Alexis Smirnov

I believe that one of the reasons for the lack of innovation in the email space is the lack of a simple yet powerful email access protocol. Every developer that wants to try something with email needs to first jump through the hoops of IMAP and MIME, or worse, the Outlook Object Model and MAPI. A new protocol like reMAP would lift this burden off their shoulders. We’ve seen what open, simple standards can do for innovation with Twitter’s and Flickr’s API. Now imagine unleashing the same sort of creativity to the vast ocean of data that is email.

Indeed, web apps that generate and host personal information are providing that information to other apps via OAuth. Email – on of the key datatypes of personal information – is still only accessible via non HTTP protocol. It is time for a change. I suspect that Google re-hiring Gabor (and killing reMail in the process) has a lot to do with this vision.

As Lisa Dusseault pointed out in 2008

The idea of using native HTTP resources to RESTfully access an email store is not only an old idea, it’s been implemented many times.

Her Atom-based API proposal is quite close to Gabor’s and was prototyped by Jeff Lindsay who talks about it here.

To be fair, IMAP practitioners point out that IMAP isn’t really broken. Be that as it may, the number of HTTP-based apps (aka Web apps) dwarfs the number of IMAP-based apps. In fact, there’s strictly one IMAP-based type of app that went mainstream – an email client. There are still plenty of messaging/communication problems waiting to be solved.

Every so often you experience a technical problem you can’t find any information about and which takes you forever to solve. Then, after you finally solve it, you are left scratching your head saying, “I don’t get it­—there must be millions of people with this problem—why is there so little information about it?

This post is a powerful illustration that the design online identity are much harder to get right than it seems. Unfortunately there the industry didn’t yet find the design pattern that works. And the problem is growing with the number of people that have multiple email addresses and multiple identities.

Google clearly didn’t get it right. Anyone else has?

There are real benefits to using email as a social media platform. Just about everyone knows how to use it. (Despite claims that young millenials look down on email, it’s just too useful to go away anytime soon.) It’s incredibly flexible – you can share anything you want, and comment on it at any length, from 140 characters to as many as it takes to get your point across. It has a global address space that allows you to find almost anyone, an address space that links people to content. It’s multi-platform, and accessible from anywhere.

This description of benefits of email is dead-on. And the benefits apply well beyond social media. But there’s another key property of Email that makes it so ubiquitous: Email is multi-client and is multi-server.

When you email someone or get an email from someone, you don’t care about what client, or server your counterpart is using. A system that makes the user pay attention to this stuff will not be as universal as email.

Twitter and Facebook are guilty to have created their own address space that parallels email. So Buzz is closer to be running on “email” than traditional social networks. In that respect it deserves Tim’s kudos.

But in one key respect Buzz is still foreign to Email system. You have to be “on Google Gmail” to benefit from this new capability. Ask this question: when you send a photo in an attachment to you fiend’s email address, do you think about what email provider she is on? Or what version of email client she is using?

Could people who don’t have Google Account send Buzz “messages” to each other? My understanding they cannot. This is the key difference with email thus I’m skeptical Buzz will become as ubiquitous as email.