It Had a Great Run?

In addition to writing away for his forthcoming book, The Future of the Internet — and How to Stop It, Berkman Center co-founder Jonathan Zittrain is now a guest blogger for the month of July over at Concurringopinions.com.

In his first post, he sounds the death knell of email.  He writes,

"...But this is a good time to point out something beyond the cat-and-mouse of spam-and-filter: email is dying.

Email is the last great 'shared hallucination' applications of the Internet. The Internet itself is a shared hallucination -- built to allow the routing of packets without any particular central coordination or backbone -- and first uses to which it was put are similarly able for anyone to step up to the plate and join. Internet Relay Chat can be done with anyone setting up a chat server; Usenet newsgroups -- what we know today as message boards and what dimly live on within Google Groups -- could be created by anyone, and their propagation would depend on the individual decision of each newsgroup server operator on whether to subscribe to it.

Newsgroups and IRC were overrun by spammers and crooks, and they have been subsumed by alternatives. There are still some people who use IRC for nostalgic purposes or because they're on very low bandwidth...Newsgroups appear like the walking dead themselves, with most of the conversations they hosted now carried on elsewhere...

So too goes email."

Professor Zittrain's full post teases out the issue more here, where you can also join the choir in responding to his thoughts.