November 23, 2009 at 11:24Email will be forever, says Gmail author
“Email will not disappear. Probably never. Until robots kill us all, ”said Paul Buchheit, author of Gmail, co-founder of FriendFeed, and currently one of Facebook’s system programmers.
Paul Buckheit added that he had never tried Google Wave, however this does not diminish his confidence in the bright future of email.
The discussion about the prospects of e-mail, one of the oldest network technologies, was held as part of the live broadcast of RealTime CrunchUp , which was also attended by Rob Goldman, founder of Threadsy (a service for integrating email messages into social flows like twitter), and journalists from TechCrunch. All of them were unanimous in the fact that so far nothing threatened email.
Even in communication services like Twitter and Facebook, notifications are sent exactly by e-mail. For example, some people don’t understand how to use Google Wave if they don’t receive notifications about new messages in the mail. Buckheit said that he had never tried Google Wave at all, although, he grinned, the invite was somewhere in the mailbox.
People are simply not ready to live without e-mail. According to Buckheit, they will never be ready.
Paul Buckheit added that he had never tried Google Wave, however this does not diminish his confidence in the bright future of email.
The discussion about the prospects of e-mail, one of the oldest network technologies, was held as part of the live broadcast of RealTime CrunchUp , which was also attended by Rob Goldman, founder of Threadsy (a service for integrating email messages into social flows like twitter), and journalists from TechCrunch. All of them were unanimous in the fact that so far nothing threatened email.
Even in communication services like Twitter and Facebook, notifications are sent exactly by e-mail. For example, some people don’t understand how to use Google Wave if they don’t receive notifications about new messages in the mail. Buckheit said that he had never tried Google Wave at all, although, he grinned, the invite was somewhere in the mailbox.
People are simply not ready to live without e-mail. According to Buckheit, they will never be ready.