&gt; E-mail as notifications (push) is lacking<p>Let me introduce you to IMAP IDLE.<p>&gt; E-mail as an interface to software systems (e.g. ticket tracking systems) is lacking.<p>Jira, for example, has a pretty good one.<p>&gt; We have essentially abandoned the federated nature of email and handed over one-sided control to a small group of companies (Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, perhaps a few other) in order to effectively curb spam. The alternative would have been the end of email.<p>I&#x27;ve been running my own mail stack for 8+ years. The reason is simple: only I can mess it up. No 3rd party to lock me out from my communication, no 3rd party to decide what I can send. If it fails, it&#x27;s my fault only.
And I&#x27;m still using email. I do occasionally get spam, but most of them is already dropped by blacklisting and a few intelligent rule; the rest is catched by dspam.<p>XMPP is overcomplicated, solving nothing IRC can&#x27;t solve already ( imho, of course ); that is why it&#x27;s failing.<p>What we need for the more open source approach is people to value their communication and not to trust 3rd party because the look&#x2F;act cool.<p>&gt; Hopefully, at some point, the IM features of Slack, Twitter, Google Hangouts, iMessage, HipChat, Yammer, Skype, Whatsapp and friends are going to converge enough that an open source application can emerge and define a basic set of features through domination, in much the same way Wordpress ate the blogging world, and that can then lay the foundation for interoperability.<p>They won&#x27;t. WordPress was open from the start and the current trends are locking-in APIs, not open standards. There is no profit in openness.