Yeah, I think email has always been the clear answer to this question (which many of us have been asking pretty much since Facebook began).
- no one owns the whole system, and no part of the infrastructure depends on a single vendor
- it already has more penetration than Facebook
- the security and privacy issues are well-understood and relatively well provided for (in some cases it even has legal protection similar to physical mail)
- people can use it to do most of the things they do on facebook, and people who want to play skeevy Zynga games can just use the apps, which is a privacy win even if they don’t know it
- it’s proven viable as a (cheap) paid-for service, and in fact many people today pay money for email service.
- it doesn’t artificially require people to have a single identity, or use their “real” name, or other bollocks of that type.
Unfortunately enragingly, there are a few reasons why email has languished, most of which could have been fixed long enough ago that Facebook might never have taken off in the first place.
- spam is still not dealt with as effectively as on other platforms
- ridiculous message-size and mailbox-size restrictions still exist in enough places that you can’t rely on sending messages over a couple of MB
- support for message formatting is wildly inconsistent
- setting up a mail client is clunky at best, and too often requires actual tech support
- strictly speaking, it doesn’t allow for publishing (“feeds” or photo galleries), although that is covered by usenet, and besides, if the UX were good enough, most people would be better off publishing that stuff via mailing lists, since it’s intrinsically much easier to have a handle on who sees what
- there is a problem with addresses being tied to corporate domains, as you can’t keep your address if you change employer / ISP / etc.; there are ways around this but they’d need to be standardised. (of course, Facebook messages are all tied to a single corporate domain too)
- the state of mail client software is an abomination; there is not one single option that is good enough and believe me I have looked
Some of these problems need things to change at the infrastructure level (the solutions exist, but aren’t consistently implemented). But the basic problem is the shitty client experience, and hot damn that’s frustrating, because Apple or Microsoft could fling together an engineering dream team to fix this in six months and not even notice the cost.
I wish there’d be, like, a Red Cross appeal or something to make email work.
