How we can improve digital communications

Digital communications haven't evolved as an open standard in almost a decade. We really have have two options XMPP (Instant Messaging) and email protocols to rely on.  Sure there are a lot of other communication methods.  But i'd wager that 99.999% of these are just websites.

The problem I've encountered over and over is email is very rudimentary when you look at the needs for communicating online.  This is why Twitter and Facebook are very popular.  Your email was never built to manage communicating in the types of contexts that these services provide.

So last Friday (26th of July, 2013) I posted a slideshare and submitted a talk to SXSW on a new standard, we'll reframe from calling it anything absurd like e-mail 2.0.  I actually call it "couriering" but i'm not married to the name. But the standard is, very simply, just taking email to a new level.  Here's some of what the new standard would allow:

• Sending messages to people (you@yourdomain.com), to devices (yourdevice%you@yourdomain.com) or to applications (yourapp%yourdevice%you@yourdomain.com).
• New types of delivery mechanisms such as anonymous messages, "pull" messages and "push" messages.
• New meta data to give context on the intent, identity and use of a message.
• New formats that allow you to store machine readable information within these messages for applications and couriers.
• Ability to send large data messages (up to 4GB) or small messages (less than 4KB).
• Standards for applications to send applications information in a structured schema.
• Discovery protocols for devices associated with the same identity to find one another (e.g., your iphone can see your mac laptop and decides it should exchange some info).
• Backwards compatibility guides to show how this can run, right now, without a single modification to existing policies, protocols and servers.
• Security standards to establish networks of trust, contacts, signing messages, encrypting messages and securing information.
• Identity standards to help establish context of unknown contacts who are trying to contact you.

You can go to the panelpicker.sxsw.com and find my proposal called "A plea for f#%king relevant digital communications" (unfortunately I can't deep link it), I'd appreciate if you up-vote it.  SXSW works by voting on panelists and speakers so I can't do it without you.

Also, if you'd like to see the entire proposal on SlideShare, knock yourself out:

http://www.slideshare.net/TrevorLinton/sxsw-a-plea-for-fking-relevant-communications