I can tell it has been a busy week when my blogging declines and the number of open browser tabs I maintain increases. One of those tabs was some rumination by David Berlind about whether it is time to redesign e-mail. The key motivation for that is spam, which reportedly is estimated to be some 90% of all e-mail traffic.
Basically, all it would take would be for Google, Microsoft, AOL, and Yahoo to make it happen and here’s why. Collectively, they represent more e-mail users than any other group of vendors out there. If they came to some agreements on standard technologies for fighting spam, the rest of the world would have no choice but to follow. Not only that, since they run the largest online e-mail services, killing spam off through a set of mutually agreed upon “standard†approaches would be good for their businesses given how the load on their systems might one day be lightened.
By this, I take David’s suggestion to be focused on universal filtering protocols—email would still look like email. As some of the comments in that thread suggest, spam is more a creation of political policy and use than some technical problem. However, it does bring up an interesting question about our current Internet tools: At what point is an overhaul needed?
The World Wide Web is just over a decade old. The majority of Internet users have only been online during the Bush Administration. Because of the speed of technology change and adoption, the ‘net tools are in a strange position of being both old and new, both established and innovative. They were created well before the Internet became as widespread as it is today, and perhaps under those constraints aren’t the best design for the current or future state of culture. What if the problems of spam and that ilk could be addressed through a radical redesign of our interfaces and underlying systems? Would such a redesign be considered a new invention or be recognizable as an iteration of something we use now?