google and I tend to use other companies products, that said Wave does intrigue me.
If Wave is to seriously threaten email then I feel it must be able to provide a solution to email’s only serious flaw in my eyes- SPAM! So far all I’ve heard is that it will be conversation based rather than message based but that doesn’t stop me receiving messages I don’t want.
Perhaps I just haven’t researched enough but I agree with this guy that email will last- there’s just no reason for Wave to replace email for a lot of things e.g. mailing lists for offers from companies- unless everybody expects that to go the way of Twitter or something which I’d see as a step backwards personally.
Does anybody know about a potential spam solution?
try gmail
No provider would ever do something active against spam. Why?
Spam is important for *every* mail provider (Gmail, Hotmail, …) because it increases advertising prices. Imagine Google would sue spammers. Result -> up to 80% less spam, but at least 80% less money for Google cuz Gmail statistics would tell that there is 80% less incoming mail.
So what you can do is to report EVERY SINGLE spam message to spamcop.net and depending on where you live there might me some “central reporting site”. If your provider doesn’t respond to Spamcop, they get blacklisted. Good solution. Good for you, bad for your mail provider.
TechCrunch really needs stupidity filters for comments like this. Google does not make money based on “% of incoming mail”. Google makes money on paid ad clicks, and most spam (if you’ve ever used Gmail) is immediately filtered.
If Google weren’t to filter spam in order to generate more ad impressions & clicks, the result would be users fleeing to other services. OK, I can see Yahoo! or Bing trying a stunt like that to boost near-term revenue for some quarterly earnings announcement, but Google doesn’t give a shit about quarterly results and optimizes for the long term.
Gmail creator has really made Email entity a new aspect to check in !
Trying to kill email simply because its old is the dumbest idea I’ve heard in a long time. Email works well – there’s no need to replace it with anything. NOTHING we have right now could replace email anyway.
what is new is seldom good; because a good thing is only new for a short time.
besides, email is not broken – people’s self-organization is.
Look, Paul is a genuis, but I find it completely retarded that he hasnt even tried Wave yet, but here he is giving his ‘feedback’ on it?
I know Google is now a competitor, but couldn’t he have just tried it out first, for the sake of this pannel you guys did, before dismissing it outbid hand and you guys treating the assessment with more gravitas then it deserves?
Grains of salt.
I am using Threadsy and I think that is quite good as an integration software….Speaking about Wave: Google is waiting too much on not giving enough invitation yet, meanwhile companies like threasdy is getting “fans” for their app. and is too close (maybe I am not using it in a good way yet)
Just look at some of the responses here. Wave is a great concept, but so many people are resistant to new ideas, change.
Gmail and Gchat work well together as a means of unified communications. Wave is just taking those components and going several steps further to create active collaboration. People who can’t see the value in that probably don’t have much friction with email today. The “me too” crowd can come later – not out of need, but because enough people they know have started using it. For now, there the early adopters will find good utility value there, because they need it. Recreational use of it, for the people who don’t “get it”, might take a lot longer.
The problem isn’t with email. The problem is with us. Some how it has become socially acceptable to generate a huge amount of noise in other people’s lives. 90% of the thoughts shared on Facebook/Twitter are painfully narcissistic and do nothing but inflate a person’s ego. Why is everyone still forwarding stupid emails to large groups of people? Why isn’t spam illegal already? Email needs to be treated as a valuable tool and society needs to do a better job of self censorship.
Unless Wave opens up and allows people to run their own Wave servers or other communication tools (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) e-mail will remain.
This is because all the services created recently are giant centralized systems. E-mail is distributed. Can you imagine if Google had a problem with Wave, like they did with Gmail earlier this year, and it was the world’s primary form of communication?
All of electronic communication just died… for everyone. We are building highly vulnerable, centralized platforms, versus the highly scalable, distributed systems of the past. “The Cloud” and commodity computing have made users and developers lazy.
iirc, thats the exact design of wave.
anyone can set up their own wave server, and have it integrate with anyone else’s wave server, so that you can invite someone into your waves on server x, while they have an account on server y.
this is largely thanks to wave being built on top of xmpp. and xmpp started out as jabber, a decentralized IM system (that also powers google chat btw, and will power facebook chat soon, iirc).
basically, xmpp handles IM in much the same way as email, as each user account has a name@hostname layout, so that your IM server knows where to look for the user if its not local.
Can we stop saying that this guy is Gmail’s creator? Thanks!
Gmail forever.
Whatever Google says is surely so!
Jess
http://www.ultimate-privacy.br.tc
Speaking of Threadsy, requested an invite last week. Looks very cool! Google Wave is great but I totally agree with Paul. I don’t get notified when I receive anything new which is kind of a downer.
It’s NOT true that you can’t get notified. You can get notified about your waves, there’s a notification bot just for that and I am using it already on Wave. A lot of this is new and people who aren’t using it don’t really know all of this yet.
Here is a use-case for you :
I have an idea that I want to get some feedback for. So I log into my wave server, it’s federated with a few other wave servers of some friends of mine. One of them are on so i pull them into my wave and we begin discussing my idea in real time chat. She brings up some interesting points however im no expert on the subject. Luckily i know a guy who is, he normally only uses skype. Through wave i ring him up on skype and get his opinion on my idea, (the conversation is added to the wave through a generated mp3 file, or directly into text through speech recognition), my friend can hear too because her wave client has the skype widget built in (or there is a shared audio widget). The conversation goes on and she starts to add links and pictures to support her case. I think this is getting interesting so i decide i want to blog it and embed a wave client app into the page of my blog so i can publish the wave directly to it. Mean while im having a side conversation with some people in an irc chat room through wave, that i dont want included
in the main wave im having. The conversation in the main wave stops, its a pretty good one, something i think the people on a mailing list i
belong to might be interested in, and some people i know in academia, so i use a wave-to-Email conversion widget to send it to them.
Can some one who knows something about wave tell me if this is possible?
If so wave is something much more then a mere E-mail replacement, it could become the glue between all other communication means on the
internet. A single central location I can log into,and syndicate my content (what ever that maybe, personal, commercial, ect.) into all
other services. You will no longer log into other apps/services to post content, you’ll simply set up an account with them, and then log into
YOUR wave server and publish content to them.
Is it possible, is it to big, is it crazy?
Can I have this invitation please. I like to try wave out.
Jasja, toss me an e-mail on majeztic _at_ gmaildotcom and I’ll hook you up with one.