Accept no substitutes

Future of email is #noemail & the past of email

Starting with the past, Washington Post got some hoax busting advice from email historians that resulted in a long but not quite satisfying article with some very good links to orthodox and substantiated email histories including a section on email from Dave Crocker’s Living Internet and Tom Van Vleck’s entry that credits Noel Morris as Tom’s partner in electronic mail creation starting in 1965 (and noted by Noel’s brother film-maker Earl as discussed earlier on this blog). Success has many fathers, but Tom and Noel are clearly the first to implement a mail program.

Meanwhile Megan Garber writing in The Atlantic discovers what I (and many others) have been claiming right along, “‘The Future of Email’ … Looks a Lot Like Twitter”. What she discovers is:

Fluent, a new service that integrates with Gmail (and eventually, its creators say, with other email platforms) to deliver messages in the flowing fashion of a social media feed. The service, built by a team of former Google developers — the guys responsible for Wave, but don’t hold that against them — converts Gmail’s grids into a message-sharing service that’s more dynamic and fluid than any kind of letter-writing has been before, giving way to an inbox that’s not a box at all so much as a Twitter-like feed of information.

I think I’ve mentioned earlier that Wave was a good idea executed terribly from a social point of view (to say the least). Nonetheless I found it useful as it combined many of my styles of communicating, integrated many of the sites and environments that I used to communicate and allowed me to “slice and dice” the various threads and conversations.

I’m no longer interested in how to improve email or it’s best current implementation – Gmail — but if I were I’d be giving Fluent.io a test drive.

1 Comment

  1. George Entenman

    I’ve signed up for Fluent. Can you tell them to let me in, please? 😉

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