[FoRK] The death of email?

[Eugen Leitl]

On Wed, Jan 23, 2008 at 04:38:48PM -0500, Luis Villa wrote:

> You have a funny definition of easy, but yes, I'll agree on feature rich.

Doesn't easy mean the one most looking the like the real world?
 
> I should have added (I thought it was assumed) that these were
> features that solved problems people have. College students have the

College students is a reasonably small demographic. Also, judging from
their online slime traces, (US) college students of today have very little
in common with (EU) university students of 1990s.

> problem of inviting people to parties and tracking RSVPs. Facebook

Aren's you supposed to know where parties happen, and crash those?
RSVPs? Isn't this something what stuffy old people use?

> solves that problem; email doesn't. The list of such features could be

I wonder why one would need email to throw parties. That's just completely 
mind-boggling. 

> very long.
> 
> Second Life doesn't solve any problems that anyone has.

I guess I'm not anyone. In not having problems to solve, I mean.
That's a small solace, at least.
 
> > Which has about 50 k simultaneous
> > users. WoW has some 10 MUsers, though I have no clue how many online
> > at the time. Somehow, I can't imagine spend a lot of time in Wow.
> 
> That sentence not complete.

This sentence no verb. Sure. Seriously, who here much over 30 has time
to burn in WoW?
 
> WoW (relative to SL) solves a problem- by providing goals and a
> storyline, it gives people something to *do* that is relatively
> mindless. SL says 'here is a pile of tools.' Unless you're one of the
> rare people who has a self-directed creative software itch, SL isn't
> solving your problem.

I thought those virtual worlds are the most interesting which were
open-ended, thus resembling life. 
 
> The evidence (at least so far from my 18 months back in
> college-mind-space) is that the geekier you are, the less likely you
> are to use facebook. Facebook is the anti-geeky; *everyone* in college
> uses it.

Never was a geek; but time sure have changed.
 
> > Maybe it's just me, but haven't the tools all gone to shit?
> 
> Which tools?

Whatever you use daily, observed over a period of 5-10 years. I'm particularly
annoyed with bleeding edge (admittedly, my fault, but Linux used to be highly
usable out of the box in time of floppy disk distros). Over there the window
just moved, after some 15 minutes (I'm not exaggerating) after the event. 
 
> <shrug> Your phone and your email are tapped too; you use them because

My phone is registered on the minister of the interior, all my emails
involving killing president Bush are encrypted. I make my own explosives
from scratch, and so is my GPS guidance and UTMS video remote control
and teledetonators.

> that is where the people are. In college, facewhat is where the people
> are.

It's a small, small world. And it's been a long time ago since I was ever
excited about persons. People, never.

-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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