Last, Silicon Valley startups seem to be able to offer the great experiences that they do because they centralize our information within their server farms. But email proves that this is not necessarily the case. Progress can come from much more distributed decision-making processes. The email protocol evolves based on the deliberations of the Internet Engineering Task Force, not by the fiat rule of a single company in Silicon Valley or New York.
Nearly 100% of my communication is done via email. In the rare cases that someone sends me an SMS, it goes through Google Voice. In both cases, I have an indexed, searchable organized repository for all of my communications. With Email, I own 100% of it the server, the internet connection, VPN tunnel and desktop mail application. There are no ads in my Inbox, only communications server to server with my contacts. Google owns my SMS but hosting my own SMS relay is very costly and difficult at the individual level. I worked on SMS technology @ Brightkite (check-ins via SMS) and it’s not a cheap setup to own your own shortcode.
I’m off topic now but my point is, one day Facebook will be gone and email will still be alive. I don’t use Twitter or Facebook anymore. I don’t use any of those new fangled services. I can email my photo full resolution (not cropped like a square) to a thousand people just like I do with instagram. I can email videos, photos, party invites and thoughts. Email rules and unfortunately, articles like the above-linked one don’t come around as often as they should.
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