Neil Hopcroft

A digital misfit

The golden age of the internet

It would seem we are entering a new age of global communication. Today is the first day I have considered giving up on email as a useful communication mechanism, I had expected the MyDoom storm to calm and everything to return to normal. This has yet to happen. September just got worse [0].

Email is dead.

This couldn’t happen at a worse time for me. I know I’ve not been very good at responding lately (busy busy busy, more information later) but it has been one of my two main lifelines to civilisation. Without it I will feel isolated, distant.

What next?

Livejournal is an interesting community, but it gives very much a us-and-them divide, where those of us who are members communicate easily with each other while those who are not [1] can read but not really interact, voyuers. This leads to two tiers of friendship – something I’m uncomfortable with.

Orkut is another nice concept, but, as yet, is still too immature to really be that much use. Once they have implemented a sensible aggregation for community posts, the concept of communities as friends, better categorisation of communities, and a whole bunch of other tweaks and nicities it has potential to be a thriving community.

Merging these two, somehow, could make an extremely valuable resource. Perhaps with a Wiki connection too. Maybe this could be structured as a meta-site which connects an LJ profile with an Orkut profile and lays the two out into a single, simple page.

Beyond that, though, where do we go next? Am I the only one who is considering abandoning email? Or does everyone else already live without it and its just that I never noticed because I was too busy deleting copies of MyDoom? Does anyone have any ideas about other community sites, either real or not-yet-real?

[0] The year September never ended – 1994 or something, iirc, I wasn’t there at the time
[1] Why not?


Categories: Memories.

/ 20 Comments

20 comments

  1. zoo_music_girl

    I couldn’t do my job without email, well I suppose I’d find a way, but it would be very awkward and take twice as long to do anything.

    I still use emails in private too. Graham and I bounce 2 or 3 ongoing emails at a time, mostly rubbish but it keeps us in contact, maybe between 10 and 20 a day, depending how busy I am at work, fewer at weekends. I keep up with old friends who are not on Livejournal via email, I use it to send notes to my parents when I want them to have something in writing or send them a link or a file. I do not want my mother turning up on LJ!

    I do use LJ for nearly all the arranging of my social life, but that’s just because it’s a convenient way (for me) to arrange things. There’s no one I see regularly who doesn’t have a livejournal so it works for me.

    Email is far from dead for me though.

    Reply
      • neilh

        I was mainly affected by somebody in Oxford who caught it and had my email address in their address book – I’ve received something like 40 copies of the virus from them so far and theres no sign of it letting up. I don’t even know who it might be so can’t mail them to warn them. The oxgoth list has had quite a few too, and bounces from mimesweepers etc.

        Reply
  2. _lois_

    I hardly use email, I tend to speak to most of my friends via the likes of MSN etc. The only people I regularly communicate with via email is my mother.

    As for MyDoom, the only MyDoom emails I’ve received have come via the oxgoths mailing list. Unless some others have been deleted and put somewhere that I’ve not noticed.

    Reply
  3. hirez

    Email is not dead and I’m not going to abandon the thing.

    It’s far too useful for that.

    I can barely get away at work with having a LJ tab open the whole time. I can’t/won’t use ‘web-boards’ because all the UIs are FUCKING AWFUL and look like some colourblind crackmonkey took a swift glance at an ANSI-colo(u)r BBS in 1988 and decided that’s how it would be done for ever more.

    If there’s some kind of diaspora and people end up spread across yea-many friendster-alikes (I remain entirely unconvinced about the utility of Orkut) that can’t/won’t do some flavour of aggregating, then the world will be a poorer place.

    [I tend to think that the various RSS factions have carefully and methodically shot themselves in their feet in exactly the same manner as the proprietry unix vendors of the early 90s. I care, in an abstract, invented-at-HP-so-clearly-good manner about whichever version of RSS is mostly RDF, but does any of it do anything useful? I mean, the FOAF gugna could vaguely work as a grot-level liveorkutster, but I’m not best interested in pissing with the raw markup. That’s what the Gustavs are for. ]

    Personally, I’ve not been at all bothered with Mydoom. Other than the hassle of sweeping out the reports from the AV rig every morning and a minor tuning wobble yesterday that caused the mail-queue to get a bit long for a period.

    Perhaps it’s less ’email is dead’ and more ‘hopeless ISPs are dead’?

    Reply
    • neilh

      Agreed, the Balkanisation of the community market is hardly helping it.

      I suppose my annoyance stems from the bandwidth limits I have – downloading megabytes over the mobile network costs me real money, only to find that its junk.

      Reply
    • neilh

      if [header] contains “cpc3-oxfd2-4-0-cust247.oxfd.cable.ntl.com” => virus

      Is being quite effective at the moment, and dropped 50% of todays mail into the bin. However, I’m stuck on the end of a mobile link and don’t really want to have to download 400k of useless code that I’ve seen before on a daily basis.

      A bit of spam I wouldn’t mind, but spammers have now harvested a private (non-web-published, given only to people who send real emails) address from the virus messages so I will have to change that.

      Reply
  5. venta

    not really any reason other than hassle for people not to have an LJ account

    Er, maybe they just don’t want one ? LJ is far from perfect, and is not a particularly nice interface to use (a) in general and (b) to organise social stuff.

    If I mail you to invite you to a party, then I know that (on the whole) you will at least see the invite. If I post a party invite on my LJ, then I rely on you checking regularly, and I have no way of guaranteeing that you’ll see it.

    Reply
  6. neilh

    Until MyDoom all of my spam arrived on two easily filtered addresses (neil.hopcroft@mathengine.com and neil-cv@hopcroft.org.uk – both freely available on the web), I’d trawl through those folders every couple of weeks just to make sure I hadn’t missed anything important. This can be done offline to prevent trackers.

    In the last two weeks my other main addresses have received first a considerable number of copies of MyDoom, then spam. I’ll have to create a new mail address.

    Sure, Eudora isn’t the greatest client, but it is a good deal more stable than Mozilla (I’m running 1.0 here)…I don’t want an unreliable mail client. I can’t really upgrade since my machine is bursting already (only 128Mb on this chunky old laptop, so I’m swapping considerably once I’ve got a mail client and web browser open)

    Reply
  7. hirez

    [ Shrug ]

    I’ve used and liked Eudora since version whatever-was-current-when-we-started-the-ISP. And indeed still use it in ‘classic mode’. It works the way I like, doesn’t blow up and reads and writes Berkeley-format. The search/index facilities in V6 are really rather splendid, given it’s got an eight year mail archive to trawl through.

    I guess it’s because I use my email-pile as a sort-of diary – it’s a log of what was going on in my life untainted by editorialising or nostalgia – that I’m ultra-conservative when it comes to changing the tools. Nothing else I’ve seen (Modulo Kmail on my BSD box) offers enough bell and whistle to make a change worthwhile.

    And I think that’s most of the reason that I’ll not abandon email for this new-fangled web-thing without a bitter and protracted fight. Hell, I still won’t be doing with any sort of markup in email.

    Reply
    • neilh

      markup in email
      Gods, not long ago one of my colleagues asked me to reformat one of my emails using Excel….what is wrong with these people? Its like they’ve never used a VT100 or something?

      Reply
  9. Anonymous

    The Tyranny of INTERACTION

    Email is great – mainly misunderstood – SMTP is majorly flawed by lack of authentication and end to end identity management (in most configurations – and they stay that way because people don’t want the hassle). Lets face it SMTP is a good transport protocol – and the filters (such as only recieving S-Mime or PGP have been there years – with few takers) Then again do you really want everyone always knowing who you are – yes it’s polite but sometimes being rude just suits… Sometimes anon messages are necessary.

    A comment:
    Livejournal is an interesting community, but it gives very much a us-and-them divide, where those of us who are members communicate easily with each other while those who are not [1] can read but not really interact, voyuers. This leads to two tiers of friendship – something I’m uncomfortable with.

    Understandably I can agree with you, thankfully your life is not one that people may perv over (hope you don’t take this the wrong way) – unlike many online journals. I worry more about the lack of the two way process that is interaction – unlike Instant Messaging or email… This means that info comes out, and you only hear the comments on your stories (unless we all want to be as open as you are… and run our own live journals). I only hope it doesn’t feel lonely not having feedback…

    [1] Why not?

    Too lazy

    Smiff (see anon doesn’t have to mean anon)

    Reply
    • neilh

      Re: The Tyranny of OVEREACTION

      Sure, I like anonymity for some things, where I am in control of exposure of my identity – the shop from which I buy alcohol (not that I do much…) doesn’t need to know my name, just that I am over 18. The problem comes where there is abuse of anonymity, SMTP makes such abuse trivial…sure filtering is possible but the filters need to live somewhere, and, for them to be of use to me, to be under my direct control. (there are sidechannels in the spam of some of the high traffic lists I have, in the past, been subscribed to, I wouldn’t want to lose those channels to an overenthusiastic ISP)

      I don’t write this stuff for the feedback, its more a means of contact. Aggregation is of more value to me than publishing details of my life – oddly there are some people who want to read it, thats their call, its (nearly) all public so theres little to be missed if you’re not a part of the community but the community thrives on the distinction between the haves and the havenots.

      Reply

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