<story><title>All you need is e-mail, e-mail. E-mail is all you need.</title><url>http://monkeymace.com/post/23937902775/all-you-need-is-e-mail-e-mail-e-mail-is-all-you-need</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ajdecon</author><text>I&apos;ve wondered a lot about why e-mail isn&apos;t used more as a backend for different services. But as far as I can tell, messaging products proliferate because their creators want to create profitable products rather than distributed protocols.&lt;p&gt;E-mail is a pretty good group of protocols for distributing arbitrary messages between different locations on the Internet. It&apos;s easy to imagine how all sorts of messaging and social network products could be implemented as a specialized e-mail client with a good user experience. Their forms might be slightly different than they have now, but they&apos;d serve approximately the same consumer purpose.&lt;p&gt;For example, you could build a social networking &quot;client&quot; with e-mail as a backend. Status updates, photos, etc. would be distributed to all your contacts via email, and the client would produce a &quot;timeline&quot; based on the data in its mailbox, without ever showing the user the original messages.&lt;p&gt;But you give up a lot of control that way, and it&apos;s harder to monetize. What developers want (and users too, to be honest) is a centralized service that they can control, mine data with, and sell products or show ads. A distributed protocol, while in some ways more powerful (and less dependent on a fallible central authority!), doesn&apos;t achieve the real business aims.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>superuser2</author><text>Email is decentralized to &lt;i&gt;us&lt;/i&gt;. We have the very specific skils, attitudes, and patience required to buy a domain name, rent a VPS or dedicated server and configure SSH public keys, Postfix/Courier, DNS, SPF, DKIM, and keep it up to date and patched, audit it to make sure it stays secure, and detect/respond to intrusions. And even then, unless you are going to roll your own emergency power, multiple redundant HVAC, and fire supression, as well as shell out hundreds of dollars a month for significant upload bandwidth to your house or apartment, &lt;i&gt;your data and encryption keys are still in the physical possession of a corporate datacenter.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Email is most certainly not decentralized to anyone outside the IT world. They can, with extreme difficulty, move between providers, but they are still dependent on a provider.&lt;p&gt;Email decreases the volume of users that mediocre players can own (Google does email better than anyone else, so it gets a significant share of the market) but users are still going to be owned by someone.</text></comment>
<story><title>All you need is e-mail, e-mail. E-mail is all you need.</title><url>http://monkeymace.com/post/23937902775/all-you-need-is-e-mail-e-mail-e-mail-is-all-you-need</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ajdecon</author><text>I&apos;ve wondered a lot about why e-mail isn&apos;t used more as a backend for different services. But as far as I can tell, messaging products proliferate because their creators want to create profitable products rather than distributed protocols.&lt;p&gt;E-mail is a pretty good group of protocols for distributing arbitrary messages between different locations on the Internet. It&apos;s easy to imagine how all sorts of messaging and social network products could be implemented as a specialized e-mail client with a good user experience. Their forms might be slightly different than they have now, but they&apos;d serve approximately the same consumer purpose.&lt;p&gt;For example, you could build a social networking &quot;client&quot; with e-mail as a backend. Status updates, photos, etc. would be distributed to all your contacts via email, and the client would produce a &quot;timeline&quot; based on the data in its mailbox, without ever showing the user the original messages.&lt;p&gt;But you give up a lot of control that way, and it&apos;s harder to monetize. What developers want (and users too, to be honest) is a centralized service that they can control, mine data with, and sell products or show ads. A distributed protocol, while in some ways more powerful (and less dependent on a fallible central authority!), doesn&apos;t achieve the real business aims.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>antidoh</author><text>&quot;messaging products proliferate because their creators want to create profitable products rather than distributed protocols.&quot;&lt;p&gt;That&apos;s a bingo.</text></comment>