[FoRK] The death of email?

[Stephen D. Williams]

Eugen Leitl wrote:
> 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?
>   
No!  Not necessarily.  Perhaps that is a lower barrier to entry path in 
many cases, but the real world is pretty inefficient in a lot of ways.  
A while back I saw a work-oriented community and presence application 
that forced you to navigate a building to rooms to hold meetings.  Duh.  
Maybe for 5 year olds.  Not that there shouldn't be any physical 
grounding, as SL is evidence, but there has to be a much more efficient 
capability for the most part.
>   
> ...
>> 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. 
>   
For some purposes, sure.
>  
>   
>> 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.
>   
I was always a geek.  But I also became a non-geek.  I added personality 
traits rather than switch to a different also-narrow type.  Somehow the 
cultural language confuses that.
> ...
>> <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.
>   
My email is buried in 10-50MB/day of spam cover traffic...  Good luck 
with that.  I have 5 TB of data on or under my desk.  My servers are all 
2-5Kmiles from each other.  And if I did have something I cared to hide, 
it would take some doing to find it.

...

sdw

-- 
swilliams at hpti.com http://www.hpti.com Per: sdw at lig.net http://sdw.st
Stephen D. Williams 703-371-9362C 703-995-0407Fax 94043 AIM: sdw