I was one of THE first people to ever have a public GMail account, in 2004 (before the “GMail invitation market” was created in which people would buy and sell invitations to the service).  Since then, whenever there is a new Google service, I typically get invites.  I was among the first in my group of friends to get a Google Wave account, and I got a Google Music Beta invite before many of my friends.  Somewhat related, Google has approached me with employment more than once, over the years.  Somewhat even less related, I own 2 Android phones, and a Barnes & Noble Nook Color that I’ve rooted with Android 2.3.  (Have I made my Google resume’ clear yet?)

What I don’t understand is why I keep hearing about people using Google+, but I have not yet got an invite.  It isn’t like Google doesn’t know about me — granted, they know about everyone, but I would think they know about me more than the average Joe.

I signed up for an invitation on the very first day I heard about Google+ on their website, yet the status on that page remains the same:

Google+ is in limited Field Trial
Right now, we’re testing with a small number of people, but it won’t be long before the Google+ project is ready for everyone. Leave us your email address and we’ll make sure you’re the first to know when we’re ready to invite more people.

I’m not buying it. GMail was in “beta” for years. Five, to be precise.  Google Wave was in beta the entire time it was online (and still is, even though the entire Wave project has been scrapped).  Google Music is still in beta — officially named Music Beta by Google.

Google+, from my understanding, is that it is a social network service similar to Facebook.  Some have even called it “the Facebook Killer”.  As with any social service, success of the service is measured in how many people have subscribed to the service.  If I were Google, I would want as much exposure as possible…  by as many people that enjoy Google services as possible.  Why have a limited rollout of something so central to Google?  Why have a limited rollout of something, and then not invite your most loyal fans?  Is this their way of saying they don’t love me any more?

O, Google, why have you forsaken me?  I feel gypped.  I see you pushing Google+ heavily, redesigning GMail, Google Calendar to have a similar look and feel to Google+, and I can only feel like the 3rd cousin that has been forced to eat dinner in the garage because there are no more seats at the kids’ table.  While reading daily news (on Google Reader), I see tours, tutorials and helpful tips of how to use Google+, and can only think “wow, that seems really nice, and seems to solve what bothers me about Facebook… too bad I can’t try it out.”

What gives, Google?

I’ll say that again… Email is not a storage mechanism.

By this, I mean that the purpose of electronic mail is not to store important files, information, or future reference material. It was never intended for that purpose, and even in today’s standards it still falls short of that use.  Of course, there is GMail today.  Of course, there are GMail extensions (like gDisk and GMail Drive Shell Extension) that allow you to store your MP3 collection, photos, etc.  That is a good example of what I’m referring to.  I’ll explain…

GMail, as most of us are aware, is not a typical electronic mail system.  It does not operate within the paradigm of traditional email systems.  Google Mail’s primary interface is via the web page in which email messages are only sorted by “threads” (“conversations” in GMail-speak).  But, more on GMail later.  Back to the point…

Email began as a way for users of a time-share system to communicate with one another, coordinating within the same closed system.  Soon thereafter, it became a method of communicating with users of other time-share systems, yet with serious limitations — namely, the sender of a message was required to know the path in which the message took to get to the intended recipient.  Instead of having addresses such as

poe@deadpoets.org

there were “addresses” such as

localhost!nextdoor!nextnextdoor!poe@deadpoets.org

which meant that the message had to travel from localhost, to nextdoor, to nextnextdoor, to finally deadpoets.org in order to reach user ‘poe’.  The machines did this in an automated way, as long as the route specified was correct.  If one of the machines along the message route was offline, or otherwise not accepting incoming mail, the sending machine held the message for a certain period of time until either the message was accepted on the receiving host or the sending machine effectively gave up — at which point, the message was lost forever.

Eventually, the machines connected to the network grew in number and a machine’s knowledge of other networked machines needed to scale as well.  Email needed to change with the new networking methodology, which is why we have user@somesystem.com today.  The sender of a message needs to know only the address(es) of the recipient(s), the subject of the message, and the message itself.

Notice in all the above explaination it reads “the message”, and not “the file”?  There is a reason for that.

Consider this example:

Alice wants to send Bob some files.  The total size of the files is 9.5MB. The contents don’t matter for the purpose of this example, so lets just say the email contains a few large photo images, and a large document.  In order for Alice to send these files, in an email to Bob, she would need to first specify Bob’s email address as the intended recipient.  Next, she will likely describe the contents in a few words in the Subject: field of the message, “The stuff I wanted to give you”.  Then, she sets about attaching each file she wants to send to Bob.  Each of these files becomes encoded in a very long set of letters and numbers, completely unreadable by any human, and inserted into the email message “envelope” so that each email system that handles the message will be aware that it is a message with a Subject: and multiple files attached of differing size and type, such not to get the files intermingled among each other, nor this specific message’s contents intermingled with any other message that might be handled.  Next, Alice presses “Send”.  It takes a moment for her computer to actually send it because most email systems aren’t expecting (or designed) to handle messages of that size… but it gets sent.  The message is then copied into Alice’s “Sent Mail” mail store (sometimes called “outbox”).  Bob does not see this message right away — this is not file sharing, nor is it Instant Messaging (IM).  Alice’s message is received from Alice’s computer, is copied onto Alice’s email server, which then needs to determine which machine handles Bob’s email.  Once that is determined, the message is sent again — to the machine listed after the ‘@’ in Bob’s email address.  That receiving machine typically makes attempts to verify that it is a message coming from an actual person (like Alice, and not a Spam robot), is destined for a person that it handles mail for (like Bob, and not Boob), and that the size of the message is within the system’s constraints for reasonable handling (typically 10MB).  After the message is accepted, it is written to Bob’s email server (this is the 3rd copy of the message) for delivery handling.  Assuming that Bob has not forwarded his mail elsewhere (which would further the process of sending/copying the message again), the message is then stored in a holding area on the server’s hard drive, to await Bob’s email client.  Once Bob’s email client connects to the email server, the message is copied yet another (4th) time to Bob’s computer.  The message will reside on both Bob’s email server, Bob’s computer, and Alice’s email server, and Alice’s computer (in her “Sent Mail”, remember?) until either Alice or Bob delete their respective copies of the message.  For a single 10MB message, it has taken multiple computers copying, and costing a total of at least 40MB of storage space.  This is not taking into account various spam/anti-virus systems, which also typically store each message for a short time.  More importantly, this is also not taking into account that had the message been addressed to more than one person (say Bob and Charles), the message would be stored 6 times — server and user’s computer, for each user — which would amount to a total of 60MB for the sender and two recipients.

Email systems treat messages as such. Sure, each message is a file, but a message to be delivered to user1 cannot/should not/will not be considered the same message as to be delivered to user2, even though it has the same file attached to the message and may contain the exact same contents.  Electronic mail is designed this way for privacy; not file-sharing.

“But, Mr. Linux Ninja Geek…  storage is cheap!”

Yes.  Storage is cheap.  However, transmission is not.  It takes relatively a small amount of effort for your computer to generate data, or even say copy data from your camera, and store it onto your computer.  It is much more effort to transmit that same data across the Internet to another computer, and have it stored there indefinitely.  Enter email into that equation and the effort is mulitplied by each computer the message travels through to get to the final destination.

“Ok.  So, I shouldn’t send files attachments in email at all??”

That is not what we’re talking about.  We’re talking about storing email messages indefinitely.  Consider that information in a typical message has a given lifetime.  Normally, this lifetime is very short, on the order of days or even weeks, possibly even months.  After this time passes, is the information in the message of the same importance, or has it become much less important?

To demonstrate this, let us employ an analogy…

In the old days, before email, people wrote correspondance — stone tablets, papyrus, handwritten, typewritten.  The message itself was carried, by another human, to its intended recipient, and either read aloud or delivered into their hands.  Once the information within the message was received, what happened to the message itself?  In the case of stone tablets, it was likely destroyed — or made into some type of monolith, depending on what the actual message was.  In the case of papyrus, the message was read aloud, retrieved, and kept for futher use — this is why the message was stored on a scroll, because it contained more than a single message for more than a single recipient.  In the case of handwritten or typewritten correspondance, either the letter was kept in a folder in a file, or it was discarded sometime after the message was understood.

That last part, concerning handwritten/typewritten letters, is probably the closest analogy to email.  After the letter was filed away, what was its disposition?  More often than not, the letter sat in the file for a long time, until someone either tossed it out with the trash, or it was framed for historical purposes.  Point:  a letter was hardly ever kept “in case I need it again”.  The physical letter’s disposition was certain, upon the moment of receipt, similarly to stone tablets and papyrus scrolls.  Why?  Because physical objects need space to be stored indefinitely.  The more physical objects that need to be stored, the more space required, of course.

Hard drive space is required to store electronic mail messages as well.  In all cases of message storage, the information contained within does not change after delivery.

Enter GMail.  GMail’s claim to fame was that, initially, the storage amount was enormous, compared to other offerings like Hotmail.  Leveraging Google’s search abilities, supposedly you could instantaneously find any email you ever received in the GMail system.  This goal is in line with having conversational correspondance with other people connected to the Internet, only in a different way.  GMail does not sort messages by date, subject, or even sender of the message like typical email client software.  The only sorting mechanism available is by “thread”, which makes GMail seem more like Usenet, or an online discussion forum.  This design structure does not seem to lend itself for file storage at all — much less attachment storage.  Sure, you can save a message (or entire conversations) indefinitely, for later review.  How easy and practical is it to do that?  How important is that email from years ago?  More importantly, how many other email systems are similar to GMail?  It doesn’t seem that GMail is a good gauge as to what an email system can or cannot do, since it seems to be a consensus that GMail is different from the rest, and since GMail is due to fail without warning among other technical limitations.

Given that a message’s information/content/meaning does not change after it is delivered, why is email kept for so long?

Not just that, but if a message is noticed to be lost (presumably a while after it was actually lost), why is it so important to have the message restored?  What could possibly be contained in a message, that wasn’t noticed to be missing, that has become critical this very moment?  Could the information not be resent from the sender?

More to the point:  Why are people storing information in email?

Not just oh-we’ll-find-a-way-to-fix-or-deal-with-it bad, we’re talking a downward spiral that slopes deeper the further we decline until we have reached “terminal velocity”.  The bottom is not yet in sight.

Why?  Well, I’ll tell ya why…  in a minute.  First, I’ll put things into perspective by shedding a bright historical light on the subject.  This is not to mean that the history of email is dark or bad — but the present state of email certainly is, compared to its early days.

Email (not E-mail, since words that are introduced into the English language are often comprised of multiple words that stand on their own, separated by hyphens, normally lose their hyphens as the new words gain wider acceptance) as we know it today, was originally created in the early 1970′s, purely as an experiment, though in a slightly different form.  To put this into proper context, we’ll go back just a bit further. Email (at this time E-mail, or “electronic mail”) only existed in self-contained systems.  People would log into one specific machine (a time-sharing device, which was basically a big expensive computer that a group of people shared at different times) to perform their work, and would occasionally leave messages for one another to read whenever the next person would log in again.  This concept of “self contained” email would eventually evolve into other implementations of the same use — such as Microsoft Mail, which was designed as a central system, namely in an office building, that people would use to talk to only other people in the same office.  I digress…  but, even in its first use case, Email (and E-mail) was used as a convenience.  Some would say, a luxury tool — to save people from leaving yellow sticky notes somewhere, or picking up a phone to talk to someone that may not have time to talk to you.  In tech-geek-speak, email is asynchronous communication:  I can talk to you as much as I like, and you can reply back to me, but it is pure coincidence if we happen to talk to each other at the same time  (there is a variable delay between one person talking and the other person replying).

From being an easy way to leave messages for other people sharing the computer, it turned into a way of leaving messages for people using other computers — no longer “self contained” email, but networked email.  At this point, email diverged into two uses:  local “self contained” messaging on one computer, and “networked” messaging.  The two remained distinct for quite a while, as there were people sharing central computers that had very little need to communicate with people sharing other computers, yet there were people that had a valid need for such distant communication even if “distant” meant “the computer right next to mine in the same room”.  Still, it was viewed as leaving an electronic sticky note on the screen for whenever that person logged in again.  As such with StickyNotes, eventually the glue on the paper dries and at that point it no longer sticks to anything, falling off the surface to become lost when the cleaning lady vacuums the floor.  This was the expectation for early email — “Joe, I left you a quick message about the widget, if you have concerns just give me a call.”  If the email message was lost, deleted accidentally, or was never delivered, it was no big deal because the communication was eventually going to take place in person anyway, and there was no guarantee the intended person would ever read the message in the first place.

As the novelty of communicating with other people on other computers evolved, so did the implementation of email.  To send an email message to someone outside the shared computer, a person needed to know *which* other computer the recipient used.  The @ was born, since that seemed like the most logical delimeter to distinguish “user” from “computer”, and since neither could contain the @ symbol.  For similar computers, the method was “user@computer”, to properly address an email message.  For different systems, it wasn’t so clear.  In fact, it became downright complicated and confusing.  If a person needed to send a message to a distant computer, but the distant system could not accept “user@computer” (possibly it used the @ for something other than a delimeter), the sender of the message needed to know not only who to address the message to, and *which* computer that user used, the sender also needed to know the path the message would take when it was sent from computer to computer to computer.  UUCP (Unix-to-Unix-Copy) was born.  Imagine instead of smith@accounting it was  !cenvax!westnode!accounting!smith.  Gateways from one type of email system to another type had to be erected, to handle the messages and translate one address into another.  Yet, even then, email was still viewed as “fire and forget” in the sense that whenever the recipient got the message, IF they got the message, they will eventually acknowledge by replying in some fashion as courtesy.

Back in my early days of email, I worked in the military in the computer support office.  Then, email was more a novelty than a necessity.  I vividly remember a sergeant I worked with would get daily phone calls after creating a new email account for someone.  Someone would normally call him up to complain “its been 3 days since you created my email account, and I haven’t got any email yet.  I think its broken.”  He would always reply with the same thing:  “you have to send email to get email”, which basically was his smartypants way of saying “it isn’t broken because you didn’t get anything.  You probably didn’t get any email because no one knows you have an email address, or they have nothing to say to you, or all the people you want to talk to don’t have email themselves.”   He would hang up the phone and we would have a chuckle, then I would joke about how the first person in the world with a fax machine probably wondered why he invested so much money in a device that strangely never prints out any faxes.

Slowly, email became the “killer app”.

[For the uninitiated, a "killer app" is an application (a program or function) that is just so utterly cool and awesome it is NEEDED so much that the purchase of an expensive device is justified, simply to use the application.  The other programs and software are bonus, and not needed as much, compared to THE reason the computer was purchased.]

Everyone seemed fascinated with the ability to talk to ANYONE (as long as they were “on email too”) for FREE.  Its better than long distance calling!!  No more busy signals or answering machines!  And its FREE!!

“Move over word processor, I’m going to communicate with the world!!  Shrink yourself into a microscopic icon, Mr. Spreadsheet, EMAIL is the real reason I have a computer!  Now, if only I knew what to say, and who to talk to.  Maybe someone will figure out how to contact me, so we can send messages back and forth.”

Today, no one really needs to know the path a message takes to reach its intended recipient (in some instances, even the recipient need not be known) because we address email to “user@something.somethingelse.com” and we trust the system to do the Right Thing to deliver the message.  To the right person.  At the right time.  “When it absolutely positively needs to be there…”  within the next 15 seconds else I’m going to wonder what the HELL is taking so long, and why haven’t they replied yet because I just got a message that says they’ve read it and it better not have been marked as spam because it wasn’t spam!!

Email has become the primary method of daily communication.  No longer do you “need to send mail to get mail”.  If your email address is on a web page, business card, or if you have ever used your email address to log into a website, YOU’VE GOT MAIL.   Whether you want it or not.  We email each other about meetings, to talk about email.  We email appointments, contact information, political opinions, love letters, chain-messages, advertisements.  The type of content goes on and on.  The problem is no longer about how we communicate with the right person on the right computer, but how to silence the noise to get to the legitimate messages that we need to read.

In the past, whether it was “self contained” or sent from the other side of the continent, each message was read and discarded soon thereafter.  Lately, email is received and almost immediately archived for “safe-keeping”, sometimes without it even being read.   It seems the focus now is not the immediate meaning of each message, but that a potential need might arise in the future where we might need to re-read the message.  Email used to consist of one file, appended to whenever new messages arrived — older mail was at the top of the file and newer mail was at the bottom/end.  Email now has folders, sorting, searching, tagging, categorizing, filtering, and archiving of all types.  We rarely, if ever, delete email that we’ve read.  Sure, it was really nifty when Google unleashed GMail to the world with its “2GB and growing” size limit on the amount of email one person could have, but if we’re only talking about purely text-based messages it amounts to billions of messages. (By the way, it is no longer only 2GB — its more like 7 or 8GB now.)

Email is no longer just the “killer app” in the sense of being able to communicate with anyone.  It is a presentation moniker; an address with @gmail.com is not as prestigious as it once was, but an address with @yourreallastname.com is.  It is a storage mechanism; people have figured out a way to use free online web email accounts to store documents, MP3s, and photos.  It is a calendar; if you’re using a particular email system that is tied into a shared calendar, you can send/receive appointments, and reminders of upcoming events.  It is a ToDo list; some people have an email folder with messages they have sent to themselves containing the errands they need to perform in the course of a day.  It is a webpage; modern email software will accept HTML in the body of an email message and interpret the language of webpages, even in the sense that images need not be attachments to the email but can be referenced to elsewhere on the Internet.  It is submissible legal evidence; there is legal precedence where email messages are a form of evidence, able to be subpoenaed by a court of law.

How did we get this way?  What changed so radically that “e-mail” could come from an experiment on the ARPANET (a solution looking for a problem), to “email”, a common term of the layman’s vernacular so much that it is no longer a privilege but a rite?   How could a function of computer networking change the way we communicate, yet itself change so little?

How is it that email is no longer a novelty method of asynchronous communication, but is now a basic human necessity in the modern world, measured not in its content of communication, but in cosmetic appeal of its address and in its storage size limit?

I haven’t even got to the bad part yet.

SMTP, or Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, was basically an afterthought in the broad historical map of the creation of the experimental networks that were the grandfathers of the Internet we know today.  SMTP is the most widely accepted and “standardized” method of sending and receiving email.  It was essentially created to bridge the gap between unlike electronic messaging systems, back when “e-mail” was growing in popularity and usefulness.  The unfortunate part of the story, though, is that SMTP was created back when there was no real malicious threat or intent proliferating through the networks.  Users basically trusted other users in the sense that everyone followed the same rules because that was what it meant to “be connected”.  After all, if you behaved badly on the network, people would want to network with you less, until eventually you would be partitioned from everyone else in such a way that you gain a decreasing benefit from being part of the network.  It was a self-governing system, yet relatively unofficial.  “Netiquette” dictated good form and respectable practices toward other network-citizens, which mainly consisted of college students and faculty among connected higher education organizations.  SMTP was very trusting back then, and still is.

To this day, anyone can still send email as anyone else — so easily that specialized software is of little concern.  Simply connecting to a mail server with a bare terminal (Telnet), typing the correct sequence of commands and syntax, and voila!  You just forged an email message.  If you’re lucky, someone will believe they’re talking to whom you pretended to be.

What does all this mean, then?  Put together all what I’ve said so far, and it paints a rather dark and confusing portrait.  Email is *everything*, yet flimsy in it being unreliably verifiable.  Email messages pass from machine to machine across the room, or across the hemisphere, and yet they are “essential communications”.  They are submissible in a court of law, yet easily forged.  Messages are quickly and easily created and more easily deleted, yet we archive them for years or even decades with the possibility that we might need them later even though we already know what each message means, resulting in a liability if they are ever subpoenaed, and requiring constantly increasing storage.

How do we end this accelerating downward spiral, or at least slow it down so we might recognize and begin to approach the problem?

When will added functionality, storage space, and guarantees of quality be enough for this old and simple luxury of slow and insecure communication?  When will we finally realize that we have already outlived email’s usefulness and begin using the next electronic communication “killer app”?

If anyone reading this knows the answer to any of the above, drop me an email. 

[3 Oct 2009 Edit: I JUST found out about Google Wave!!  Go here, here, or here to learn more about it.  It is in closed invitation beta right now, but I hear its going to be released this year.]

Yeah.  Its…  like…  AAAAAAaaaaahhhh!!  What the hell is WRONG with you??  Why don’t you let me HELP you, or at least lets talk about it rationally??!!!

Anyways, just askin’.  Its a legitimate question, right?

That may seem strange to some… but it makes perfect sense to the analytical mind that is self-aware.

Genius
For most people, “genius” is a term they use to describe people that are smarter than the average person. While this seems to be true, its actually deeper than that. “Smart” people appear to make fewer mistakes than others, or they are perceived to be correct more often than not. Really, being a “genius” is as simple as being able to properly analyze things, events, and situations. It has nothing to do with already knowing an answer, or having common sense.
Example: an analytical mind (“genius”) can determine if a peg can fit into a hole before attempting to actually place the peg in the hole. The analysis of size and shape of the peg versus the size and shape of the hole is carefully examined, and thousands of mental calculations are done. If the peg and hole don’t carefully align together mentally, the “genius” will abandon the thought process of putting the peg into the hole. It just won’t be possible, and alternatives are examined.
This is what is called analytical intelligence.

Common Sense
Everyone has common sense. It is basically the ability of your brain to remember the outcome of a test. People know that red means stop, and green means go. Why? Because if they thought red means go, bad things will happen and people will get hurt. You know not to touch a pot on the stove because it may be hot. Why? You tried touching a hot pot before, and you burned your fingers. It is common sense because the outcome was a bad traffic accident or pain in your fingers from the pot on the stove. This is what some psychologists call practical intelligence.

Analytical and Practical
Everyone approaches problems differently. The analytical mind (“genius”) begins by examining the situation, all the facts, and how all the information presented relates. There are no attempts to solve anything until all the options for a solution are carefully weighed for the most successful result. On the flip side, common sense is based solely on what has already happened in the past — there is no analysis at all except to try to match the current situation to a similar instance in history.
They said that even Einstein, the father of modern physics and general relativity, used to forget his own phone number. For most people, its common sense to remember your own phone number. How could one of the most brilliant minds in history forget his own phone number? Common sense. Maybe he never had a need to phone himself. If he had a need to phone himself, he would have discovered what his phone number is and gone through the mental process of touching a hot pot — he would remember instinctively. While it might not be true that even Einstein forgot his phone number, or even had a phone, it begins to form a theory…

Common Sense and Genius are inversely proportionate.
The more common sense someone has, the less genius (analytical intelligence) that person will have. Likewise, the more someone appears to be “smart”, the less common sense he/she will likely have. I believe this is because when the brain approaches something, it tends to lean to one way of thinking than the other. After a while, the brain gets used to thinking one way more than another. Or, it could be that most of the energy in the brain gets reserved to one way of thinking than another.

Some people put their keys in the exact same place each time they come home after a drive, because they’ve learned that if they place the set of keys as a routine, there is no need to analyze where keys might be when they are needed again.
Some people put their keys wherever they drop them when they get home. These people can remember where their keys are most of the time, and the rest of the time use a combination of analytical and practical intelligence — “where did I leave them last time?” “what was I doing, when I put them down?” “what are all the common places I leave the keys?”
Some people do not care to remember where they leave their keys, and go through the entire analytical process each time they need their keys. Every time keys are needed, the process begins — “Are the keys here?” “Are the keys near the door?” “Are the keys on the counter, near the door?” “Are the keys in the car?” “Are the keys still in my pocket?” and so on.

What’s the point of all this?
Some people are completely analytical, and appear to be “smart” while other people have good common sense but aren’t praised for their intelligence. This seems backward, or at least odd. However, it does seem to be true that any one person could be mostly analytical and have no common sense, or a person could have a tremendous amount of common sense but not know how to effectively solve problems.

So, really… when you think about it… if you find yourself losing your keys, you just might be a genius! And… if people call you a genius… use some of your brain power to remember where the hell your keys are. If these two kinds of people could merge into a cohesive unit, the world would be a better place, and we’d all be learning and remembering, and probably have fewer problems.