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Inside continues to bet on email, the “largest social network”
- gsich 9y agoEmail is like the one and only vendor/device/programming language independent way of communication.
- eli 9y agoWell, unless you try to use an HTML layout technique more modern than tables and spacer gifs.
- jimktrains2 9y agoAlso XMPP, but that's not gained a lot of traction. IRC also doesn't seem primed to burst back onto the scene. (To be honest, the only thing I really like about slack over IRC is history. I wonder if that couldn't be processed in a more peer-to-peer manner over IRC?)
- TomMarius 9y agoYou can run a ZNC bouncer for a quarter of the price of one Slack account.
- jimktrains2 9y agoI still lose history if my bouncer goes offline.
- TomMarius 9y agoYou don't lose anything (assuming your whole team uses the same bouncer, which is a good solution, IMO), logs will remain saved on the disk drive, but people will be unable to connect. Personally I have a bouncer running on a VPS since 2008 with 100% uptime so far, costs me $3/month and is used by 10 people.
- jimktrains2 9y agoIf my bouncer goes down, I don't have the history for the period for which it was down. Congrats on 100% uptime, but that's not the numbers one should plan by.
- TomMarius 9y agoIf the bouncer goes down and your team uses only the bouncer, someone fixes the problem before new history is made, and nothing is lost. Fixing the problem means rebooting the machine, there is absolutely nothing that can go wrong with a simple IRC bouncer.
- jimktrains2 9y agoI'm really not sure what you're talking about. I mean in general, not one very specific use case.
- erikpukinskis 9y agoI used to hear people saying all the time "well, the correct way to handle [messaging problem X] is to use XMPP" but more recently people seem to talk of it like a dead man walking. Is it really so bad? Is there anything on the horizon that could replace email as an open messaging protocol? I guess kilobyte-sized text snippets are probably a pretty good fit for a blockchain-based trustless messaging service. A million monkeys are hacking on that right now, right? Maybe that will just leapfrog everything else?
- jimktrains2 9y agoI've never implemented it, but from a user standpoint, there aren't any widely-available services that people seem to use. gchat appears to be shutting their endpoints down. Facebook shut theirs down in 2014. People got familiar with email because their ISP/employer provided them with an email address. Eventually it became a thing on it's own. Chat was never like that. There was always one service you used, and all your friends used. Now that's gchat and facebook chat.
- larma 9y agoJust to be precise: Google and Facebook did not shut down their xmpp servers, they just disabled the ability to connect to them via xmpp clients, to make sure everyone uses their web clients, so they don't loose any data they could've collected otherwise... The original Google Talk ifnrastructure is still up and running and clients can connect to it using a protocol derived from XMPP (basically a subset XMPP converted to protobuf) and use it to message devices (Android uses it push messaging, but technically you can also send messages directly between devices). It's not directly used for text messaging though.
- paxy 9y agoIf you want to send plain text, yes. There is a lot of variation among clients when it comes to formatting and layout however. But then by those constraints you can also count HTTP or SSH or Telnet or any other protocol at that layer.
- Spivak 9y agoNobody outside of business and advertising cares how annoying it is to write carefully formatted HTML emails. For any end user, email is the universal communication mechanism.
- paxy 9y agoFor text based communication SMS absolutely dwarfs email.
- huhweirdyhat 9y agoIn what respect? I don't think i've ever gotten an important SMS outside of personal communications, let alone the 50+ emails I get a day that are considered "important" in some way.
- AznHisoka 9y agoAlso very few people care how well formatted your html emails are. Give me plaintext anyday.
- erikpukinskis 9y agoI think your OP probably meant to constrain the point to messaging. HTTP, telnet, etc aren't really messaging, implying asynchronous delivery, they're socket protocols. I guess in theory you could leave an HTTP packet for someone to pick up months later, but existing networks would time it out.
- jedikv 9y agoExactly, it's much more portable than any other electronic comms system atm.
- tnecniv 9y agoIRC?
- pmlnr 9y agoIRC is centralised. You can't send message from server X to server Y. XMPP and Matrix can.
- ptman 9y agoMatrix also isn't too set on chat. It would be quite possible to send email over Matrix. Maybe once Matrix has some kind of solution to spam that would be something to explore. With bridges to SMTP, if you'd like.
- justboxing 9y ago> For others, it might mean one original article blurred out in a newsletter. (Inside’s newsletter CMS is built to handle toggling between paid-for and free content.) Anyone know of an open source or paid Newsletter Management CMS? I'm working on a content site like inside, for a very small sports niche, and am thinking of making it a daily newsletter with paid subscriptions, instead of a regular website driven by WordPress or some other CMS, with ads, which would be super annoying and not monetize well these days.
- sogen 9y agoHave heard good things about Sendy https://sendy.co https://sendy.co Self-hosted AFAIR
- jasonmcalacanis 9y agoWe built our own CMS after realizing there is nothing out there. Our CMS has the email-based paywall system, plus manages all the opens and pre-subscriptions (i.e. you can subscribe to new newsletters before we launch them). We just added a secret new feature: inside.com/alerts, which allows us to send news to people by SMS if they can't wait for the emails. In terms of paid newsletters, there will be 2-3 in each of 1,000 vertical with over $100-250,000 in revenue each based on what I can see.
- frankdenbow 9y agoCheck out https://www.getrevue.co/ https://www.getrevue.co/
- RandomInteger4 9y agoThis is tangential, but needs to be stated: What I've learned from email newletters is that Microsoft Outlook needs to die a swift and horrible death. There is absolutely no good reason why we should have to create email newsletters that require tables for layout.
- mgkimsal 9y agoyahoo, gmail and others need to fall in inline - they all seem to require tables.
- markdown 9y agoAt this point I'd settle for them all just supporting the exact same elements and properties in the exact same ways. The type of element is less important than there being consistency and documentation.
- JetSpiegel 9y agoThat and HTML email that doesn't have a text/plain alternative. Even the braindead conversion contain some nuggets of information.
- Spivak 9y agoIf you want your email to look the same on all clients text/plain is the way to go.
- Flimm 9y agoThat's not true. Plain text is usually hard wrapped with newlines, which leads to awful experiences on small screens.
- mi100hael 9y agoYou can send plain text encoding with format=flowed to avoid the hard wrap. Personally I prefer 80 chars, though. Still looks fine in landscape mode on any phone.
- aidenn0 9y agoe-mail seems to be dying fast. I have several friends (all under 30) who are only reachable via facebook or SMS; e-mail is an afterthought.
- UnpossibleJim 9y agoEven in a professional setting?
- ringaroundthetx 9y agoIf you are doing unskilled labor, you know the kind eligible for overtime at all, you or your employees are text message and Facebook. And the Facebook part is a big maybe if they are also under 30 and not that impressionable. Oh that have an address or two. Apple gave them one. A utility company gave them one. But its an afterthought
- aidenn0 9y agoDefine "professional;" inter-office communication, e-mail still wins. Independent contractors I've hired all prefer text. The gym I'm a member of uses a facebook group rather than e-mail for communcating things like changes to the regular hours or special events.
- UnpossibleJim 9y agoHuh. Good to know. Thanks =).. Ok. For the record, I am not under 30 (it's probably very obvious), and I was always a dork, even when I was under 30, way long ago in the stone age before cool cars were electric with touch screens (I'm pretty jealous of that, though).
- jimktrains2 9y agoI hear this from a lot of people online, but my group, which isn't majority techies may prefer FB for sharing photots, but any planning or broadcasts announcements are always via email.
- jasonmcalacanis 9y agoI hear people say this from time to time, but I think once you get to college and into the workforce you start to center your life around TXT and email. I view each email address as an LTV of $10-50 and every phone number as 2x that. Owning emails and phone numbers is the great asset any startup can have -- but so many founders miss this!
- andreasgonewild 9y agoIf you're more into the social part of networking than newsletters and don't mind a bit of privacy, Snackis might be worth a look: https://github.com/andreas-gone-wild/snackis https://github.com/andreas-gone-wild/snackis
- duck 9y agoA shameless plug, but if you like HN and email, my side-project, http://www.hackernewsletter.com/ http://www.hackernewsletter.com/, might be worth a look. Rolling past 50k subscribers this month.
- ethnic_throw 9y ago> All links are curated by hand from Hacker News. My fear is that I have a different taste than you. How do you curate it?
- duck 9y agoThat is 100% fair, but not an easy question to answer! I curate by hand using a custom tool that helps me search/filter articles and basically find a mix of things I like along with things that subscribers tend to click on. I tend to avoid "click-bait" type articles with little substance and try to get a good mix of things that were popular with things that should of stayed on the home page more. I've been doing this for seven years now, so I feel like I have something that works... but ultimately you'll have to see if it fits what you're looking for. :) A recent issue just so you can see an example: http://mailchi.mp/hackernewsletter/360 http://mailchi.mp/hackernewsletter/360
- MattSayar 9y agoI've been subscribed for a while, and I think this approach works great! There's plenty of links and sections to click on.
- joshmarinacci 9y agoAh. I think you are the reason my blog was slammed all of a sudden a few days after I hit the front page.
- duck 9y agoHa, yep! That was a great post and generated about 2,000 clicks.
- azurezyq 9y agoMaybe in US this holds, but things may be different in different places. I'm a Chinese living in the bay area. I think people here treat E-mails as part of their daily life probably because most of them began to use it before the mobile internet is a thing. On the contrary, in China where the majority internet users are mobile-savvy, WeChat is the new email. Actually E-mails are only for official communications there, and I don't think official communications can be treated as "social networks". I'm wondering if the same thing is happening in other developing countries where people first touched facebook/whatsapp before even knowing E-mail exists.
- paxy 9y agoSame with India and WhatsApp
- killerdhmo 9y agoCase in point why email will live forever.
- ringaroundthetx 9y agoGeneral rule of thumb for the US, the worst form of printed communication is typically the more official business savvy one. Probably some correlation to your observations.
- majormajor 9y agoYeah, there's a big list of global differences around "what technology was around when these systems started getting built." Results in a weird mix of things looking both more and less futuristic than wherever home is in certain places; for me this was most striking when visiting Japan a while back and seeing how automated with vending machines and such a lot of ramen shops were compared to the US, but at the same time how cash-based they still were - the vending machines were very clearly very mechanical, not networked or "smart" machines, that just processed paper money and nothing else.
- ImaCake 9y ago
- bkanber 9y agoI was intrigued, so I just looked at the "Inside Premium" plan -- $10/mo for one newsletter?? You can get a digital subscription to Washington Post and NYT for basically half that!
- jasonmcalacanis 9y agoNYT and Netflix are an exceptional value at $10 a month, but those are large scale consumer content. In the B2B content space, any content that saves folks a couple of hours a week is worth a LOT of money. in this case, $10-25 a month is nothing... really, it's like zero dollars in the context of a business executive making six figures.
- bkanber 9y agoI'm a business executive making six figures ;) Still not sure I'd pay for it out of pocket (but who knows!), but I missed the B2B angle on the first read and was reacting to the price point as a news consumer. IMO neither the article nor the premium page does a great job of showing me that kind of value -- the only allusions to B2B value I saw were "research reports" in the article and "let us be your research team" on the page. But I suppose that's because you're still figuring out what premium should be. Hope you figure it out and wishing you success here. I love me some email.
- ronack 9y agoI'm a longtime subscriber to Launch Ticker (their tech/startup newsletter). It lets me very quickly be kept abreast of fundraising and M&A activity relevant to my startup. Saves me about 30 minutes a day of visiting several popular tech news sites, so well worth $10/month to me.
- brongondwana 9y agoThe most important thing about email is that you get your own, immutable copy of every message. You can keep your copy and know that it will be exactly the same when you look at it next week, it won't have been silently (or even not silently) "corrected". It's both a blessing and a curse, as anybody who's accidentally emailed the wrong people or hit send before finishing editing knows, but it's the most powerful thing about email (and SMS or even fax for that matter!) - you get your own copy.
- ergothus 9y agoYou can also assume that copy will remain readable - standards and multiple vendors matter. I have no huge issue with moving to a more IM-based interaction as my default, but I've yet to find one that is actually compatible with them all. I need 3-5 apps to communicate to everyone right now, and in a few years some of those will be gone and new ones will be added.
- ams6110 9y agoThis is part of why I send email in plain text. HTML is probably not going away any time soon, but plain text has been around several decades longer at least.
- ryandrake 9y agoAt least HTML can be trivially converted to text. Who wants to bet that your conversations in WhatsApp, or WeChat, or Facebook, or whatever the kids are using today, are binary blobs that require a running, proprietary "app" to view, or only available through a cloud service?
- pmlnr 9y agoThat is only one important aspect. It's also provider-independent (as long as you own the domain, that is true) and is, by nature, decentralised. (Like really decentralised, even by redundancy provaded by MX record priority in DNS.)
- jasonwilk 9y agoSorry to be negative but 300k subs for an email newsletter is not a lot.
- pmlnr 9y ago"[...] People seem to hate email for the same reasons they once loved it. Email's underlying triumph, the quality that made it revolutionary, was that you could instantly deliver a written message to someone even if they weren't there to receive it. [...] Email is neutral, meaning that anyone can email anyone else with an email address. If you have a person's email address, your message will be delivered no matter who you are - whether the recipient is your oldest friend, your granddaughter, your boss's boss, or Beyoncé. The year the web was born, this flattening effect was astonishing. Anyone in an organization could communicate directly and immediately with anyone else, "regardless of rank" [...]" - Adrienne LaFrance, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/01/what-comes-after-email/422625/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/01/what-... I'd like to add one more very important aspect: you don't need to register with any or with yet another service, which will eventually fade into oblivion within a few years - or which will become so ignorant to privacy, like Facebook, that you end up deleting their apps and accounts. Email is a set of protocol and thus it _will_ outlive any centalised, closed, walled garden. (BTW this is what decentralisation people should understand: you need to build services using common protocols, not services which can be installed; mastodon is a bad example, activityfeeds or linked data are good ones)
- gramakri 9y ago> Email is a set of protocol and thus it _will_ outlive any centalised, closed, walled garden. What stops email going the way of XMPP?
- robertlagrant 9y agoThis is an interesting alternative to having a newspaper website: a newspaper via email. Not the first, I'm sure, but possibly the best organised.
- killerdhmo 9y agoA... news letter, if you will?
- hiisukun 9y agoI enjoy email, but get frustrated when conversations get long. Here is my favourite quote about email, which explains the issue lovingly: -- A: Because it reverses the logical flow of conversation. Q: Why is top posting frowned upon? A: Top-posting. Q: What is the most annoying thing on usenet and in email?
- bobbles 9y agoRun into this sort of problem all the time using Jira service desk, internal view of a ticket is new comments add to the bottom, customer view of the same ticket is that comments add to the top. Results in everyone using 'please see below' or 'above' and everyone being confused
- alkonaut 9y agoEmail should not be used for group conversation, period. From one person to many is OK. Between two people is also OK (They can usually keep a conversation consistent in some way). Group discussions with multiple people over email is usless. Discourse and similar is a much better alternative to that.
- email4ever 9y agoSo glad to see the pro-email comments! People seem so down on email, I made buttons for those of us who still like it: http://giantcatco.bigcartel.com/ http://giantcatco.bigcartel.com/
- petarb 9y agoBeen a subscriber to a few of their newsletters for a some months now and have to say the content is great. Can't wait to see what else the Inside team rolls out.
- askvictor 9y agoGoogle's Inbox is basically an email client reimagined as a social network feed. They might have cocked up g+ (and whatever is was before that), but this one they've done pretty well (as long as you don't think of it as just another email client).
- Chirael 9y agoBesides search-ability, one thing I love about email is that I know the sender isn't going to be notified when I read it. Contrast that with FB where I know the sender will see a little "read" notification, and then I have pressure to respond, etc.