Messaging Clients in the Post-Web 2.0 World

by Al

Asa Dotzler and I were discussing messaging and message clients last week for a bit. The conversation was about the possibilities around messaging in general and what is wrong with the current situation. For those that don’t know or don’t pay attention, it has been said in a lot of media and by various pundits that kids these days (you know how it is) don’t use e-mail the way that us older farts do. They use IM instead and consider e-mail to be slow or less useful.

Example IM with AdiumFor people my age (36), who have been on the net for a long time, e-mail is the bedrock of our online experience. Sending and receiving e-mail has formed our Internet experience since before the web was an idea in anyone’s head. I was using e-mail for at least five or six years before the web came along and ran several bulletin board systems that were all about group messaging and e-mail between systems. I even ran a uucp node (pagan.uucp) for a while, which was mainly to get mail and news back before things like internet service providers even existed. So, I’m officially old and stuck in my ways and don’t dig the newfangled IM thing as much as people a bit younger than me.

Part of the overall discussion around Thunderbird is about the role e-mail has today on the Internet and how fixated some people are on the way that e-mail has functioned for, oh, the last 25 years or so. This isn’t condemnation but simply a statement of opinion. I’m reminded of the people that I know that still use Usenet news heavily (which I can no longer effectively use or tolerate and haven’t for years) and their discussions of why it still works, is cool, and relevant. The rest of us, in that instance, have largely moved to web forums, blogs, etc. for group discussions. I have a feeling that the e-mail discussion feels the same way for a lot of people. Then there is the fact that a lot of people are pretty happy to use webmail and don’t even see a need to locally store their mail or have a dedicated mail server.

Asa and I were discussing the idea of an application devoted to messaging, in all its forms, rather than simply devoted to e-mail. Some kind of next generation messaging that tries to switch things up, makes things easy for everyone, and can leverage Firefox and Mozilla projects for mindshare and community. The idea is a central clearinghouse for any and all personal messaging and sharing that comes into your system. The core concept here is that messaging is no less important than it has been. It is just that the focus of it has shifted away from e-mail. This doesn’t change the underlying desire to connect and communicate with friends, colleagues, and family.

In our conversation, this also became intermixed with the file sharing that AllPeers is trying to do. The file aspect is useful because a lot of people tend to e-mail fairly large files to friends or even to themselves. This is partially to get the files to people but it is also because of a desire to have a storage location that is web accessible or not on your local machine. I know that I have copies of my Master’s thesis stored on my mail server just in case my hard drive and backups somehow go south on me. No matter what, I want that nearly two megabyte word file to survive so I e-mailed it to myself. If you think about the original intent and design of e-mail on the Internet, this is definitely an overloading of its core architecture and design. I’m hardly the only one that sends large files as well. Unfortunately, as people have found out, mailing a file greater than a megabyte or two to someone, even yourself, can be a painful exercise. The infrastructure created decades ago for e-mail is not well adapted to the sending of files as big as the ones that people commonly use today. Because of the potential chain of SMTP servers or the policies that your Internet Service Provider may (or may not) have around message length and storage, you may simply never see a file or see it intact. If you want an example of this, try e-mailing an mp3 to yourself. See how long it takes to send and whether or not you actually receive the file. If you don’t receive it, see if your sending account actually is sent an error message or if the file simply dematerializes like a bad transporter accident. It will be pretty hit or miss, especially if you are using webmail but even if you aren’t.

AllPeers Torrents Example

In the discussion with Asa, the things that a proposed “messaging center” application would need to do would be:

  1. Store and retrieve e-mail, whether webmail, pop3, or imap-based
  2. Store and retrieve instant messaging logs
  3. Store and retrieve Usenet news
  4. Store and retrieve files

Other aspects of it, with varying degrees of necessity, would be:

  1. Act as an IM client to all of the different IM networks (and perhaps IRC)
  2. Act as a peer to peer IM client
  3. Act as a peer to peer file sharer
  4. Act as a peer to peer e-mail client
  5. Act as a proxy for these services even if you want to use traditional IM, e-mail, etc. with existing clients, storing traffic locally.

The last point is especially relevant to me. Why do I need to send my e-mail to my friends through a series of servers if they are logged in right now and, in fact, I can see them in IM? You could just send them an instant message them but that medium lends itself to one or two lines of text and maybe you want to write a detailed e-mail or have a back and forth discussion by e-mail. You can do it by IM but why be strangled by the norms of the medium when e-mail is a well understood paradigm as well. If people were logged into some central service, whether an IM network or some other cloud service, there is no reason that they shouldn’t be able to e-mail, chat, or share files directly with one another. This also allows the the avoidance of storing files on servers (potentially compromised by many parties) between you and your friends and the use of simple encryption for the actual communication. This could make for a friendlier and more private Internet in many ways.

There is also the possibility of file storage. Right now, there are a number of free services that allow people to store a couple of gigabytes of files online (not to mention people who use their gmail account space to do the same thing). Why not unify these under one messaging client?

All of this largely constitutes thinking aloud but there is no reason why the exchanging of messages with friends or the sharing of other data needs to be limited by the popular paradigms in use. There is no reason to choose between either instant messaging or e-mail except that this is the way that things have been done up until now. There should be options that allow for more than this. I see XUL and the various Mozilla technologies, especially given their extensibility, as being uniquely placed to foster development in these areas. It may take someone with more vision than me and would obviously take quite a bit of coding but I think that this is an interesting space.

Perhaps I’m alone in these thoughts and most people are happy with the current models but I somehow doubt it. The question is how to work out a good design for such software that would actually fulfill the need, not be painful to use, and generally work.