Don Quixote’s Modern Quest
updated 6d ago
Don Quixote’s Modern Quest
- While email's continued evolution is significant, what it has retained from the old web sets it apart from the other pretty, convenient apps. Email is an open, interoperable protocol. Someone can use Google's service, spin up a server of her own, or send messages through Microsoft's enterprise software. And yet all of these people can communicate s... See more
from Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet by Alexis Madrigal
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- All this to say, email has soaked up many of the great things about the current web. It's pretty. It's convenient. Algorithms work over the raw feed to simplify the flow of information. Email, generally, is mobile-friendly and renders beautifully on all devices. These are the things that the current generation of web companies strive to accomplish.... See more
from Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet by Alexis Madrigal
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- He also brings up its implications in the modern tech ecosystem. The Facebooks, Googles, and Amazons are like panoptic overseers that can force legibility even on the most impenetrable, messy datastreams through machine learning algorithms and hyper-scale pattern recognition. The trade-off here may not be conscription (not yet anyway), but there is... See more
from Res Extensa #4: On Legibility — In Society, Tech, Organizations, and Cities by Coleman McCormick
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- Email is actually a tremendous, decentralized, open platform on which new, innovative things can and have been built. In that way, email represents a different model from the closed ecosystems we see proliferating across our computers and devices.
from Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet by Alexis Madrigal
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Famously, when Gmail came along, Google told us to stop trying to organize (and delete) our email and instead just rely on search to find what we’re looking for. Broadly I’d say that approach has worked well, and in the vast majority of cases, I err on the side of risking losing track of something later instead of spending the time to organize it n
... See morefrom The Folksonomy Edition by Colin Nagy
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- Email apps are good at being better. They've invented or popularized some of the most innovative ideas in software—even if they can’t always find a business model to match. And those features are what live on.
from Email is where new software features get invented. by Matthew Guay
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The internet is no omniscient library, but the parallels between Borges’ story are apparent. The web is a boundless compendium of information and data scattered across billions of pages—content, as we’ve loathed to call it. In this virtual information library, Google may be the closest thing we have to a librarian.
from The Future of Search by Terry Nguyen
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