I had been thinking about something like that too some years ago. Subject or first line of the mail should act as headers for the mail client extension parser.

I had been thinking about something like that too some years ago. Subject or first line of the mail should act as headers for the mail client extension parser. You could tag the social object you send out (event, picture, status update) and users could subscribe to those (the client would just filter out)(it solves the problem of being interested in an author's upcoming books and social comments but not in his comments on his family vacation). Likewise you could choose who get your updates. Problem is you don't have a mean to publicly advertise your status and offer a way to subscribe. That would be a third party provider. I can imagine someone fetching everyone's updates and providing a mechanism to just resend the mail via a public web repository that would act as a public registration hub. That would be a huge data mine though. Unless you add pgp in the mix and then you have to hit the mark on the client pgp handling to easily allow close friends to give out their public key. Wouldn't that make a fun POC project ? I remember I was thinking about it when pownce came out. I still believe the net would be so much more fun with the likes of pownce and w.a.s.t.e around :(. I remember having some actual conversations on w.a.s.t.e. That's never happening with torrents.