Day: March 12, 2008

Yesterday I posted how to make a Web 2.0 E-mail client. Although a joke, some people kinda agreed that this is the future.

Let’s consider a few use cases and let me try to make a point about this:

When OpenMoko asked me about an E-mail client, they told me it would be nice if they could show the history of activity of a person when you clicked on a person in the contact application. This included phonecalls, chat sessions, text messages and therefore also E-mail.

If everything was Google, this would mean that the entire contact management would have to be done by Google. All the data the phone needs would have to be managed by Google. All your phonenumbers, all your calls, all of your history, every every everything would have to suddenly be managed by Google. Not by your personal phone, but by Google. The one big, the one, the gigantic, Google.

I’m sure Google’s employees who have stock options are now seeing little dollar signs in their eyes. Me personally, I don’t really like the idea.

The other option is using Google’s online APIs. That could work, but then suddenly another user of my software would want to use yahoo mail, an yet another would want to use Hotmail. And another would want to use Thismail and another Thatmail. As an application developer, I would have to learn to use all the existing online APIs, and worse, all future ones too. On top of that would these E-mail monopolies get quite a large portion of your privacy too (they can easily log all the activity that you create on their server while using your phone).

Let’s try another example. Back when I was working as a subcontractor for technology companies, I remember not having the permission to and a firewall blocking me from using my E-mails from outside of the walls of the building of the company for whom I was doing contract working. And to be honest, that makes a lot of sense. I remember one of the companies forbidding the use of MSN because all the traffic was centralized at Microsoft’s servers. At first all Instant Messaging was forbidden, then they learned about XMPP (the point being: decentralization and guaranteed encryption).

You think these companies would allow me to receive their E-mails on Hotmail? On GMail? On Yahoo mail? Please keep in mind that often they are directly or indirectly competing with Microsoft, Google or Yahoo.

While everybody congratulated Jabber for decentralizing Instant Messaging, now a lot of people are telling E-mail client developers that the centralization and the monopolization of E-mail by Hotmail, Yahoo mail and GMail is a good thing.

That kinda doesn’t make a lot of sense. Does it? Anyway, I don’t think that their black and white point of view is realistic. GMail is a good service, but let us make them compete. If we don’t, nothing guarantees us that Google will keep playing nice.

I’m not one of those religious conspiracists but we’re talking here about possible privacy abuse and security concerns. These are real concerns that companies have and serious barriers to the migration of E-mail to one entity. They are among the reasons why E-mail will be decentralized and why GMail wont ever be the single solution for E-mail. No matter how many Web 2.0 enthusiasts start blogging.

It’s simply not black and white.