> How much hype is there in this press release from eGroups?
that's about all there is in it.
> The predictions about e-mail communications are interesting. Presumably the
> claim is that the ability to send a typed message with your logal or photo
> will become a favourite way of communicating in the US, and will be simpler
> than the web. Presumably voice recognition would make this even friendlier.
nah. there are lots of 'e-card' attachment systems, but they're mostly a bust. voice recognition is too hefty for what's basic- ally an input problem, which isn't necessarily a *text* input problem. most people would rather bark simplistic comands into a smart cellphone (e.g., 'ESPN! NBA! LAKERS!' gets you a game score over a dumbed-down web page) than compose letters into a klunky laptop--and the difference between speech-recognition that *you* conform to and speech-recognition software that con- forms to you is BIG. desktops are getting faster, but so what? laptops are catching up with desktops, but so what? the growth area is cheap palmtops with cheap special-purpose modules. which is screwing software vendors, btw, because people don't like to spend $300 on a computer and $200 on a program.
> In Britain, BT at last is going to introduce lower connection charges for
> the internet, although not the free local calls many subscribers have in
> the US.
heh, yeah, BT's promises...
> The eGroups press-release also looks an interesting description of
> something that started of as an internet cooperative aiming to get
> advertising and investment. Now the process of centralization of capital is
> under way. But how much hype?
after the web-fueled hype--or, more accurately, graphic browser- fueled hype--of late '94 / early '95 settled, a lot of industry talk turned back toward the idea that 'email is the killer app.' but the IT crowd doesn't like it, because there are hardly any toeholds in email for making money: its bandwidth needs are al- most nill, it requires little setup and maintenance, it relies on protocols that are necessarily open at every level (because clients and servers have to interoperate without mangling email), and 'users' don't like to switch between clients, partly because doing so requires manually manipulating local files (mailboxes, addressbooks, etc.).
the fate of eudora is an exemplary tale: it was a solid freeware client until qualcomm bought it up in order to 'converge' email with their specialty (telephony), but the gewgaws they tried to add--voice attachments--flopped. since then, most of the basic innovations in clients have been augmenting flat ASCII with HTML and 'enriched text' shite. they've added lots of nice stuff, but tweaking client software just isn't big business; and the mail- server qualcomm bought, AIMS (now EIMS), has stiff competition that's free for many more OSes than EIMS runs on
there are structural reasons, too, which restrain the development of email, ranging from disparate contexts (list-owners invariably squash attachments on practical grounds) and technical boundaries (like AOL's no doubt intentionally broken gateways, which are leg- endary for mangling stuff), the persistence of shell accounts in isntitutions, where people use user-gnarly and enrichment-hating mailers like pine, elm, and [say it with feeling] mutt.
the numbers the egroups/onelist PR bandies around seem dubious, much like the '50 million users' (i.e., 25 million abandoned ac- counts) hotmail claims. they're an 'exploder' service, so it's not very suprising that they can claim big numbers: any incoming mail will get spewed out at dozens or hundreds of other people. but so what? cloning such a service is trivial: a perl archive like CPAN probably has a set of egroupish scripts--~30 seconds to download, 15 minutes to configure under a free OS like redhat, which comes with sendmail running be default. heh: some 'emerging category.' their business is distribution to clients they don't control, so they can't even promise advertising--unless they start sticking ads into every email, which will bring about their fast 'demergence.'
the only thing they *can* promise is a hefty database of addresses tied to users' interests, which is *prime* data-mining territory. it's also why, if you give a whit for anything approaching privacy, you'd do well indeed to stay the hell away from them.
my guess is that megacorps didn't want to buy either egroups or onelist because they were heavy competitors in a pretty lame field; by merging, they become much more attractive, but mostly as a front- end for gathering seriously scary psychographic data on users.
cheers, t