Reconceptualizing the Internet
The Idea
The Internet has grown up as a patchwork of protocols and services, starting from an era when most users knew each other. Consequently, the user experience is patchy in quality, and privacy and security problems appear to be endless. The notion is to reconceptualize the Internet as a worldwide distributed system, consisting of loosely-coupled processes and distributed document systems.
Starting Point
Replacing Email
Email is one of the most useful Internet services, but one which is increasingly plagued by problems:
- attachments are a clumsy mechanism; for example:
- multiple authors of a document accumulate different versions which need to be brought into alignment
- they are a virus vector
- duplicate information is unnecessarily propagated
- publishing an email address is an invitation to spam
- communication for specific purposes, e.g., tracking problems at a help desk, tracking the status of a graduate student’s application, is clumsy to separate out from general communication
- email addresses and header can provide a trail for crackers to identify a system to attack
A possibility is to replace email initially by a web-based front end for managing messages within a specific category. Users no longer see email (though for simplicity of implementation, email may exist underneath).
Prototype
To get the ball rolling, a simple prototype in the form of a mock-up of a possible page layout is illustrated here. This prototype could be implemented using conventional email as its communication mechanism, but with the messages hidden behind the scenes. Users would only see the web front end, and never the raw email.