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Formal – Interruption free communication
- zachlatta 10y agoIs this an actual product? Or just a landing page?
- bognition 10y agoAn async communication protocol already exists in Email. So what makes this different than email?
- nsomaru 10y agoMaybe it's like only being able to check your email 3 times a day
- bognition 10y agoYeah, totally. The barrage of constant notifications is the real problem. I used to keep my email open all the time. Over the last year i've disabled all email notification and check every hour or so.
- TeMPOraL 10y agoAfter reading "Deep Work" recently I did the same - I unsubscribed from all services, newsletters, Facebook pages, social apps, etc. that I don't really care about, and I decided to only check e-mail and social media a few times a day in pre-scheduled moments. Does wonders for my productivity and stress levels.
- smilespray 10y ago"It's not email."
- corndoge 10y agoThe focus is not async but the "three times a day" part.
- creshal 10y agoWhich email can do just fine, if you set up yours that way.
- Karunamon 10y agoAnd Dropbox can be replicated "just fine" with scripts and rsync.
- creshal 10y agoApples and oranges.
- Karunamon 10y agoNot really. Another instance of the principle that a purpose-built solution is often better than free ad-hoc scripts/nonstandard configuration that can do exactly the same thing. And besides, this isn't "the same thing". I know of no MUA that offers the ability to sync only specified threads in realtime.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago> Not really. Another instance of the principle that a purpose-built solution is often better than free ad-hoc scripts/nonstandard configuration that can do exactly the same thing. As long as your needs remain constant and perfectly aligned with the purpose of the app. Which happens exactly never. Flexible / configurable solutions have higher up-front costs but often turn out better overall - because they can be easily adapted as needs (and wants) change. INB4 someone says that users are dumb - no, they aren't. The dumb thing is actually the predominant trend in our industry of making everything purpose-built and simpler than possible, which makes people no longer expect themselves to spend even 5 seconds of learning to master a tool.
- lhnz 10y agoEmail isn't delivered only three times a day.
- bognition 10y agosure, but you are in total control with how often you check your email.
- Trundle 10y agoI'm in control of what I put in my mouth too. Still don't buy the family size chocolate.
- mipmap04 10y agoPerhaps you can, but maybe a compulsive eater lacks the self control. I think this project is more for people who feel compelled to check their emails the second they receive them, but also find that doing so inhibits their productivity.
- Trundle 10y agoThe lack of self control was why I don't buy the family size. I was making the same point you are.
- wccrawford 10y agoI think they were saying they lack the self control to avoid buying the family size in the first place.
- snissn 10y agoBased on your logic, why would anyone ever open up a new restaurant?
- wepple 10y agoabsolutely; however I confess to not actually be able to successfully implement that control. I know of quite a few people who will actually exit their email app so no notifications can come in and they won't be tempted - suggesting there might be preexisting demand for this type of thing
- sethammons 10y agoWhile I might not "get it," I never got why you would limit a message to 160 characters either, and those guys seem to be doing ok.
- joopxiv 10y agoActually, they're struggling quite a bit.
- softawre 10y agoWho is the They here? Seems like the guys that made the platform and the top engineers working for them all got rich off of the idea.
- simonswords82 10y agoTrue - but that's all in the past now. Twitter's overall future is grim...They're either going to properly niche down and try not to be all things to all men, or die. Just my opinion.
- Senji 10y agoTwitter will never be strapped for cash, it's owned by a filthy rich billionaire.
- simonswords82 10y agoThere's got to come a time when even the filthiest rich billionaires say enough is enough, this project is never going to hit a satisfactory ROI.
- etjossem 10y agoTWLO was doing $60 a share last time I checked, up from $10. :)
- TazeTSchnitzel 10y ago
- deckar01 10y agoIt's stays in your outbox until the receiver's preferred delivery time. You can see which messages haven't been sent and start to get a feel for other people's schedules.
- rch 10y agoHow is this better than DND? My messages are there when I feel like looking at them.
- danvasquez29 10y agoTwo ways it's better: it sets the expectation with the sender that you won't get an immediate response, and it provides a better option for those without the discipline/self-control
- avindroth 10y agoFrom what I know, you cannot fine-tune your DND. For instance, I want certain notifications to show up versus not. I prefer "Cellular Data Off," because there is greater need distance that way.
- rch 10y agoAndroid has a few filters: alarms only, priority notifications, calls/messages from specific contacts, etc. I agree that greater flexibility in creating custom rules would be welcome though.
- nxzero 10y agoWhy not an app that sends messages when you're not busy?
- Mickydtron 10y agoIt would be hard to detect the best time to deliver the message. Naive approaches could get it almost exactly wrong, as one of the times when I really don't want to be interrupted is when I'm just sitting and reading something, and not really interacting much. I'm sure there are better ways of determining if the user isn't focusing on anything, and maybe some of them would work well as a trigger for delivering messages. That would be pretty nifty.
- nxzero 10y agoCorrect, it would be hard, which is why if you we're able to figure it out, it'd be useful and hard to copy.
- chrissnell 10y agoThe non-immediacy of messaging was one of the things I loved so much about FidoNet. A few times a day, your node (BBS) would dial into a hub server somewhere (sometimes over a long distance phone call) and download the mail bundle. The more messages you got, the longer it would take, so there was always some excitement when the bundle was large. You'd read your mail with care--after all, you might get 2-3 private messages a day--and responded with care. Normally, you'd just let your messages get delivered during the next daily mail call but if you had something important to send, you could initiate one manually. If you were sending internationally and didn't mind spending a little coin, it was fun to mark your message as "direct" and watch your node dial up the recipient's node across the pond or the world. It was remarkable technology for the savvy home computer user in 1989.
- j45 10y agoFidoNET was greatly efficient in a time of limited connectivity. I find I often schedule emails. Even wrote a plugin for my ticketing system that scheduled emails to maintain a sustainable flow of interactions with one client and not burying them in emails. Can't wait to it to be reinvented like slack brought out a modern IRC client. What would today's FidoNET look like if there was little to no internet available?
- cknoxrun 10y agoWhen I was 12 I was the hub for FidoNet mail in my smallish town. I was tweaking the settings before heading on vacation. We left the next morning, and returned a week later. We came home to an official notice from the police to contact them immediately. My parents did, and pretty soon 2 police officers showed up at our door. They wanted to know who had been "hacking" from the second line in the house. It turns out I forgot to enter the area code for the FidoNet long distance number, and some poor souls had been getting a phone call at 3am with "strange noises", which auto-dialed every minute for 3 hours straight. The police had disconnected the line, and I had to spend an hour explaining to the police officers what a BBS is, and what FidoNet is. I remember trying to draw a diagram, but it was in vain. In the end they just left confused, reconnected the line and I promised to be more careful in future.
- have_faith 10y agoSimilar to an idea I've had for a slow messenger. It talks about threads and "number of tasks you're working on". Is this thing targeted for use at work? because that seems like the worst use case for the limitations it outlines. I imagine it more as a digital snail mail with a digital mailman bringing you messages once a day. An effort to bring the romanticism of a messenger bringing you an important message.
- thewavelength 10y agoI see it coming: "Pay five bucks to get your message delivered in just ten minutes!"
- k__ 10y agoI raise you: "Pay ten bucks to only get messages delivered to you once a day!"
- NegativeK 10y agoPay fifteen bucks for the message, we'll refund the customer their $10, and deliver the message RIGHT NOW!
- avindroth 10y agoGood tongue-in-cheek, but I see no incentive for them to add such a feature. There is zero economic incentive to pay and stay in that frame, and subsequently none for the company to adopt that approach.
- tomjen3 10y agoHonestly if you want to pay ten bucks to get me a message _right now_, thats okay. The message is probably really important. It is all the legends of crap that gets send because email isn't even a penny a letter I object to.
- creshal 10y ago> It is all the legends of crap that gets send because email isn't even a penny a letter I object to. Even physical mail is too cheap; advertisement leaflets and "free" catalogues are like 90% of my total mail volume (after putting "do not deliver advertisements to this mailbox" stickers on everything), a worse quota than with email (after setting up basic spam filters).
- TeMPOraL 10y agoThis is one of the things that make me hate advertising industry the most. Just count up the physical spam you get weekly, multiply by your country's population and divide by average household - and you get a good low-bound estimate of how much paper, ink and energy goes from a manufacturer straight to garbage can, with the sole side effect of pissing people off. It's ridiculous.
- posabsolute 10y agoI think delivering messages 3 times a day is the wrong approach. There is a need for synchronous communications, it just should not be chat channels you are connected to all day long. One preferable idea would be to use notification channels that would reduce significantly the noise you receive from your pairs. I speak at length about the idea here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/channels-best-way-handle-internal-discussions-cedric-dugas https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/channels-best-way-handle-inte...
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- samfisher83 10y agoWhy can't someone just check their email 3 times a day? Wouldn't that accomplish the same effect?
- pavlov 10y agoSometimes forced constraints can make a product (cf. Snapchat, Twitter).
- afarrell 10y agoThe same reason someone can't eat just three Pringles but instead eats the whole can.
- theknarf 10y agoWhy can't people just delete the photos and videos they receive after 10 seconds?
- TeMPOraL 10y agoBecause that's a ridiculously stupid idea that defeats the very concept of taking a photo or recording a video. That, or I am too old already.
- avindroth 10y agoRestrictions define human behavior and freedom.
- cesnja 10y agoOn the conceptual level, this seems great, because it removes the expectations of a timely response from both parties (sender and receiver). However, other (more immediate) channels will probably get used instead, precisely where this app would be most valuable.
- Mickydtron 10y agoIt seems like the "Watch" feature would actually take care of this. If both people are watching the same chat, they would both get real time notifications, and could chat in real time. The app limits how many threads you can be watching, though, trying to force you to actively opt-in to things that you want to pay attention to because they are directly relevant to what you are doing right now.
- cesnja 10y agoWell, that seems unfortunate. The value I see in this application is its explicit asynchronous nature which saves you from the burden of checking (or even thinking about) messages or email. The ability to be unreachable where the other party knows about it. Because right now, it's considered rude if I don't manage to reply quickly enough.
- Touche 10y agoNice! This reminds me of an app I worked on many years ago but never finished. A Twitter clone that only let you post 1 message per day. The idea being that if you can only post once per day you'll make your posts more thoughtful.
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- ape4 10y agoI like the idea of this. But it should be an email client.
- peterhartree 10y agoI made a Chrome extension for Gmail which includes a timed inbox lockout feature. You could configure this so that you can only see your inbox at specific times of day. https://inboxwhenready.org/ https://inboxwhenready.org/
- runn1ng 10y agoWell, whenever I install a messenger (seems like I am doing this too frequently last few months, since every group of friends like to use a completely different messenger), first thing I try is a simple "ping-pong" messages, that is - "is this working?" - "yes, it is.", usually even with seeing the friend face to face. I cannot imagine these "ping-pong" messages - to even establish if the messenger is working, that the other person has it installed correctly etc - would take about a day.
- ErrantX 10y agoIs that a problem? Everyone is always in a rush these days :) by its very nature. If you need this messenger app working "right now" then it won't do the job for yo
- avindroth 10y agoI don't know if this is possible, but I would love this as a layer above existing messaging platforms. For instance, I just want my iPhone to batch my notifications until a certain time, without me having to worry about becoming distracted. I want just 20-30 minutes of unhindered communication (real-time as well), and then go back to the batch-mode. I am currently doing this with "Cellular Data Off", but it's a bit annoying when I want to listen to music without being distracted. I want the data, but not the notifications. Right now, as a time-consuming hack, I manually turn off all messaging notifications. A very important aspect of life, and a step in the right direction. But does not seem like a worthy replacement just yet.
- firloop 10y agoOne thing I do with my iPhone that helps is turning off lock screen display for the most distracting notifications. iOS will then batch these notifications and show them when you unlock your phone next. It's not perfect, but it prevents stuff like a Snapchat or a Twitter @mention from totally distracting me while I'm at my desk.
- cylinder 10y agoThose types of notifications should be disabled entirely IMO. I don't think people realize how stressful those notifications are relative to their actual value. I unfollowed everyone on Facebook so I don't have a news feed. I am detached from news. Focusing on my work and local family and community seems far healthier. I've realized that worrying about everything going on in the world, including trivial details about my acquaintances, is a recipe for disaster.
- thefastlane 10y agothis looks like a fun project, maybe there could be some use among a small circle of friends, for example. that said, i won't speak for what the market will sustain, but in terms of what we need as a society, i believe we are past the point of needing to invent new messaging platforms. we have email, we have xmpp,(and we have a smattering of other pretty good platforms like WhatsApp, though it is not open) etc. we have mature spam filtering technology built around email, we have TLS, etc etc . this stuff already works. and when it doesn't, we should be working together to improve upon them. there's a lot of work to be done making existing communication more secure, and also things like personal data warehousing of one's communications, etc. etc. we are not in need of another app (i don't even know what platforms this will run on -- linux? probably not.) that does less than what email did 40 years ago.
- dorian-graph 10y agoRelated: Slow web movement http://jackcheng.com/the-slow-web http://jackcheng.com/the-slow-web http://theslowweb.com/ http://theslowweb.com/
- yumaikas 10y agoIs there an actual app here, or is this just a website describing something that would be nice to have right now?
- Karrot_Kream 10y agoSeems like the "watch" feature is what makes this idea interesting. You receive batched updates for a channel when you're not paying attention to it, and if both participants in the channel are paying attention, then you receive real-time messages. You're limited in the number of channels you can pay attention to. I don't really see what's stopping Messenger, Slack, et al. for adding a "work" or "focus" mode that achieves this trivially though.
- partycoder 10y agoYou can do this on any e-mail client by just using "offline mode". Now, I don't like the concept. It opens the possibilities to a world of excuses and lack of accountability.
- christophe971 10y agoAnyone interested in interruption free messaging should check out WiredIn: https://wiredinapp.com https://wiredinapp.com It's an existing product, so you can try it yourself. The biggest difference is that the interruptions are happening at the same time for the whole team, therefore increasing the total quiet-time of the company.
- taco_emoji 10y agoFlagged for being a landing page for something that doesn't exist.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- rco8786 10y agoSemi-ironic that the very first FAQ is about how to circumvent the main feature of the service, no?
- gavinpc 10y agoIt's been years since I've pointed out that something doesn't work when cookies are blocked, since it's at least half of the demos I click on. But out of curiosity, I just checked for an error message on this (blank) page: SecurityError: The operation is insecure. e.exports.getItem() So... it's a local storage call, which uses the domain's cookie permissions. That makes more sense (than cookies). Still, how can a first visit to a site require a getItem call before displaying anything at all? Others commenters are saying this is not even a demo, but just a landing page. Wow. You might be overengineering.
- zyxley 10y ago> Still, how can a first visit to a site require a getItem call before displaying anything at all? Something like "the index.html page is empty, and gets populated from other templates by (insert Javascript framework here)". There's this weird fetish now for doing literally everything in Javascript instead of rendering pages server-side ever.
- gavinpc 10y agoSo make this your storage module: // For a given domain, localStorage uses the same permissions as cookies. When // cookies are blocked, attempts to access localStorage will throw a Security // exception. We do that test once here so that we can safely test for this // object everywhere else. define(function() { try { var K = '__test', V = 1, s = window.localStorage; if (s) { s.setItem(K, V); if (V == s.getItem(K)) { s.removeItem(K); return s; } } } catch(e) {} return null; }); I mean, I like javascript too. But whether or not your site is rendered entirely by javascript, you should be feature testing for localStorage. And if your site is rendered entirely by javascript, (1) it's impossible that rendering to a first-time visitor can depend on something previously stored there. (2) your site will be hosed by any uncaught error during load For this to happen on an essentially static page is just laughable. /rant. Okay, I'm good until 2020.
- 0xTJ 10y agoIf this turns out to be useful, I could see a situation in which this could be very useful. I've always disliked the way in which calls and SMS disrupt people's actions.
- jelder 10y agoThis is just email.