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This is an interesting idea that uses email/IMAP as a transport for social message passing. It plays to the strengths of multipart email messages having a human
by _sh 14y ago
This is an interesting idea that uses email/IMAP as a transport for social message passing. It plays to the strengths of multipart email messages having a human-readable part that is as rich as possible for email client viewing (when users aren't in a social-aware application), and a machine readable part (JSON) for plugging in to the rest of the social infrastructure.
Here is their own summary of problems with this approach (from the article):
* Not all users have a suitable email service (requires IMAP to support the
“read it if you feel like it” model).
* Servers tamper with messages as a normal part of existing infrastructure
(especially mailing lists and spam filters).
* Basic IMAP does not provide the full gamut of features required (some mail
servers don't support all IMAP verbs).
* Mail systems may have standard protocols, but individual implementations
may have different performance characteristics.
- dredmorbius 14y agoThere are certain message formats which should not be tampered. PGP/MIME attachments (RFC 2015 / RFC 3156) for example, though many mime application attachments generally don't take well to being arbitrarily modified. Doesn't mean it doesn't happen. But it shouldn't.
- mike-cardwell 14y agoYeah. Try looking at an email before it goes into Microsoft Exchange via SMTP, then compare it to the same email that Exchange then goes on to expose via IMAP. They bare no resemblance.
- alexanderh 14y agoSomething like this doesn't NEED to work "ontop of" email though. It just needs to work LIKE email, and be decentralized, where anyone can run a "facebook like" social networking server that all know how to talk to eachother. I certainly do applaud efforts like Diaspora. If only they could actually take off. Maybe this approach of working "on top of" the existing email infrastructure will help adoption, IDK. But It seems like it will be equally as challenging to make popular. Might as well write a new protocol that is simply similar in its decentralized nature, so we dont have these issues.
- icebraining 14y agoThe protocols already exist, but who will run the servers?
- ryanhuff 14y agoWhy not ISP's?
- icebraining 14y agoWhat's their incentive?
- pfraze 14y agoYeah, I think you could combine a number of existing services to make a network- email, twitter, HN, github, a linking service (this github profile = this twitter account) and an address book service would get you going for a dev network. The challenge would be to combine the data meaningfully, but I think the basics can be done. Plus, your address book amd email could be private services.