In The US, Email Is Only For Old People 383
lxw56 writes "Two years after Slashdot discussed the theory that Korean young people were rejecting email, an article at the Slate site written by Chad Lorenz comes to the same conclusion about the United States. 'Those of us older than 25 can't imagine a life without e-mail. For the Facebook generation, it's hard to imagine a life of only e-mail, much less a life before it. I can still remember the proud moment in 1996 when I sent my first e-mail from the college computer lab. It felt like sending a postcard from the future. I was getting a glimpse of how the Internet would change everything--nothing could be faster and easier than e-mail.'"
Just the beginning (Score:5, Insightful)
The funny thing was that at the time that *was* instant messaging, so while email has been around for quite a few years, we now have beautifully designed mobile phones [apple.com], IM clients of many flavors, tweets [twitter.com] and all manner of both temporally immediate and time shifted communiques. It's been an amazing road to watch, but more impressive is that we are still only on the cusp of a much larger communication revolution that's been building for the last 20 years. When distributed networks become truly transparent and ubiquitous, we are going to see a future where todays Internet will look absolutely archaic.
Re:Just the beginning (Score:4, Interesting)
Modern IM using asynchronous interruption (cell phones or separate clients) makes the current experience "different." I can choose to ignore my IM client much easier than I could when it was my only running application, synchronous in nature. The old client was much more like a conversation, one which you could end by disconnecting. Current clients are much more intrusive, and people expect more responsiveness out of you at all hours of the day.
Re:Just the beginning (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Just the beginning (Score:5, Informative)
He has my number. He can call me whenever he wants. When he does, he pays for a minimum of 3 hours, at overtime rates, even if it's something as simple as for me to answer a question. The rationale ? If it isn't worth 3 hours of overtime pay to him, then it obviously isn't -important-, in that case he should just wait until I arrive at work and discuss it with me then.
Works fine. I guess your mileage will depend on your boss. Some bosses will surely be the opinion that just because they get to disturb you, shouldn't mean they need to actually -compensate- you for it. (and no: 15 minutes of extra pay is -NOT- adequate compensation for having -private- time invaded by work, even if the intrusion lasts only 15 minutes)
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One of these things, to you, is pretty abstract. If your boss isn't happy about you having limited availability on nights and weekends that might have an affect on future income levels, or it might not. And this might matter to you, or it might not. On the other hand, you know for sure that when you leave for vacation you can actually relax, s
Re:Just the beginning (Score:4, Insightful)
I guess the main problem is that it advertises that you're online. (And whilst you can be invisible, people then, unlike a phone, will assume you're offline, so that's no good either.)
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More importantly very few people were online all the time, most were using dialup which meant their other primary method of being contacted was blocked. If they did have an internet conne
Re:Just the beginning (Score:5, Funny)
Not to rain on your parade, but doesn't the future tend to make most things look archaic? Isn't that kind of...the definition [reference.com] of archaic?
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The other side... (Score:5, Insightful)
This is why I have started to look more at power consumption than speed lately. I would plunk down money faster for an AthlonX2 2600+ that was fanless and used 20 watts than I would for an AthlonX2 5600+ that requires a fan and uses 50 watts.
Re:Just the beginning (Score:5, Insightful)
The G3 iMac was derided for not having a floppy drive. Sounds pretty ridiculous now, doesn't it?
The G3 iMac was derided for not having a _replacement_ for a floppy drive. Had apple shipped them with CD writers (not even CDRWs), there would have been no complaints. But at the time, it made getting information off an iMac difficult without buying more hardware - not an insignificant issue for a computer with a significant customer based expected to be in the education market (either schools or students).
And "being ahead of your time" (Score:5, Insightful)
Phasing out old technology isn't bad, nor is embracing new technology. However it shouldn't be done just for the sake of doing it. If you get rid of something before it is really obsolete, you just piss people off and force them to buy replacements. Like I'd love to say that we are done with floppies entirely, but we aren't. I don't have one in my desktop at home, but I do at work. I simply end up needing to use it. Gateway fortunately makes them optional. They aren't normally included, but for a small fee you can get one added if you need it. While there's no reason any more to make it a default, there's also no reason to say "Nope, you can't have that." Back when the Mac eliminated floppies it was really silly since they were still used all over. I remember at the paper I worked at we had to buy USB floppies for all new Macs since the preferred method for reporters to bring in stories was on floppy. They didn't have CD writers then, they were too expensive and too new.
Likewise just jumping on new technology for its own sake is stupid. I remember when Apple upgraded to gigabit on their computers. At the time, it was an incredibly expensive proposition. Gigabit chips were in the $200-300 range bought in bulk, so it was adding a non-trivial cost to the computer. Also, it was totally worthless to most people, as a 5 port gigabit switch was north of $1000 so almost nobody has gigabit. Being "Ahead of their time," did nothing but add cost for a feature few could use. Now all computers ship with gigabit because the cost difference between a gigabit and 100mbit chip is trivial, cents at most.
There's nothing wrong with ragging on a company when they jump the gun on technology. Yes, in the future everyone may do it, but that doesn't mean it was a good decision then. I'm sure at some point in the future, computers won't have any more analogue video output, it'll be pure digital. That'll be great, when all monitors are likewise digital. However today that'd be pretty stupid since there's a large number of analogue monitors out there and it isn't expensive to add the RAMDACs needed to do the output. You'd be "ahead of your time," to eliminate analogue output, but it would rightfully earn you scorn.
Re:Oh, bullshit (Score:4, Insightful)
The iMac shipped with three replacements for a floppy drive. The first was the Ethernet port...remember that the "i" in the name stood for "Internet."
Sorry, but in 1998 internet connections - especially broadband ones - were *far* from ubiquitous.
The other was the USB port--flashdrives were well on their way to becoming common when the iMac hit the market.
The first flash drives weren't on the market until 2000, so they sure as hell weren't "common" in 1998. Further, since Windows didn't have built-in support for them until Windows 2000 and Windows ME, they weren't "common" until a couple of years after that. It would have been brave indeed to walk around any time before about 2002 with the assumption your USB key would just "plug and play" with the majority of computers you'd encounter.
The whole idea was that data would move across the pipe more and more, so the floppy was not necessary.
Indeed, there was nothing wrong with the idea - the problem was that it was half a decade too early.
The success of the iMac, and the way we work now, shows that was an accurate prediction.
The complaints and subsequent boom in the late 90s for USB floppy drives suggest lots of people thought the iMac's lack of any easy and compatible method to transfer data was a problem.
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Predictions about the future are often wildly off. And predictions that progress in the future is going to make everything we have today look like a child's toy, might not be an exception. I'm typing this on a single core Semperon 2.2GHz machine with DDR (not DDR2) RAM and on-board graphics. That's very far from archaic, but it was low end when I bought it and that was several years ago. It manages pretty much all that I need at present. I am intending to upgrade it soon, but that's only because I have som
Obligatory (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Just the beginning (Score:4, Interesting)
Look at the telephone. Telephone time is now so cheap that people spend the entire day with a receiver on their ear chatting. It is any worse that the one telephone in the house? Not really, only in opportunity costs that one could be doing something else, perhaps more valuable.
If one has to pay for communication, then one thinks about what one has to say. if one is not paying, then just talks. So what is happening is simply that the kids are not having to do what many very older people were trained to do, which is not to tie up a line for too long. It is now a non issue. Everyone in the house has at least one phone. Everyone in the house has a computer. The resources are not scarce, so there is no need to ration them. As long as resources remain plentiful, there is no problem.
personal experience says no freaking way (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:personal experience says no freaking way (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe it's because my computer history is very different than most people my age, or maybe because it's just logical that something as easy to use and as widespread as email isn't going to go away anytime soon, while other services have either come and gone or never caught on in the first place. Pretty much every internet-connected device can handle email plus one other protocol, but it's email rather than that one other protocol that's on EVERYTHING. Like so many other things, it's not really perfect for any one application (though if it had been encrypted from the start, I'd say otherwise; unfortunately, it's really too late to get encryption everywhere), but by and large it works well enough for just about anything.
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And as a 23 year old, everybody who is really my friend is on my MSN (I've never, ever heard of somebody I know having AIM...maybe that's an American thing). I rarely use facebook internal messaging but I always considered it a bit more like email anyway, with simplified forward lists.
The key differences as I see them are this:
Facebook and other social networking sites have whitelisted contacts (you have to accept them as fr
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Re:personal experience says no freaking way (Score:5, Insightful)
I have yet to understand why anyone ever wants to use the internal messaging on websites rather than email. Having to waste my time logging into a large number of websites in order to read and reply to messages instead of them all landing in my inbox is crazyness...
Not only that, but when using email I get to use one well designed user interface of my choice, whereas messaging on websites, forums, etc require me to use a different (usually badly designed and slow) UI on every site.
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Eh? Is there no one under 30 in your office?
The country where I live/work has the highest concentration of English speakers in the world. This should make it some kind of reliable reference on the topic of modern communication. The office staffers all use email sure, but the youngsters read it when they feel like it, and compose/send when they need to - however, IM, by far, is what they really use to
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Please. Incessant IMing and SMSing by younger folks is just the contemporary equivalent of teens trying up the phone line with content-free communication. As Leary and Wilson put it [wordpress.com], "Most human communication is embarrassingly primitive, consisting of endless variations on `I'm still here. Are you still there?' (hive solidarity) and `Nothing has really changed' (hive business as usual)." The young need
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That may be true, but as a grad student returning to college after 10 years, I can definitely say that email isn't what it once was, even to college students.
When email first went mainstream in the mid 1990s, it was a bit like when phones first went mainstream: getting an email (or call) was a big event, and everyone was attentive and responsive, utilizing the new technology with a glorious combination of wonder and gusto. Now, the same thing that happened to t
Spam ruined email (Score:5, Insightful)
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I never understood people who say they don't get spam on gmail. Since I don't use it except as a backup, I've never given my address to anyone save for my web host and yet, here is all this spam.
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Another useful factor is Gm
What is there to understand? (Score:2, Interesting)
Do you mean, you don't understand why you get spam and nobody else does?
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I never understood people who say they don't get spam on gmail. Since I don't use it except as a backup, I've never given my address to anyone save for my web host and yet, here is all this spam.
In the gmail account I use for "signing up to things" - for everything from online forums to torrent sites - I see maybe two spam mails into the inbox a month, if that.
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They must be lying! Those bastards! It's inconcievable that they're telling the truth and that you're the minority.
Since I don't use it except as a backup, I've never given my address to anyone save for my web host and yet, here is all this spam.
Probably because you don't have any actual emails in there, Google has no way of determining which are spam or not. If you used the email account, I'm sure it would do a much better job.
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You know, I have an e-mail address (billandkimroehl@gmail.com) listed on my website that gets about 12,000 visits a day and I wouldn't doubt if many of those harvest it for spam. While I get almost 0 spam (with blacklisting and SpamAssassin) on my main address (which I hadn't received a single spam to before a year ago) GMail handles the 19 or so spams I get to my web
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For most of what I do I expect an immediate response
This is why I feel ambivalent at best about supplanting email with IM/SMS/whatever else.
I don't think it's reasonable to expect everyone around me to respond immediately, and I don't appreciate it when other people expect that of me for no good reason. Email, as it has developed, is nice to use because the expected response time (usually within a few hours, unless there's clearly a reason it needs to be sooner) strikes a good balance between being able to get stuff done and allowing recipients a little
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as in, you can leave a message for someone thats not connected to the system right now, and it will be delivered when they do.
only thing missing really is a way to save and sort individual messages like one can mail, and upload files in a similar way to how one can do attachments to a mail.
still, it could be thats where microsoft is heading with the live messenger system.
Re:Spam ruined email (Score:4, Insightful)
Um.
At this point, haven't you essentially reinvented the email wheel?
I don't see how this hypothetical system is substantially different from email. Well, to be fair, "email plus presence" (see: tightly integrated email/IM systems like Gmail/Gtalk or Mail.app/iChat).
Note also that whatever it is about email that "the kids" don't like anymore, they'll also grow to dislike about "IM plus offline messages plus mailboxes plus attachments".
you don't see the lost emails (Score:3, Insightful)
Since you can't get anywhere near reliable message delivery with email these days, I find the whole system ready for the trash.
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Or you install dspam [nuclearelephant.com], and never have to worry about it again. I haven't seen a single spam in my Inbox IN OVER 3 YEARS now, nor have any of the users I host mail for.
Thousands of spam messages are blocked or quarantined every day, and I never see them, unless I decide to check the quarantine (which is web-based). I put graymilter [acme.com] in front of that, and the incoming malware connections on port
Re:Spam ruined email (Score:4, Insightful)
social networks... (Score:5, Insightful)
Not more limited. (Score:5, Insightful)
Facebook is the same thing but with several simple but important improvements. The friends list acts as a mailing list of sorts, something that very few of the kids I have talked to know how to do with webmail. It also acts as a grey-list spam filter, limiting unsolicited messages to your request box where they are more easily ignored. There are features that act as the analog to outlooks meeting request, which is quite useful but you don't ever see used outside of work, I guess because of the implied formality of it.
I guess what it comes down to is that features are useless unless they are accessable, so your level of expertice will dictate whether email or social networks are the more limited of the two.
Re:Not more limited. (Score:4, Insightful)
On a related note, I text message like there's no tomorrow, but mostly with my girlfriend. I can't imagine using that as a substitute for e-mail. Especially in a work environment.
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Re:social networks... (Score:4, Informative)
And as a social tool, IMs match the attention span of the users. Sure, it's fun to play with Twitter and I have daily dialogs via SMS. But I am not going to write a note to a family member about a significant issue using AIM, nor am I going to discuss terms of a legal deal, send a 500 source file archive, or use SMS to read a 50 thread mailing list.
I think a more interesting study would be to follow a sub-25 year old Internet user for 10 years and see how their communications tool usage changes. That has some intrinsic value. This "study" has none. It's like saying lots of little kids play with Legos while only a handful of adults do, so therefore Legos are the wave of the future.
DIfferent use cases (Score:5, Insightful)
I would not use email to check if someone wants to catch lunch. And I would not use any kind of IM to discuss issues with the latest revision of a journal paper. As a guess, when you're 16 you have a lot of the former kinds of communication and very little of the latter. As you grow older the balance shifts. Both have their place.
Mod parent up. (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, whatever. Look at what the kids are sending. Short, light messages. Anything more and they talk in person or talk on the phone. OMG! Just like the adults do!
And the funniest thing is that this article is from a guy who just discovered email in 1996.
IM is great for "lunch?" or "meet 4 pizza".
It's not very useful when you have to discuss Johnny's grades and why he is not turning in any assignments.
Re:DIfferent use cases (Score:4, Insightful)
In the old days, email actually worked. It was delivered to your box, and comsat was there to biff you when it arrived. I even had my beloved xface running at the edge of my screen so I could see the incoming and catch the ones from the five people I cared about. And in that environment, we surely did use email to arrange lunch; it was quicker than shouting down the hall.
Then Microsoft figured out that the Internet wasn't going to go away. And suddenly it was all DHCP and POP and all the applications that used to blow started to suck—sorry, those that used to push started to pull—and the Internet stopped feeling like the Internet and turned into what we have today, a kind of UUCP on steroids, where communication doesn't happen until the next scheduled contact time, because an IP number no longer successfully identifies a node and everyone lives in fear, cowering behind firewalls and running no daemons.
And by now email is little better than snail mail, and the interfaces are worse (no xface or deliver scripts in Windows!) and it sucks, and of course people are looking for alternatives so that they can arrange lunch and communicate selectively with the people they care about.
So, I know I'm an old fart by now, but in the old days, before Microsoft Rule and the Eternal September, the technology used to work. I'm not making this up....
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Oh I hate that so much. It's even worse when the e-mail is a one line thing asking a simple question (and it's not a matter of having a paper trail either). So irritating.
As for the article itself, being one of the leading edge of the facebook generation, this i
No biggie - they're young and will find out... (Score:5, Insightful)
IMing "OMG - did u c Larry - teh gay!" will only get you fired.
IM is useful in some contexts with some teams, but by and large, it's counterproductive.
And FACEBOOK at work? BWAHAHAHAAAA!!!
YOU ARE SO FIRED!!!!
You're in a meeting and some clown texts you with "OMG - did u c Larry - teh gay!" and you answer? YOU'RE FIRED.
Email is crucial in a business environment as it is not synchronistic - you don't have to engage, and there is no immediacy. That is important.
Jobs make all the difference - sitting around doing bong hits in your dorm is OK for facebook. But getting paid to do something is something else altogether.
RS
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We are 'up with the play' though, as we're allowed to print out the letter, sign it, then scan it as a PDF and e-mail the scan.
I've never tried printing and scanning "OMG - did u c Larry -teh gay!", but will try it on Monday and see how it pans out.
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If you're actually serious, why don't you just have an image of your signature you can paste into the document and then print directly to PDF? For that matter, 99% of PDF (or worse, DOC) attachments I get could just as easily, and a lot more conveniently for me, just be plain text emails, incidentally taking up just 1 kb in my mailbox instead of 1 MB.
Hmm... not my experience (Score:4, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
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They use MSN at my work actually. (Score:5, Interesting)
You're projecting too much the attitude people bring to the tools, which have nothing to do with the tools themselves.
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Most places I've worked were Exchange environments; when you logged in in the morning you turned on outlook or Mozilla app suite or pine or whatever, and when someone sends you a e-mail you get an Immediate Notification that you have a message.
Sure, if you are working with a dodgey mail server or are severely bandwidth crippled IM might make more sense, but how often is that the case?
strange.
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Wait until they have to get a job....
IMing "OMG - did u c Larry - teh gay!" will only get you fired.
Have you ever actually IMed at work? It can be very, very useful. More convenient than interrupting the workflow to use the phone, and many of us can type far faster than we can speak. You *can* use the protocol to say things professionally.
billl: are you turning in your tps report today?
peter: yes. give me 30 mins
billl: good. that's terrific, ok?
billl: oh, make sure to put a cover page
peter: ok
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Indeed. For the last few years I've done most of my online socializing with friends on private forums several people have set up. It's great because then your conversations are semi-public, in that your friends can see them and join in if they want, and you don't have to take part in every discussion.
The only email socializing I do is with my parents and with one friend who doesn't know the people with the forums. All of these people, however, live on the opposite side of the world from me, so IM isn't
What has changed in the last 30 years? (Score:5, Insightful)
In the early 1980's, I used IBM's CMS system. It had instant messaging (#cp msg) and email, but sadly, no forums nor chat rooms. People talked about needing the later two.
In the mid 1980s to the early 1990's, I used unix. It had IM, email, forums and chat rooms.
Since the early 1990s', I've used unix on the internet. It has IM, email, forums and chat rooms.
Now, in the 2000's, people claim that IM will kill email? Huh? I don't see it. Did these people never have IM before?
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Define "these people". If you mean everyone who didn't use CDC PLATO, IBM CMS or Unix in the 1980s, then it's a fairly huge number. "These people" never used IM (at least, not to the extent that they could consider it a primary means of communication).
What us computer geeks fail to realize is that technology doesn't become mainstream when we start using it -- it becomes mainstream when it reaches critical mass. Today, teenagers are growing up with social networks and
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In the 1970's, I used a the CDC PLATO system, which looked more like the modern internet than the internet in the 1970's looked like the modern internet.
They would look even closer if the modern internet had PLATO's cool orange plasma displays. (IIRC, the graphics memory bits were implemented using the hysteresis of the neon grid discharges themselves.)
It's kind of odd how before there were things like Flash ads to gum up the works, hundreds of people could simultaneously share a single ~10 mips machine with a few kilobytes of iron core memory and get a halfway decent web-like experience.
The real world (Score:2)
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Did you know that the hardcover book faces imminent doom [guardian.co.uk] as well?
Email reshaped the company world (Score:5, Insightful)
Overnight had a huge impact on the industry. Until overnight was an issue, we were used to having a few days of waiting time between ordering and receiving. With overnight, JIT manufacturing turned from something that required often a lot of logistics and planning to a fairly trivial task.
The advent of email had the same impact for offices. It suddenly became trivial to send documents instantly. Not only as a printed copy with fax machines, which were impossible to edit and to process further sensibly, but now you had a working and workable copy at your hands. Instantly.
So it's quite logic that the 30+ generation, i.e. office people, often in elevated positions, view email as a vital part of their life. It became trivial to send a copy to your boss, send a copy home or work from home and send the result to your office.
Yes, that's not what mail is for. I personally get ruffled the wrong way when I see people generate insane overhead by latching binaries to mails instead of using sensible ways of transfer (like uploading to some server and sending the FTP link via mail), but that's how mail is being used.
So I guess the reason why mail is so popular with "the old" (read: people aged 30+) is less that it's a communication tool for sending messages. It's being used as a tool to transfer data of various kinds. From wordprocessor documents to spreadsheets to binaries. I think people value the fact that they can link attachments to their mails higher than the fact that they can exchange simple text.
Re:Email reshaped the company world (Score:5, Insightful)
I realize you're probably a nerd due to the fact that you're post on Slashdot but the vast majority of people who use e-mail in the corporate world cannot put anything on a FTP server, webserver, or anywhere else. That type of shit is for the IT department and I hope that they honestly have better things to do than place some lame Excel spreadsheet used like a database up so that three people can access the data contained in it once.
I have access to a webserver, FTP server, whatever and you know what? I still send attachments because it makes more sense for 99% of what I (and everyone else) attaches.
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This is all a matter of perspective and context. There are places where what you describe is probably an appropriate response, but not where I work ... When the development or operations groups point me to their file server or other on-line system, it
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Yes, that's not what mail is for. I personally get ruffled the wrong way when I see people generate insane overhead by latching binaries to mails instead of using sensible ways of transfer (like uploading to some server and sending the FTP link via mail), but that's how mail is being used.
This is not a sensible way of transferring files and their associated metadata (which is the important part). It requires additional resources (in the shape of a functioning FTP or webserver), access to said server by t
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Yes, that's not what mail is for. I personally get ruffled the wrong way when I see people generate insane overhead by latching binaries to mails instead of using sensible ways of transfer (like uploading to some server and sending the FTP link via mail), but that's how mail is being used.
So quit bitching and fix it. If that's what people want out of email, why should there be so much overhead involved? There's no technical reason that emailing a file should be a worse way of sending it than FTP. If
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Talking about it, I don't have any plans for Sunday anyway...
Stupid... (Score:2)
IM, facebook, email, etc... I expect to become more and more integrated over time, until it is a centralized unified communication center. All of them have their place until something comes along that will replace it.
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How is that different from kids anywhere, ever?
Tools (Score:2)
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I honestly have trouble managing all the buttons of a keyboard without looking at them, and I am trying hard to overcome this, but I understood the mouse as soon as I touched it.
Come to think of it, this
Damn, I'm old. (Score:2, Informative)
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Whoever modded the post funny must be a newbe and think the fidonet has something to do with a dog taking mail as the comic pigeon net.
Time for a lesson in fidonet. I too sent my first e-mail on Fidonet. A Compuserve connection was like 25 cents a minute. Fidonet was dial-up BBS's relaying mail in the wee hours of the morning when long distance rates was low.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet [wikipedia.org]
Been there d
Meh. (Score:2)
Forums, however, do have their time and place!
Kids (Score:2, Funny)
Privacy is for old people (Score:5, Funny)
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Laurel and Hardy (Score:2)
What? Me Old?!?!?
It's another way to screen people out (Score:4, Funny)
So there beget the IM which permitteth thou to put DNC flags and "I'm not here" status lines. Behold it was a wonder. Till the day when thine fellows ignored the status line and sent messages forth, no matter. But the upper middle managers didst avoid this plague with their Blackberries - sending forth SMS and emails 'from the car'. And God saw what he had created and was overflowing with wrath.
not out of college and already old? (Score:2)
I've seen the shift to Facebook as of late (Score:5, Interesting)
Although I'm sure this will violate Facebook's TOS in some way, an existing project like FreePOPS [freepops.org] or a server-side daemon could be modified to fetch messages in my Facebook and Myspace inboxes and move them to my regular email account. Then they could be pushed to my phone and archived in my local email application.
Facebook needs to consider allowing POP/IMAP access to the inbox and only allow messages to be sent to other Facebook members via the same method. Facebook already forces verification of accounts via college email addresses or via mobile phone text messages which helps cut down spam and viruses. This allows a very large white-list of sorts with a global address book. With more businesses becoming present in the Facebook world, legitimate corporate advertising could be allow/blocked simply by altering account privacy settings. I see it as a win-win for Facebook.
IM sucks (Score:4, Interesting)
More like, "IM is for kids with unlimited time", rather than email is for old people. For awhile, I used IM a lot, then I figured out what an incredible time sink it was. I changed my account and gave it only to a few select people, and even then it's only used when someone wants to ask me a quick question or give me a "come here a second".
I suspect that rather than be some generational thing that only the new generation "gets it", it'll be abandoned by that same generation once they grow up and get real lives.
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Because (Score:2)
I just feel like playing "one up" with the submitter. I sent my first email in 1986...
These kids today, sheesh
In the US, Email is only for People With Jobs (Score:5, Insightful)
Typical Gen Y commercialism (Score:2)
Sign up without email? (Score:5, Funny)
Stupid Slate Article Designed for Web Hits (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Writer seems to be bemoaning their age. I have four words for the writer, IM-style: STFU.
2. Shiny new tech (IM) is actually gussied up old tech (IRC), with some new makeup, red dress, pump heels and matching faux p2p protocol. Not that there's anything wrong with IM, it's just that, um, it's been around a bit longer than people might realize. It's looking younger, but its at least several decades old.
3. Email is older still. It's showing it's age, and it's been to the doc's office a few times to get a physical (damn spam rash keeps showing up in my queues doc, canya give me a bayesian ointment to treat it?)
4. People who are not working full-time and/or in a domestic setting frankly have lots and lots of time for this. People who have been working for years and have a spouse and mortgage/rent and 2.5 kids and all the other claptrap of middle age frankly don't have alot of time for things, so it's really nice to have the message waiting for me for when I'm ready for it.
IM isn't a generational/age thing, it's a "stage of my life" thing. In a nutshell: it has nothing to do with age, get the elitist ageism out of the picture, no-one gives a crap if you use email, IM, or even smoke signals. Just get the f'n message out the door, that's all that matters.
5. Keeping email for future reference is comparatively easy. I have several people in the company I work for that have emails going back 3, 4, 5+ years (yes, their mailboxes have message counts in the 6-digit range). Keeping ongoing records for business, personal, or legal needs with an IM client is just asking for trouble. Yeah, you can save your dialogs - but can you sift through them and pick out that one message from 3 years ago? Do you even HAVE messages from 3 years ago? Do you really care to store those messages that said "I hngry lts eat"?
Move along folks, nothing to see here....
Re:If email is dead... (Score:5, Funny)
Funny story. She does use e-mail as well, and was one day complaining to my (now late) father that she was getting too much 'junk mail'.
His answer: "well just print the bloody stuff out and throw it in the trash!"
Re: (Score:2)
Personally, I am a graduate student and 22 and I prefer e-mail to any other form of communication. IM is okay, but it's pretty much a typed phone call- you both have to be at the computer at the same time and have the time to type. And Facebook? If somebody puts a message on Fa
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Yes, and they spend about 38 of those seconds thinking about sex, which doesn't leave much time for communication.
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