I am not convinced by the economic argument. RSS died but email survived and thrived - Google has shown willing to replace and kill RSS in favour of waves and whatever, but kept email.

I think this is a matter of consumer preference for and understanding of an operating model.

Many years ago I worked for Demon in the UK and we gave away free email and fee webspace. The email was heavily used, and the webspace (just 10MB behind Apache) was barely taken up and if I remember discontinued.

The point is that back in 95 we could have written clients that stuck "updates" and photos onto 10mb of webspace (retrospectively that would have been an awesome project) - but ... We did not. We as in the technically minded employees did - scripts to upload last nights photos of drinking sessions abounded. But nothing offered to customers

I think Facebook was part of an explanation to consumers that you could "live" on the web. A confluence of Internet access, mobile, computing advances etc etc etc

Everyone understood email because it was an operating model we had analogue guides for. You write a letter, have it to the mail man who took it to its destination.

RSS is the equivalent of people nailing updates to their front door and waiting for people to come round and read it - That is the sensible way of doing this (currently I mail my updates to SF where Facebook puts it on a very very large front door)

perhaps a better economic argument is that email is more efficient - my MTA looks yours up only if I want to send you an email, and your MTA just waits for connections.

In the RSS / Facebook feed world, I need to poll all of my friends front doors for updates, which model starts to gain runaway efficiencies with the more people I am aggregating polls on behalf of. Facebook has already won that race before they started.

If we think the current situation is poor, we have the regulatory response (break up a monopoly) or the capitalist response (write diaspora and ...)

I think email was already in place before mass aggregation came to the web - and its economic model did not tend to a centralised model (if everyone uses Google as the POP3 endpoint, email itself is still decentralised)

But RSS (which covers status updates, broadcast messages, social media) these all economically tend to a single central polling approach. And it was not well established before Facebook era.

As such fighting Facebook will be an economic uphill battle as long as the only difference is where we poll for updates.

Perhaps the calculus will change with an emphasis on privacy. But even so I am posting stuff on my front door. How much privacy can I expect. If I am sending a message to you, it's messging if not it's a public update broadcast? There is no encryption model to send one message to lots of unspecified people (I would need to encrypt it for all my friends individually. Presumably that's what diaspora does). Even so I then have to message you. So why not just cc email.

I have lost my thread here, but perhaps I should say that the key here is the client and regulatory response.

A single client could easily aggregate secure messaging and feeds - but there is not a client to do that.

You could solve the aggregation race by sending mails as a poll trigger.

But you need to replace the client at the same time as requiring Facebook open up.

It seems the move off web browsers and onto apps was a retrograde step in many ways.