Internet Perspectives

Is Email Dying?

Itamar Gilad — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 12:06:19 +0000

Electronic mail is as old as the Internet (actually more) and still going strong as one of its most useful and popular applications. Lately however bloggers are claiming it is inherently broken and perhaps even nearing end of life. Check out Jeff Atwood’s and Tantek Çelik’s excellent posts on this subject. Even if you disagree with the conclusion (Email = Efail) you may be in agreement with the reasoning behind it.

The main claim against email is that it doesn’t scale. If you get lots of email you know what this is about – email dominates your life. You spend every free moment clearing your inbox. A week-long no-email vacation invariably leaves you with an insurmountable mountain of unread messages. You have no time or patience for messages longer than 4 sentences – often those end up being flagged ‘For Follow-up’ or stored in a To-Do folder just to never be touched again. Perhaps you gave up entirely on reading all your email, in which case you are probably missing important information and aggravating those who write to you.

Actually this is not new. Productivity experts have drafted rules for effective email usage long ago. Senders are encouraged to write short, focused messages, to avoid implied negative tones and to send to the smallest group possible. Email readers should strict processing to fixed times in the day and have their email client switched off at all other times (good luck with that). Reading should be systematic, action-driven and should utilize the tools provided by email programs (rules, flags, colors, folders etc.). From experience it’s not as easy as it sounds, and at the end of the day you still end up with a ton of incoming messages. Why? Because we’re so used to sending email for everything. From personal correspondence to the weekly status letter, from jokes to resignation letters – email is the default communication tool in our box.

But must this be so? Well, we always had other means of inter-personal communication: telephone, instant-messaging, video conferencing and face-to-face meetings. The Internet makes those cheaper and more available, however they demand immediate attention from the other participants and are liable to disrupt them, so we often choose to fallback to email. There are advantages to these media, though: they are conversational and interactive and allow for nuances that email does not. Just as important, and this may be my own subjective feeling, engaging in spoken conversation is often easier and quicker than expressing one’s thoughts in writing and trying to interpret other people’s written messages.

Today email faces even more competition. Web-based services such as wikis, blogs, micro-blogs (e.g. Twitter) and activity-streams (e.g. Facebook, FriendFeed) offer some important advantages over email: 1) Only those who choose to read/receive them will, hence less inbox-load. 2) They’re intended for group communication and are better at it than email. 3) Anything you post gets stored (potentially forever) in a server on the Web or in the corporate intranet and will thus become searchable and reusable in future. Some have already labeled those email 2.0.

So actually we have an array of inter-personal communication tools at our disposal. This may be shown like this:

So email is not dying – it’s the concept of “email for everything” that’s losing ground. Email is finding its place in a spectrum of means for inter-personal communication. A good communicator will thus not automatically use email for every purpose. Instead of sending weekly status mail she will setup a blog. Complex multi-party discussions will not be held over email, but rather in a Wiki, a phone conference, a video conference or a meeting. Funny clips and other Web findings will be posted as updates in a personal activity stream. So, the next time you’re about to hit that Send button – think again. Unless of course if it is to forward this post.

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A Much Needed Overhaul

Itamar Gilad — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 08:08:19 +0000

If the Internet was a car it’d be a 1974 pickup fitted with a 900 horse-power engine, 40″ tires and state-of-the-art suspension. No airbags, anti-lock breaking system, cruise control or satellite navigation, though. In fact none of the conveniences and safety features you’d expect in a modern-day car. Yeah, it goes extremely fast and is great fun to ride, but it’s not really modern or safe and you just never know when it will choke-up on you.

TCP/IP, the core technology of the Internet, was developed in the mid 1970s and early 1980s when the world of computer communications was orders of magnitude simpler. The first wide-area-network to connect Internet computers ran at speeds of 56kilobit/second, roughly 1/30 of an entry-level home broadband connection today. It serviced a closed community of computers and users that were all fully trustworthy. Opening the Internet to commercial use in the late 80s signaled a dramatic change - demand drove exponential growth in number of computers, networks, applications. Today as many as 1.5bl people use the Internet regualrily and not all of them Good Samaritans. Throughout this transformation TCP/IP (with some modifications and reinforcements), remained the “chassis” of the Internet, a tribute to the extraordinary level of engineering that went into it. Still some capabilities that were not deemed necessary or even conceived 35 years ago, the equivalent of today’s airbags and ABS, are still missing today. Some of these matter a lot.

Security – The truth is plain as it is painful – the Internet is a very, very dangerous place. Any computer or device connected to it is exposed to attacks from malicious hackers who may (among other things) steal information, corrupt data, disable services or just turn it into their drone. Things are so bad that some researchers aim to start a whole new Internet built with security in mind. Much of this is due to software bugs, but the lack of inherent security in Internet protocols has made hackers’ lives that much easier. There’s nothing in TCP/IP preventing an anonymous computer form communicating with your PC, Smartphone or IP phone. Consequentially we had to barricade behind layers of protection systems such as firewalls, which prohibit all but the “safest” comunication. In other words we’re taking that vamped-up ‘74 monster-pickup only to the nearby shopping center and only while wearing a full body armor and a crash helmet.

Addressing – Internet addresses (the ones that look like this: 111.22.3.4) are a limited resource which means there aren’t enough to go around. In theory there are about 4 billion of them, but demand is actually larger . Think of all the computers out there, now add to that all mobile phones, PDAs, ebook-readers, cameras and other soon-to-be -connected devices. Missallocation in the early days aggravated the problem – some countries have fewer addresses allocated to them than some USA universities. Internet service providers and organizations feel the pain as it’s getting harder to obtain new address blocks. Pain killers had to be invented. Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR) allows allocating smaller address blocks, thus improving utilization. Network Address Translation (NAT) magically transforms one real address, AKA Public address, it into roughly 65,000 virtual and hidden ones known as Private addresses. These remedies keep the Internet going, but nothing comes for free. CIDR made fouting, one of the core functions of the Internet, more complex and taxing. NAT had a worse effect – the loss of transparency.

Transparency – In the early days of the Internet any computer could communicate with any computer. The Internet was transparent. It isn’t anymore. The combination of network address translation and restrictive security makes most computers hidden and inacessible from the outside world. This severly limits Internet applications that rely on communication between peer computers. IP telephony and video conferencing are two examples, but there are others, possibly ones which never happened because of this. More workarounds had to be developed. More stuff got broken in the process. So it goes.

Multicast - The Internet has many great applications, but broadcast TV is not one of them yet. As Mark Cuban explains in his post “The Great Internet Video Lie” you just can’t take a 24/7 television channel (or the Superbowl broadcast for that matter) and transmit it to millions of viewers over the Internet. The key issue is its lack of end-to-end broadcast capability in the Internet, which means there is no simple and cheap way to send the same information to many computers simultanously. Such a capability, known as Mutlicast, could be usefull for video, music, file-sharing, mutiparty games and many others.

Quality of Service and Mobility – I won’t go into these now as they’re not major showstoppers yet. That may change soon, though, so consider this a placeholder for a later version of this post.

So, you may ask, if things are that bad why isn’t anyone doing anything about it? Well someone has. The Internet community is well aware of all of these issues and has been for years. In fact there are already agreed-upon solutions that enhance/retrofit TCP/IP. They have catchy names like IPv6, MBGP, IPSec and RSVP, but perhpas more important they’re already standardized, and better yet, many of the are already incorportaed into networking gear and operating systems. The computer you’re using to read this post probably has many of these built into its networking software. So why aren’t they in use? Mostly because network operators and service providers, both private and public, don’t enable them in their systems. Reasons include costs, effort, lack of know-how, fear of service disruption and that old truism “If it ain’t (badly) broken don’t fix it.” Most of all there’s still no major business incentive to justify the investment. Deplyments are rolled out, but at a very slow rate. In the mean time we’re left using aging technology that’s truly a piece of engineering marvel, but does not allow the Internet to become as great and powerful as it ought to be. One of these days we’ll have to take that ol’ Internet to the garage for a major overhaul.

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What is the Internet Anyway?

Itamar Gilad — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 06:38:42 +0000

An odd question, right? How can anyone not know what the Internet is?

Well, I encourage you to go ahead and ask people around you. You’ll find that pretty much everyone is confident they know, but surprisingly few even come close. The Internet is very accessible and deceptively easy to use. So much so that we just intuitively “know” what it is, even when we don’t.

Here are some of the common answers I encountered:

The thing you surf – this is by far the most popular perception of the Internet. I even heard this from people with Internet-related jobs. Still, it is plain wrong. If there was such a thing as an Internet Drivers License this answer would undoubtedly make you flunk the test. The thing you surf is the Web, which is completely different from the Internet (more on this below).
A huge network – Closer, but still dead wrong. The Internet is not a type of network.
A series of tubes – I didn’t personally hear this gem – a US senator said it in a 2006 debate over network neutrality. This may have been just an analogy, but that doesn’t make it any more correct. It just goes to show that even the people passing laws about the Internet don’t always understand it.
A network of networks – this is kind of the common “trivia answer” which puzzle-solvers and alike pull out. It’s right in a very general sense, but in my opinion it’s pretty far from actually capturing the essence of the Internet.

So here’s how I would explain what is the Internet. I’m going to do it in two parts.

1. An Information Superhighway.

I know “Information Superhighway” is a cliché, but it’s a good one in my opinion, so here goes. Consider computers, mobile phones and other Internet-connected devices as houses, and the networks to which they connect (home networks, ISP networks, mobile networks, corporate networks and so on) as towns and cities. The Internet will then be a huge grid of highways that interconnects all the towns and cities across the globe. Cars and trucks driving through it represent information sent across the Internet. Unlike any real-world highway, though, this one lets you drive non-stop form from any place to any place. Similarly a computer connected to the Internet anywhere in the world can exchange information directly with any other computer connected to it, no matter where it is (security restrictions allowing). In other words the Internet is a global, public, infrastructure for computer communication.

The cloud is a common way of depicting the Internet

I guess many of you are saying now “Duh. I knew that”. Okay then wait for part 2. But first here’s another anecdote.

1.5 “The Internets”

In a 2004 elections debate George W. Bush said he “Hears rumors on the Internets” Yes, Internets, in plural. This made for some good comedy as everyone knows there’s in only one Internet. Or is there? Interestingly, Bush (who of course went on to win the elections) was not all together wrong – there are indeed multiple internets. Many of them in fact. The word internet with lower-case ‘i’ refers to a collection of computers and networks connected using the Internet Protocol (IP) and Internet routers. The global public internet is of course the biggest and most important instance, which is why it got the distinction of being called The Internet (with capital ‘I’), but it’s not the only one by any means. Most medium-large organizations have a private internet of their own that connects internal computers and servers. Those are often called intranets, but in many respects they are not unlike the global Internet. There are also a number of national and international internets out there. Internet2 in the USA and GEANT2 in Europe are two academic internets connecting universities and research institutes across the world. It’s reasonable to assume that the US armed forces have their own private global internet. So Bush could claim he heard “those rumors”, say, on the Internet and on Internet2, although I doubt that’s what actually happened.

Okay, on to part 2.

2. Communication Layer

This one is a favorite among engineers and other techie types. We love to make a long convoluted thing of it. I’m going to give you the simplified version.

Having a global, public infrastructure for computer communication is neat, but just on its own it does little good. Information services need to be built on top of it to make it really useful. Luckily many were: The Web, Email, File sharing , IP telephony, Internet video and Instant messaging are some of the types of services available today. They are also called Internet Applications because they apply Internet capabilities to the purposes of the service. This is where most of the confusion about the nature of the Internet stems from. Many see the applications (especially the Web) and the infrastructure as one and the same. Technology nit-picks like me, however, think of them as of two different things, one layered on top of the other:

Now strictly speaking the Internet is not a layer of communication – I’m over-abstracting here a bit. Still if you’re an Internet application developer this is a very useful way of looking at things. The Internet (and internets in general) are there for you to use them. They do things on behalf of your application such as send information between computers, locate computers and other stuff. You needn’t worry about those – the Internet will take care of them. You can concentrate on building your service instead. The cool part is that the same ”communication layer” facilitates all types of applications, just like postal system facilitates personal correspondence, packages, mail-order catalogs and other uses.

So that’s my stab at explaining what the Internet is (at under a 1000 words). There are probably better explanations out there, but I hope this one will come in handy too. Let me know what you think.

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How to Improve Your Information Diet

Itamar Gilad — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 10:56:19 +0000

Nutrition seems to be in fashion these days. We go out of our way to cut on calories, cholesterol points and glycemic load. We try to eat the right nutrients and avoid the bad stuff. Still, food is not all we ingest. We also gorge on information: facts, news, updates, commentary, recommendations and so on. Should we be giving our informaiton diet the same amount of consideration?

Not unlike food, there’s a lot of information around these days, but quality varies. Some information is accurate, timely and objective, but a lot is not that great. Bias, misinformation, sensationalism, staleness, superficiality, over-processing and gravitation towards low common denominators are not uncommon. Tabloids and adverts may be the most extreme examples of pseudo-information or junk-information, but other, more “respectable” sources of factual data are also susceptible to these issues. News pieces, magazine articles, TV documentaries and nonfiction books are now pressured by Hollywoodian dogma to be more entertaining and less informative in hope of appealing to wider audiences. Thus the Darfur genocide turns out to be less news-worthy than the court cases of Michael Jackson and O.J. Simpson, How-To-Become-a-Millionaire-Easy books are more likely to find a publisher than a book about Alzheimer and documentaries that bluntly show one-sided views of the world are no longer frowned upon.

In the midst of this gradual decline one medium stands out as different and more resilient – the Internet. In my opinion it’s shaping up to be the stronghold of good, solid info. Here’s why:

Less about revenue and shareholders – Publishing on the Internet is (comparatively) cheap. Opening and running a personal blog or micro-blog costs close to nothing. Maintaining a popular site is much less expensive than running a newspaper or a TV station. Many sites, blogs, wikis, forums, social networks and discussion groups are not for profit. Thus the corporate pressure to compromise on quality in hope of improving the bottom line is much less there. True, a race for rating exists also in the Internet, but surprisingly (or not) the masses flock to good information, even when it’s comprehensive, complex and bluntly non-entertaining. For example Wikipedia is consistently ranked as one of the top 10 most-visited sites in the Web.
Choice – the Internet rejects walled-gardens. You may read an article in site A, decide it’s not good enough and so move on to site B, perhaps never to return. Ultimately if more users do the same site A will see its traffic dwindling. Unlike old media which limits you to the offering of information included in a TV package, newspaper or book, the Internet puts a universe of content at your fingertips. Competition for your attention is practically limitless, which motivates information providers to do better.
Democratic and Heterogeneous – unlike old media, in which a select few get to decide what to publish/broadcast and how, in the Internet anyone, professional or amateur, mainstream or fringe, can be heard. If you have a camcorder and a youTube account you can open your own TV channel. Blogs, personal sites and microblogs are just some of the ways you can post ideas, information and images online. Anyone can contribute to and edit Wikipedia articles. Social networks, forums, mailing lists and Q&A sites help people discuss topics and find information. Call it democratization of knowledge, social media or whatever, it’s there and it’s highly popular. This immense influx of voices does not guarantee quality of course, but when aggregated properly it can be a very powerful agent of good info. Wikipedia (yeah, I like this example a lot) melts its many contributions into quality articles. News aggregators such as Google News and TechMeme provide news coverage based on a multitude of articles, perspectives and reactions around each topic. Customer review sites collect the opinions of users and synthesize them into recommendations and scores. There are many other examples that show how a multitude of voices can create a balanced, well-informed view of things.
Current - whether it is news, weather, prices, product reviews, classified ads or any other type of information, you’ll always find the latest and most up-to-date info on the Internet. It is constantly updating. A news web page may change every few minutes as new stories break. A Wikipedia article may get updated days or even hours after new pertinent data is published. A blogger may post an article on the spot in response to an event. Microblogging services like Tweeter report of breaking news such plane crashes and terrorist attacks in real-time and ahead of the news media as users post text and pictures from their mobile phones.
Measured and Ranked – there are many information scoring and ranking systems in the Internet. Readers can often rate the usefulness/quality of information items and see what others thought. Blogs get ranked by their “authority”, which is the number of blogs that link to them. Search engines rank web pages based on different criteria including link-backs and content. Social bookmarking services such as Digg and Delicious allow users to collectively highlight good content. These mechanisms, largely non-existent in old media, mean that Internet content is continuously monitored and scored. The end result is that good, useful things bubble to the top while junk-info gets left in bottomless pits of Internet oblivion.
Specific - the Internet is infinitely large. Mainstream topics get a lot of coverage of course, but there’s room also for every specialized niches If you’re looking to renovate a 1967 Ford Mustang you can be sure there are forums, blogs and sites full of good, free, relevant information. Wondering which herbs would grow best your garden this time of year? No problem. The printer you bought five years ago is giving you trouble – someone probably had the same issue and posted a solution. And if you haven’t found what you’re looking for – start a conversation or a whole forum dedictaed to it, and people will join the discussion bringing info.
Innovative - Internet developers are constantly dreaming up new ways to collect, process and present information. This is the fuel on which many Internet projects run. Thus your info-gathering expreince can be much enhanced on the Internet. Reading at a map teaches you a lot, but a map that combines street views and pictures posted by users is even more informative. An article about investment options is great, but seeing actual specific investor portfolios at work is even better.

So there’s nothing inherently “good” about the information posted on the Internet. Clearly much is copied from old media and a lot is pretty lousy. It’s just that the Internet gives you much more. More information, more choice, richer applications, better quality-control, and less incentive to produce junk. You can almost always find good, up-to-date and reliable information on it. Sooner or later people will be as wary of they put in your mind as they are with what they put in their body, which may spell more bad news for incumbent information industry. Down the road we may see some propagation back from the Internet into old media. There are many untapped options for symbiosis, for example displaying user-generated quality/accuracy ratings next to TV adverts and other information items. Until then we’ll just need to watch what we consume more carefully or even go on an full-out information diet .

(images: FreeDigitalPhotos.net)

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