Adobe AIR is an Email Killer
A few weeks ago I came across a blog post by Ryan Stewart titled “Thinking About the Purpose of AIR” and it got me thinking. In his post he talks about AIR being the removal of browser limitations, but I think its much more than that. My theory is that that AIR has the potential to replace the need for classic email. Blasphemy, you say?
My argument for this stems from the rise of social networks. I’ve been using Facebook for a good few months now, and I’m observing that email is no longer the primary medium for progressive communications. No longer do I email someone directly anymore, I’ll either post on their wall or send them a private message.
Of course you could argue that this is in-fact what email is, and that bulletin board systems have been doing the exact same thing since the dawn of time. But to me, sites like Facebook make the whole experience far more friendlier, spam free (let’s forget about MySpace for now) and far more intuitive. Agreed?
There is of course one big caveat in all of this. And that is that, social networks still need to send you a classic email in-order to inform you that there is a new event waiting for you to check out. Doh!
But wait, what if Facebook were an AIR application? As soon as someone pocked, messaged, threw a sheep at you, you’d know about it the moment it happened through some kind of “Toast”/”Growl” animation on your desktop. That poor old event email is now redundant and may never be read. “Aha!” I hear you cry or “Dur!” if your mind instantly springs to instant messages.
But, it doesn’t have to stop with social networking communication. What about mailing lists? They could now be turned into web services and allow developers create experiences around their APIs. And to unsubscribe? Simply uninstall the program! (That’s really important!) Also, how about apps such as Netflix Queue Management or Amazon package tracking? Just take a look threw you inbox and you can immediately see that large portion of those emails would work better if they we’re managed data within a purposed desktop application.
I think in most cases, people’s inboxes are a mass of unsorted data. Sure you can setup smart folders and rules, but at the end of day, it’s all useless data that most of the time is read once and throw away. Also look at your spam box, my spam box in my GMail account is currently holding 2131 emails! Email is definitely far from elegant is it? In my eyes it’s a generic dinosaur destined to meet its asteroid. More blasphemy! (side note: Ive been watching 300 on Blu-Ray too much.)
So to conclude. The email killer is a set of purposed desktop (AIR based) applications, that are usually connection to a user account, that store persistent data “pushed” out from a service.
In reading the headline I thought I would be reading an article and then telling you that you were crazy. However, you put forward a well thought our argument.
I still don’t agree with you, but its well argued. A lot of my email still comes from people who aren’t even on Facebook.
Mike
You assume facebook will always be spam free. I’m sure if FB scaled to the size of our email systems, spam and virii would eventually appear.
Yes, I am assume Facebook will always be spam free but that’s not the point here.
My point is that email shall be replaced by user accounts from services such as Facebook, NetFlix, Amazon, etc. Thus you can control the flow of spam by simply leaving that service.
I totally disagree….
I believe this philosophy epitomizes nearly everything I hate about social networking sites (MySpace excluded as I hate a lot more there). In particular, their viral nature.
You see, in order to use such a system as you describe I would have to be a member of Facebook, Netflix, and so on. I am already a member of nigh close to probably a 1,000 sites on the web. It’s tedious…
That said, I have my email and anyone can communicate with it. It’s an open system not tied to any one site. And that’s the way it should be.
What I would actually like to see is the reverse of what you describe. I’d like to see an universal IM protocol. So that I do not need to have a dozen messenger programs (ie: AIM, MSN Messenger, ICQ, Yahoo Messenger, iChat, and more). Rather, I’d like a protocol similar to email in which you can use Outlook, Thunderbird, Gmail, Yahoo Mail or any of nigh a 1,000 web clients to communicate email.
No…please…BREAK US FREE from site/application entanglements for communication protocols.
I think you’re on to something. As the saying goes, “The only constant is change.” What is the likely hood that we will be using traditional email 10-20 years from now? Not very I would say. The overwhelming likelyhood is that it will be superseded by something. Maybe you’re idea. Maybe another.
So we have to install an application for every single website or mailing list we want to receive notifications from, instead of just one application handling them all (i.e. an email client).
I don’t think so.
Hey Rob, I don’t see you having to have an application for every single website. Insead an application for evey kind of services.
One example I wish i’d mentioned now are desktop RSS aggragaters. They are the perfect example of what I’m trying to convay.
I know what I propose may seem crazy to you but, the Internet is still relativly young and as polyGeek said, “The only constant is change.”.
Interesting idea. I believe that one determinate of the direction of email will be found in how things shake out in terms of “the industry” vs. “the community” in user’s minds. For example, when Jason wrote, “ I have my email and anyone can communicate with it. It’s an open system not tied to any one site. And that’s the way it should be.” I get a sense that he feels that “his community” cannot be contained in one Facebook type site. These kinds of sites present themselves as communities, but in the end, to the cautious cynics, they are seen as representing the industry trying to make a buck off the concept of community.
Social choices are difficult to predict, and technical efficiency is the preference criteria for only a small percentage of human beings.
I think there’s something there. I don’t fully agree with everything, but I like the arguments and being a social networking addict, I see the benefit.
=Ryan
rstewart@adobe.com
Do you know what I love about email? I own my own namespace (thanks to ICANN) and I can control what happens to my emails. Can I do that on Facebook? No. I have to tolerate the limitations of their application and their ever more vigorous advertising. And if I ever decided I hate FB (which is only a matter of time, I think), can I take my messages with me? Too bad. I agree that the feature set presently implemented by email is not metaphysically necessary, but I think no system will enjoy the ubiquity that email has obtained without maintaining public namespace and published standards. Without these, the average internet user is a pawn in the market share battles of tech upstarts. I would much prefer an established, unexciting open technology to any closed technology.
You suggest that posting to someone’s Facebook wall or sending them private messages would be the replacements for classic email. Well, a big benefit to classic email is that you can refer back to your archive of old messages months or years down the road, in order to find some important information or to remember a conversation. To find old messages on someone’s wall would mean looking back through your posts plus the posts of everyone who posted after you did.
So to retain the ability to easily archive your conversations in an AIR/Facebook scenario, you would need to post private messages a lot of the time. Which would be just like using classic email, except that your messages would be tied to Facebook, instead of an email account under your own domain. On top of that, a lot of people (the computer-illiterate and fairly old people) could care less about signing up for (or downloading) a social media app. They only want to use email and surf a few sites, and classic email would need to be available for them.
So I don’t see AIR and replacing classic email, but I do think you’re right that it will largely enhance the way (and the number of ways) through which we can communicate with each other.
I really wish I hadn’t used FaceBook as an example now :(.
Hi,
I am Surendra Gurjar and I am novice programmer of Adobe AIR and Flex. I made one application on Adobe AIR and I felt that Adobe AIR is very easy to learn, very interesting to work with.
But as well as I am facing some problem with AIR like how to make custom uninstaller of Adobe AIR Applications. Some GUI issues with AIR Applications.
So please help me out from this problem and let me know how to make custom uninstaller.
Thank You…………………