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I've thought about building something that gives a social network type experience that is built on top of email. Any status update would get sent out to an ema
by derekp7 10y ago
I've thought about building something that gives a social network type experience that is built on top of email. Any status update would get sent out to an email list of your connections, and all the emails could be put in a specific mail folder using standard rules. A front end app would then scan that folder and give you a personalized page that represents the latest status based on what it sees in that folder. The raw messages themselves may contain various control messages (such as "friend requests" and "drop requests", but otherwise can be directly viewable too. But the main interface would be from a front-end app that runs on the user's PC or mobile device.
- gavinpc 10y agoI love this idea (if only for the motivation behind it). How would your "normal" mail client filter out the messages that are for this app? People have lots of different mail clients which they might not be able (or willing) to configure. Or would you expect a dedicated address.
- softawre 10y agoThe problem, of course, is who builds/maintains this, how do they get paid, and how do you pay the server fees.
- derekp7 10y agoThe app would run on the user's local PC or phone, and it would access data directly from their mailbox (and create a local DB from that data). So no backend server to worry about.
- gavinpc 10y agoWithout a third-party managing associations, how do you maintain that "friendship" is consensual? In other words, how do you prevent "I have your email address" from meaning "you're my friend now."
- derekp7 10y agoWhen you send a friend request to someone, their stuff is shared with you only if they accept the request on their end. If they reject the friend request, then anything coming from you that they don't want can be handled as spam (the client side software would just filter the content itself in that case).
- derekp7 10y agoAlmost all email clients have some sort of filtering. And the email messages would all have a keyword in the subject line, so filtering could be accomplished by that (or via an x-header). The app itself could automatically create the filters for various web hosted email systems too.
- Natanael_L 10y agoI recall (but can't find) having seen a social network built on Keybase.io's encrypted filesystem (KBFS), where your public data is signed stored in your public folder, and your private data is encrypted and shared with only those you choose. Everything is based on files.
- SalimoS 10y agoI'm sure you are talking about mailing list :)