^^^CNET in conversation on "The Future of Email, Release 0.5"
OPEN PLENARY: Esther Dyson, CNET Editor-at-Large
Wednesday, June 02, 2004 • 3:15 - 4:30pm

Esther Dyson is best known for Release 1.0, her insightful monthly analysis of significant trends in information technology and policy. Next month, she's going to cover the future of email. This month, she's going to give you an early look at what she's finding out, eliciting comments as well as questions from conference participants and possibly a couple of onstage email developers. She sees email not as a function but as a prism through which most other applications can be used - and she has examples to prove it. This session will help set the stage for the conference - and for the future of email.

^^^Share your notes, comments and :

Mail 2.0 -- Release 0.5

Here to throw some stuff out, get some stuff back. June issue will be on where mail is heading.

All swimsuits eventually turn brown. A form of entropy. What's happening here is reversing entropry.

• 1-2-3 as a word processor
• Lotus Agenda
• And now, mail

Accident of history that we are here, but destiny is inevitable. The place where a lot of client side innovation is in mail, not in word processors.

Mail 1.0

• Store & Forward, from A to B

Mail 2.0

• Messaging (notification & alerts) to that points to the cloud
• Lives in the cloud: Life, work and other (files, calendars, apps, docs, photos, blogs, spreadsheets, PPTs

IMHO, the cloud is the Web, plain and simple.

What's in the cloud -- basically, everything

• Information
• Versioning.redundancy control
• Access controls/persmission
• ID management (roles, permissions, security, policies)
• Search/structure/metadata
• Mail management (cf. Eric Hahn The Changing Face of Email

What's inside/around the client -- My Everything

• Messages in packages
• alerts/notifications/pointers
• links
• application events
• (Shared) calendar/to-do
• Docs/work content (.xls, .ppt, .etc.)
• Contact/access management
• MyTasks
• Expense accounts

Everything linked together, metadata. Now that my company has been acquired, I am more attunded to the mundane and want it automated.

Raymie: chicken and an egg problem. We all may want to have this stuff. Esther: I do have some ideas about how to do it. Im trying to show the

What comes in

• Spam -- one man's sausage is another man's links,
• Need detection
• Subscription (read-only RSS, lists, etc.) - need filing/labling/threading/filtering
• Correspondence -> to dos, actions, replies
•  

Functions

• Personal workflow
• Attention management -- as this really is, whats important, how much you have to define it yourself,
• Thread management
• Labeling & search & classification -- some by users, some by clever tools
• Communications (asynch & realtime) -- not just email, IM, VoIP (to me voicemail means you cede control over your time to someone else)
• Presence management (string across the chasm)
• All applications, having context in context of them

How do we build it

• Give the user defaults
• Give the user a way to "improvve" it
• I.e. APIs -- high-level that take the form of fill in the blank
• Watch what I do, generalize and apply
• Modules & metadata

Examples

• OSAF (openness)
• Jot (modularity)
• Mailblocks (auto tagging)
• Outlook (contact management)
• Lotus/IBM (attention Management)
• Eudora (filtering & highlighting)
• Gmail online storage & search)
• Bloomba (search)
• IM (presence management, privacy)
• Wallop (shared content)
• Yahoo!, AOL & Hotmail (big guys of webmail, social networks?)

Waiting to happen: Would you like to announce youself as the friend of everyone you have email over the past month? The way to have social networks collapse is to let people spam each other into friendship.

Suggests getting people together to create registries for interop. Last time collection of independent activities began to interoperate.

Q&A(rgument)

• New media - IM cell phones, etc.
• Spam (on everyone's lops...Come to session tonight. Sender pays...)
• Privacy issies/access management
• Please give us a commercial for the Accountable Net

Eric from Sendmail: In and out of the cloud sounds like the cloud is like groupware. With SMTP as the transport. What's the difference?

In some sense how we think about it and I was being very fuzzy, in one sense the user shouldn't pay attention to it. How much stored locally vs. shared will be variable. From a user point of view.

The goal is to have the clouds expand and touch one another. What if we could eliminate all redundancy in all email everywhere? Where we go is more a technical optimization question although if everyone answered it now you would raise huge privacy issues.

1.7 B accounts globally, half web-based (large portion are mobile). Half of my life I am travelling and I still can't get web-based or mobile on an airplane.

A registry is different from a standard, but where I would like to see a lot of competition. ENUM has the disadvantage of being regulated by both the ITU and ICANN, but advantage of not being owned by anyone in particular.