Ben, a very smart fellow Cantabrian who’s blogging up a storm about SaaS lately suggests my prediction of 5-10 years of useful life left in the standard email platform might be a little er, optimistic. Perhaps. But we live not just in interesting times, but accelerating times. Things change faster than they once did. I’ll stick by my aggressive prediction because I know I’ve been vague enough about what I’m really predicting to get away with it.

There are essentially two reasons I suggested that email as we know it, ie as based on SMTP/POP3/IMAP, will be gradually replaced with something better and browser/HTTP based. The first reason is that email is a significant source of pain for users and even worse for systems administrators. The second reason is that the existing plethora of clients, servers and gateway applications that deal with email means that it’s more or less impossible to make any significant upgrades across the ecosystem.

Ok, just looking at the pains for users, here are some things that are wrong with email at the moment. The list of pains for the poor benighted sysadmins is just as long, but I just don’t have time right now (and may not have time for weeks, already wasted too much time on this really, Interclue really needs 150% of my attention at the moment)

Security – it’s too much hassle, and most people just can’t be bothered. Microsoft, for some unknown reason, doesn’t want Outlook to have PGP, most PGP/GPG solutions for Windows are either flaky or a pain to set up, and they’re not all compatible with eachother. Alternative mail security solutions exist but aren’t as common and are probably just as hard to set up.

File Attachments - The brokeness of email attachments has led to about a bazillion online services that try to make this bit easier.

Confirmations – you can ask for a confirmation that someone’s read a bit of mail, but they don’t have to send it. Frankly I’d just like a confirmation that they *got* the mail and it didn’t end up in a spam/virus filter somewhere.

Lock-ins – using your ISP’s provided email address locks you into that ISP, because they don’t want to risk losing emails from long lost friends. ISPs love this. Ditto hotmail/gmail/etc. Switching mail clients can be just as much of a pain due to the problems of getting all your mail archives in one place so you can search them.

Mobile email – a pain, and remarkably inconsistent. Email from a friend of mine in the UK will usually end up in my spam filter because it has some unusual stuff in the headers or whatever.

“Rich” email – if you use HTML in mail it can trigger spam filters, and you are less able to rely on it getting to the other end. To make matters worse (well, actually there are pros and cons) Outlook 2007 changed the layout engine it uses for rendering HTML mail, to something more secure but it increases the difficulty of getting something in the right format.

Viruses – Existing email protocols make it to easy for them to spread – for instance by allowing them to fake the sender header so that you have no idea who sent you the virus.

Spam – The problems regarding spam, well, you could write a book on them. Sure, if you want people to be able to contact people who aren’t already on their list of contacts, or you want the ability to contact people anonymously, then there will always be spam, but existing email protocols and practices just make it way too easy.

Antispam – Almost as irritating as spam is all the problems that can result from the security measures taken by various users and systems to stop spam from getting in, which often get in the way of legitimate email as well.

Depending on the situation you’re in, you might also have trouble with Search, Archiving, Backups, Filtering, File corruption, Software Updates, Virus Checkers…there are a lot of things that can go wrong or were designed wrong with desktop email clients. Some webmail clients are just as bad. I’ll save them for another post.

I have a pile of MoCo bloggers in my feed reader, and I’ve noticed that most of the chatter around the call to action that inspired my post seems to be about what they’re going to do with Thunderbird and why. Only Myk appears to have picked up the thread of building “something better”. But I suspect the seed has been planted and we shall see more of this particular meme.

I think this might herald the beginning of the end. The CEO of Mozilla corporation declared that it was time for Thunderbird, their free desktop mail client, and one of the best out there, to find its own way, so that Mozilla could increase its focus on Firefox and “the open web”.

The venerable communications tool known as “e-mail”, the Internet’s original “Killer App”, is broken, and probably needs to die. At the very least, it needs to evolve, and it might be *too hard* to evolve it, we might be better off coming up with a replacement and a migration strategy. Actually, I think I might even have the beginnings of such in my head from a brainstorm the other night, but it’s competing with a few other things to get out of there right now. Oh and by “evolve” I certainly do not mean this.

Hence, a prediction: Within 5-10 years what you and I know today as “e-mail” will be where usenet is today – a communications platform still loved by a few aficionados, still distributed by many ISPs, but mostly supplanted by web based systems with richer interactive possibilities and fewer opportunities for spammers to gum up the works.

I met a few Mozilla Folk while at Kiwi Foo camp. It struck me that they were all very much Alphageeks, wicked smart, and on top of their game. The Kiwis were Roc, giving talks on the future of the Firefox layout manager and reinventing the debugger as a side project, and Ben, who has mostly moved onto new projects with his new employer, and I particularly liked Asa, who thinks and talks about Mozilla and the Open Web at a meta-level far above the average technical evangelist.

On the other hand, I might just be flattering myself by saying that the MozCorp people are brilliant, because they usually seem to think the same way I do about stuff, most notably about the increasing importance of the web as a platform and the role of Firefox in evolving that ecosystem and keeping it open.

More thoughts on this later…but here are a few links:

From Web Worker daily, who disagrees with me.

From a Seamonkey developer, pondering that this is the second time Mozilla Corporation has attempted to reduce the importance of email.

And thoughts from one of the two key developers of Thunderbird.

And finally a quote from Tim O’Rielly: “Are we moving into a world where Windows, Mac OS X and Linux are just device drivers for Firefox?”

I spent the weekend inside or outside various neo-gothic landmark buildings in Christchurch with 150 other brave medieval re-enactors from around Australasia, all wearing the warmest woolen garb in our pre-17th Century wardrobe, and gosh did we need it at times. The event was the coronation of a new King and Queen or Lochac.

I belong to a worldwide group known as the “Society for Creative Anachronism“, which has something like 100,000 people involved globally. It’s the largest reenactment society in the world, probably because it’s very non-specific and inclusive – any attempt at pre-17th century costume is ok. Some people take it very seriously and dedicate a significant portion of any given week to going along to weekly meetings to discuss the finer points of 16th Century German Frocks, 14th century English turnshoe construction, or whatever currently interests them. Or, like me, some folks just turn up to a few events a year to catch up with everyone and try to forget about the real world for a bit.

There was a “Queens Champion” tournament on Sunday. As martial arts go, SCA combat is probably about the world’s most inconsistent, and yet somehow it all works out and has become quite popular. It’s all based on an honour system – you get walloped with a bit of rattan cane that somehow slipped past your defenses, and you have to figure out if, had that been a real weapon (sword, mace, spear, whatever), whether it would have maimed or killed you. If you lose a leg, you drop to your knees and keep on fighting. Loose an arm and you typically stop the action briefly to put the now useless limb behind your back, and in a tournament your opponent will give you time to change to your other hand if you just lost your swordarm.

The inconsistency comes because everyone has a slightly different idea of how hard is hard enough, is wearing differently constructed armour, using weapons of different sizes, shapes, and weight, and has a different repertoire of offensive and defensive technique – as opposed to most martial arts where the equipment is standardised, there are masters who teach novices the same set of techniques all around the world. In this shot, I’m the one in the foreground.

Well, nothing like launching a new product to discover how many things you were leaving “until after the launch”. And after the initial publicity burst (which I didn’t really do enough of anyway), they all assaulted me at once. But I’m beginning to get back on top of it. I even managed to tidy up my desk, which was covered in stuff sitting waiting to pounce on my valuable attention stream when I looked away from the screen.

So I piled it all up to process it, GTD style. Didn’t look too bad at first.

The problem was I found that my filing system had gotten in a bit of dissaray during the rush of the last few months, so that pile stayed about the same size for quite a while as I added stuff from my files to the top as fast as I was creating new ones to file stuff in.

But it’s done now. This is one of four drawers. Everything alphabetical within 5-6 major groupings. By the end of the process it was really easy to find the right folder for stuff again.

I also created a tickler file for the first time, which consists of 43 folders – one for each day for the next month, and one for each month. Business Pundit suggests using them for the purpose of prompting a reviewing of decisions, which is not a bad idea. Might try that.

It feels good to have gotten that bit out of the way, and I’ve got a much better idea of all the things that need to be done. I really need to get back on the publicity wagon! Been trying to drum up a few reviews from the Mozillazine crowd to get us out of the AMO Sandbox, that’s also a priority. On the whole they seem to really like it but not many of them have posted reviews yet. Will be posting about how to access the AMO Sandbox and post a review over at the Interclue Blog shortly.

Go check out the website.

Incredible thanks to both Karl and John for their long efforts, and everyone I’ve mentioned on the credits page for making Interclue possible.

I had a great chat with Jon Udell last night. I noticed on his blog that he was coming to Wellington and left a note for him to get in touch if he was coming to Christchurch. He emailed me to say he was heading over here that very day! Bizzarely, the first I ever heard of the GOVIS conference he was keynoting at was via his blog post, if I’d found out about it earlier I would have been there, brandishing Interclue. Looks like there were some really interesting presentations there.

Among other things, we talked about how the internet is transforming education, and I mentioned that I’d spotted a video with some fantastic stats a while back that was originally designed to help educators understand what they were up against, and that I’d blog about it. He’ll probably recognise it when he sees it. But as JP mentioned recently, there are still a lot of other people out there who haven’t seen this one, and they really should.

Some background and references for the statistics.

He mentioned the real thing scaring American Universities was that soon more parents were going to start auditing podcasts from their kid’s lecturers to see if this education they were paying for was actually worth $x/minute!

We also chatted about his new job a bit. He said he went to Microsoft with a mission to help more people get value from the power of technology – to spend some time helping out on the trailing edge after so many years on the bleeding edge. I told him I thought Microsoft was showing pleasing signs of trying to build more value from co-operation than competition – he said Microsoft was still competing plenty hard but they were continuing to move towards less destructive forms of competition.

Then I came home and saw this. Sigh…

If you’re a webgeek like me, you have probably figured out that we are living in some very interesting times right now. Microsoft and Sun made significant announcements and improvements to their new RIA platforms this month, and Sun has released their new JavaFX Script (ok, now really, who came up with that name?)

Given that we’re also about to take the covers off Interclue May 2007 is likely to go down as a month of intriguing events for the future of the web. (BTW feel free to ping me if you want the password to the site, otherwise, add me to your feed reader and stay tuned for Wednesday)

So Silverlight wasn’t open source. Or at least, not in any significant fashion. The big reason #10 that Tim mentioned was in fact the inclusion of a cutdown CLR in Silverlight so that developers have access to a subset of .NET without needing the users to have installed the whole runtime environment on their machines – which is a big win for Silverlight given that the CLR does not have 100% penetration even on windows, let alone on the Mac.

But if it’s not open source, the Silverlight team must have another reason for thinking they have something that will compete with Flash/Flex/Apollo, Ajax, and XUL.

I think what it boils down to is that Silverlight is a way to give their existing developer base a way to migrate their .NET skillset, components, and tools onto the web. So it’s all very exciting if you’re a .NET developer, but less so for everyone else. I can see how it has a chance, because there will be a lot of windows developers feeling that windows applications just aren’t where it’s at these days, and Sliverlight gives them a migration path.

One wonders if this is what Sun has in mind with JavaFX. There isn’t any talk of a cut down JRE to be deployed where the full version isn’t installed, but they have said that there is “more to come” for JavaFX, so I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if this came about. And JavaFX is open source. GPL in fact, like almost everything Sun is doing these days. Which is pretty amazing when you think about it.

Arguably, it will work for Microsoft and Sun in the other direction as well – if web developers start using Silverlight / JavaFX and gaining an understanding of XAML or Swing, that will mean they’re more likely to use them for desktop or mobile versions of the same.

Despite the hype, neither Silverlight nor JavaFX will eclipse development with Flash, XUL, or the various Ajax libraries anytime soon, because ubiquity trumps functionality in an awful lot of cases. But there are certainly tasks for which they will be well suited, and with the massive developer and developer support teams of Microsoft and Sun involved, it seems likely that both these new platforms will grow a significant presence given time.

All this activity by major players has caused a bit of a ruckus in the Mozilla Community, with Chris Messina arguing that Mozilla should focus more on platform (ie XULRunner) development to counter these moves by other players, while Mitchell Baker (Mozilla CEO) among others, argued that the best course of action was to focus on the users rather than the developers, and keep pushing Firefox while it’s on a roll. I tend to agree with her, even though I have this really cool app idea I’d love us to build with XULRunner once our addons are launched and we get some funding (and more staff) for Interclue….

Pssst: Apparently the Mono project will attempt to port Silverlight to Linux.

Anyone who wants to check it out ahead of time, ping me for the password to the site if you haven’t got it already.

Interclue is a browser extension (for firefox currently, but for IE pretty soon) that helps you stay in flow while you’re surfing the net. It’s a great boon for knowledge workers, bloggers, and other heavy web users.

We’re probably not going to tell the world what it does before Wednesday, but:

• It’s free. No signup required either.
• It’s not spyware or adware.
• It takes about a minute to install and although it has many options it works great “out of the box” for most users.
• The learning curve is two minutes long. After that it starts saving you time.
• If it’s not for you, it uninstalls just as fast.

Something that flitted across my google reader lately was the top 10 reasons to consider using Silverlight, the new cross-platform Flash competitor from Microsoft. Reason number 10 was a mystery:  

“Ah… #10. I can’t reveal this yet – there’s a big surprise up our collective corporate sleeve that will be announced at MIX. I hate to hold back on you, but anticipation is part of the pleasure, as my mother used to tell me as a child when I was waiting impatiently for Christmas to come!”

Source: Tim Sneath : Introducing Microsoft Silverlight

Presumably, this can only mean Microsoft is open-sourcing large chunks of this new platform of theirs. No, seriously. It makes sense, they’re going up against Flash, and one of the only ways to compete against something that’s got wide market adoption and is ”free as in beer” is to release a competitor that’s ”free as in speech”. Having better features just won’t do it, when the opposition already owns the market. Microsoft has been trying to paint themselves as the less evil empire for a while now, so it just makes sense to build something major and open source it. Evolve or die, as they say, and they’ve well and truly given up claiming that Open Source is just another word for communism.  They’ve even got a lab dedicated to interop with open source technologies,  blogging at Port 25.  

Anyway, the real question is: which bits will be open sourced, and what licence are they going to choose? If they want to have any credibility at all they’d better pick something OSI-approved. For style points, they should pick the MPL. I wonder what Mozcorp would make of that one…anyway, I expect my friends Mary and Simon will tell me I’m completely off base with this, but I thought I’d hang it out there just in case I’m right  

 BTW The answer to the question in the title, I suspect, is no. It’s probably not going to gain significant adoption vs Flash, even if it’s open source. But it will be interesting to watch.

Guy Kawasaki, who is a blogger/author that every startup CEO needs to read, seems to have fallen in love with The Turk. Maybe one of the companies he backs will actually find a good use for it.

Have you done a search and seen the jobs being offered? Most of them are simple SEO work – writing filler to wrap adsense around and confuse the search engines, or “voting up” something or other. And the payrates offered are atrocious.

Update: After marking up this screenshot. I figured out how to get a list without doing a search, just clicking on HITs, you can go here. There are only 193 “HITs” posted right now. None of them pay more than $5. That’s not even worth the time I took to make the screenshot, let alone the time I took to write this post. But, I guess I’m a startup CEO, not a starving third worlder! But frankly, anyone with a clue and with an internet connection knows that their time is worth more than this. BTW (obligatory plug) if you’ve got a clue and an internet connection (and Firefox), you really ought to try the Interclue Beta.

Essentially, it was an idea that sounded great and original and interesting and got Amazon a lot of attention when they released it, but it doesn’t seem to have gotten used in the way they might have hoped. I guess there are a lot of ideas like that. Maybe things will change, but I imagine that they’re looking at the lack of uptake and pondering that to make it worthwhile they would have to be doing 100x more business, so why bother when they’ve got so much else on. (note to self: finish post about Google Answers…)

But as for Amazon trying stuff non “book” related, I’m vastly more impressed with S3, EC2, SQS, etc than I am with Mturk. We are planning to migrate Interclue onto S3 and EC2, once we have launched (Soon! I promise!) and got some more investment underneath us. Amazon is a great company, doing great things.

Last minute thought: I wonder if there’ll be an upsurge in mturk uptake on the supply side after they start rolling out millions of OLPCs…