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Email, an idea so old that it's new
- vivekpreddy 13y agoJason Calacanis has his Launch Ticker (http://launch.co/ http://launch.co/) that sends a couple emails per day with summaries of the day's top tech news. It's now a subscription only service, but it definitely cuts the time I spend looking for Tech News. Not 100% sure, but I think he's launching Inside.com that may have a similar take...
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- diminoten 13y agoI've been using Circa for the past few months (maybe even up to a year?), and I much prefer it to email. I've come to associate email with either personal correspondence, technical support, or spam. The thing about a website or an app is that it's segmented. I have to actively decide, "Now's the time for this activity" instead of an email deciding for me. Also, I didn't know theSkimm was a young-women's thing. My girlfriend (a young woman) gets it, but I didn't think it was specifically "for" her.
- xux 13y agoYes emails tend to be associated with all the bad things. Usually though if a user subscribe and expects it everyday, it'll unlikely get marked as spam / unsubscribe And yeah that's their target market. I forgot where I read this but they "aim to change the way young female professionals read the news". Don't quote me on that though.
- Raphael 13y agoEmail syncs between devices. Circa is great on my tablet, but absent on my laptop.
- icebraining 13y agoThe thing about a website or an app is that it's segmented. I have to actively decide, "Now's the time for this activity" instead of an email deciding for me. That's what filters and labels are for. I follow a few medium-traffic mailing lists, but I don't let them flood my Inbox, they go straight to the label which I can peruse later. Nowadays even "noobs" are using them, thanks to Gmail recent tabbed interface. We just need a new for News and this service would fit right in.
- diminoten 13y agoFilters and labels do nothing for this problem at all, because the email still either says, "I'm here, look at me" in some way, or it doesn't, and is entirely forgotten. The solution would be to incorporate checking the folder every time I want to read some news, which involves way more gestures/taps and intent than if I want to read news in Circa (one tap).
- icebraining 13y agoYes, I was thinking about checking the label when you want to read the news. I'm not criticizing your approach if it works for you, I'm just saying that email doesn't have to be pre-emptive and force an activity upon you; you can shape it. The solution would be to incorporate checking the folder every time I want to read some news, which involves way more gestures/taps and intent than if I want to read news in Circa (one tap). Well, I guess it depends on your OS/email client. Gmail on Android has a widget for opening a specific label directly from the home screen, so it would be just one tap as well. I use K-9, which I don't think has the same feature, but two taps (open client, click on folder) is good enough for me :)
- diminoten 13y agoDon't you see the kinds of gyrations and hoops you're having to jump through just to get email to work even remotely similarly as an actual app? Not to mention all the one-click-for-more, filter-by-category, etc. features that come with a native app. It just doesn't make sense.
- spang 13y agoYeah, what is it that makes theSkimm specifically for young women? The woman in the logo? I read theSkimm and I'm a young woman, but my impression is that it's written for the busy general public. How is "young women" more niche a target than male techies or, say, ops developers?
- devindotcom 13y agoI personally like email because I don't usually have to deal with the worst of it, but the argument that it's useful because we all use it seems... incomplete. We all have addresses, should we be sending more mail? We all have pens, should we switch to longhand? Email is good for some stuff but not other stuff, no need to oversell it as a platform it was never meant to be and never will be.
- xux 13y agoGood thoughts and I agree! The overloading of email is a huge problem, and no one wants more junk. So it comes down to receiving things that you really want. With Bit of News, it's easy to unsubscribe with one click. If people didn't want it, they would have unsubscribed. At least that's what I would do. I've found that people tend to like emails that they expect, and dislike the ones that are out of the blue. If you expect it everyday, it's a pleasure instead of an annoyance.
- timrosenblatt 13y ago"it's easy to unsubscribe with one click. If people didn't want it, they would have unsubscribed" Be careful with this assumption. It might surprise you how many people won't bother to click unsubscribe (no matter how obvious you make the option) b/c they just click "spam". I have friends who have been caught by this one in the past.
- xux 13y agoThat's a good point but I think it's a weak assumption. So far I haven't received any spam reports from Mailchimp - hopefully that's because I haven't received any instead of Mailchimp failing to catch any haha...
- frandroid 13y agoWhich is why people need to put their Unscubscribe buttons in large at the top of their emails too, not just in tiny script at the bottom. :)
- jiggy2011 13y agoIs it really that strange an idea to build a startup focused on email? Sendgrid, mailchimp etc seem to do fine. Not to mention the various tools and services for email migration, backup, hosting etc. If anything email seems like a much safer bet than building something for twitter, considering the number of businesses that rely on it and the fact that you're less likely to be screwed over by some policy decision.
- xux 13y agoSendgrid, Mailchimp are email services. They them-self don't provide the content. Where as Bit of News is a news services that relies on email. And yes emails are unstable, especially with the way Gmail handles them / attempt to segregate different types of emails.
- timrosenblatt 13y agoHave you seen http://nuzzel.com/ http://nuzzel.com/ ? It's another one that sends links out with daily updates.
- xux 13y agoCool! This sounds like http://www.news.me/ http://www.news.me/ before the team bought Digg and pivoted. It seems social news via email didn't work for them, so I'm looking forward to how nuzzel will handle this.
- mapgrep 13y agoI'm a News.me subscriber and it seems to still work the same. They did sign up me up (I think?) for the Digg Newsletter, which is annoying. But I still get the News.me newsletter too. I know part of the original value add for News.me is that it was informed by bit.ly data on who actually clicked which links. I assume there's very little of that data left as bit.ly usage is not what it once was. But just by counting links (and replies? faves?) of people in my twitter stream it is still very useful for me personally.
- chandraonline 13y agoI have used nuzzel since beta. It is neither curated nor trying to figure out whats relevant to you. Instead it uses your twitter stream to show you relevant news and also has a few featured feeds of other prominent tech people. I can easily catch up on my tech news (most of what I follow in twitter) every morning. full disclosure: I know the folks that built it.
- biesnecker 13y agoSMS must be a bigger platform than email, no?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- bertil 13y agoIn terms of people covered worldwide, yes. That was my initial reaction too. It does suffer from proprietary standards and massive costs, tough; message length is also far too small for news summary, and the addition billion from e-mail are less interested in global news and more in news that isn’t always digitalised yet. So: technically right, but for all intents and purposes, it’s the largest possible for the service considered.
- biesnecker 13y agoGood points all, bertil. I appreciate the thoughtful response!
- pshin45 13y ago> 1.) Email is the world’s largest platform. > 2.) Engagement in email far outshines apps. > 3.) Everyone else is too jaded to take advantage of it. This is no doubt the same rationale for Square Cash[1] i.e. send cash to your friends via email. I wonder how their adoption has been though, compared to an analog product like Venmo[2] which uses a mobile app approach. [1] https://square.com/cash https://square.com/cash [2] https://venmo.com/ https://venmo.com/
- bct 13y agoIn Canada the banks provide this service, and it's used very widely.
- xux 13y agoYeah sounds like a perfect way for Square to latch onto an already-popular platform and ride the wave. It just makes sense. You're already emailing the other person, why not also send money too? You're already reading your email, why not checkout today's news? I'm interested to see where email goes. Maybe it'll become a hub for all your internet activities.
- boomzilla 13y agoEvery program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can. --Jamie Zawinski
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- xux 13y agoMaybe I didn't specify clearly, but it's targeted toward young professional women. So that's around ages 17-29. Checkout their latest issue[1]. It's heavily editorialized and obviously appeal to a very specific audience. Not my cup of tea but a lot of people enjoy it. http://www.theskimm.com/2014/03/31/skimm-for-april-1st-2 http://www.theskimm.com/2014/03/31/skimm-for-april-1st-2
- flycaliguy 13y agoThis article reminds me of why I find the buzzword usage of "social" so irritating. The web has always been social! My most memorable and rewarding experiences on the internet will always be in the e-mail conversations I've shared with others around the world.
- xux 13y agoTotally agree! There are some experiences I'd personally experience alone. That's why I chose against making Bit of News social. Reading is, and has always been, an individual activity. Just you and the words. The rise of social media just cluttered our attention span, sharing this and sharing that. Reading is enjoyable when you're completely focused!
- Curmudgel 13y ago>Reading is, and has always been, an individual activity. That's not true. Novels written in the 19th and 18th century, which featured long and complex passages, were often read aloud. Poems with meter are usually read aloud as well. Religious prayers are still sung and chanted. >The rise of social media just cluttered our attention span A generation ago, people said the same thing about a kind of social media: television. The generation before that worried about movies, as well as the decline of letter writing because of spread of telephones. The generation before that was worried about the telegraph destroying the art of letter writing as well. Movies, telephones, television, and texting do not have permanent deleterious effects on your attention span. All you need to do is make a commitment and set aside time for reading.
- lazylizard 13y agoyes. actually,its older than 18/19th century. check out chaucer, for example.
- dec0dedab0de 13y agoNot to be too pedantic, but email isn't part of "the web". Historically the social aspects of the internet were elsewhere email, IRC, Usenet, etc. The Web was mostly(only?) a network of documents.
- crozewski 13y agoI think 8:30am is a bit late to send the news. I think a lot of people who work "traditional" hours are already up, out the door, and have made a dent in their day. I like to read the news before I get started.
- xux 13y agoI actually did tons of A/B testing and 8:30am works way better than 6am (in terms of open rates). Honestly I've no idea why, but I have a few theories.
- AznHisoka 13y ago6AM? Barely anyone is awake.
- xux 13y agoI used that to compare because a lot of others email out at that time: Digg, WSJ, Quartz, etc.
- transitionality 13y agoThat is so odd. You would think that an email sent at 6 am would get more people than one sent at 8:30 am, because it gets the news-at-the-desk people and the early-riser, news-during-breakfast people. Of course, one can't argue with data. But it's odd.
- marssaxman 13y agoHow many people still work traditional hours? How many of those people would be interested in an email news service? Seems entirely reasonable to me that the intersection might be small, and that the people who want to read the news at 6 AM would not be interested in doing so by email.
- joelberman 13y agoI usually wake around 6:00 and check my mail. For me the best is a short summary of stories on email, say the first 4-5 lines of each item, and clickable. If a web page was customizable, that would be fine too, but as the OP says, if you are already in email it is easiest to stay in email.
- tgeorge 13y agoI've subscribed to designboom for email http://www.designboom.com/ http://www.designboom.com/ Kinda wish hackaday had one. Btw what's with the countdown?
- xux 13y agoCountdown? How do you mean
- tgeorge 13y agohttp://hackaday.com/space/ http://hackaday.com/space/ Press Y on it
- crisnoble 13y agoI suppose you haven't tried IFTTT yet? I use it (among many other things) to subscribe to posts from blogs like that all the time. For example: https://ifttt.com/recipes/158209-hackaday-posts-to-email https://ifttt.com/recipes/158209-hackaday-posts-to-email
- tgeorge 13y agoThank you!
- snipek 13y agoOne of my side project is trying to make email as a web portal, that is, letting people do as many things as possible in email -- http://snipek.com http://snipek.com. Well, I dogfood this project a lot in my daily life :) 1) Readability inside email (http://snipek.com/read http://snipek.com/read). Send a url to read@snipek.com and you'll get a reply with readable content of the web page. And it becomes a way to navigate through links in email. You send a link to read@snipek.com, then you'll get the content of the web page in email, without leaving mail client to browser. 2) Read news (http://snipek.com/news/ http://snipek.com/news/) 3) Create web page for your email messages, so you can share the web page on social network (http://snipek.com/web http://snipek.com/web) -- forward any message to web@snipek.com
- snipek 13y agoFrom metrics, seems users use web@snipek.com more than other functions of this project, so I just made snipek.com/web the front page (snipek.com) last night ...
- petercooper 13y agoMy main business is sending news in a variety of programming niches on a weekly basis via e-mail to over 170k subscribers.. and it's a successful and growing business (at least by historical standards, though not VC/SV ones - six figure net profits). I would agree with most of what it said in this post.
- keithpeter 13y agoNiches. I'd pay a small monthly fee to have news relevant to my niche clipped, summarised and sent to me.
- xux 13y agoWhat niche, if you don't mind sharing?
- keithpeter 13y agoUK education.
- aronvox 13y agoCheck out http://www.klipperapp.com. http://www.klipperapp.com.. you can feed in sources and get 'klipped' articles.
- Concours 13y agoWe help people do this with our service: https://www.feedsapi.org/ https://www.feedsapi.org/ , maybe it's exactly what you are looking for. It works not only with email but with Evernote, Instapaper and rss readers + it clips the full article content.
- stronglikedan 13y agoI miss Coder Weekly, and your service sounds very similar, but without the niche aspect. Where do I sign up? EDIT: Thanks. Subbed.
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- TheRealDunkirk 13y agoEmail sucked for a decade because spam got out of control. I ran a hand-built email server in my home for years, and know this problem decently well. However, with the ability to train their filters based on SO MANY people, Google fixed it. (Other systems vastly improved as well.) With the signal-to-noise ratio being largely a solved problem these days, it makes email a viable "platform" again.
- thatthatis 13y agoI've been using email as an application platform for years, and I agree with everything this author is saying. I wish, however, that he hadn't written this article for two reasons. 1) Email suffers from the tragedy of the commons. The more email that is sent the less valuable each email app is. 2) Current email tools are woefully inadequate to deal with the existing volume of email users receive. Worst is the fact that email forces users into a LIFO queue and doesn't allow for import-based ordering. We need innovation in email processing more than we need more email based applications. (Even SMS has a better model for organizing data than modern email: one thread per counter party group.)
- e12e 13y ago> 1) Email suffers from the tragedy of the commons. The more email that is sent the less valuable each email app is. I'm not sure it's so much the tragedy of the commons, as it is "any fool can mash some text and whatever random markup he thinks works down the pipe and call it email". With proper use of headers (and x-headers) most setups can handle mail just fine (filter on delivery with sieve or similar). > 2) Current email tools are woefully inadequate to deal with the existing volume of email users receive. I've yet to see anyone roll out proper server based filtering that truly enables the "regular" user to do what "power users" already can do easily. I think sieve coupled with imap and server-side search holds great promise, but I don't know of any clients that actually make good use of this. The alternative approach of indexing for fast search/filter on the client only really works for a single client (eg: "hosted" mail, either webmail, only reading email on a single computer (eg: laptop) or reading email over ssh). I suppose we need a standard way of a) syncing email (like imap), b) syncing filters (like sieve) and c) syncing indexes and search/view/tag preferences. I'm not aware of anything that fills c). > Worst is the fact that email forces users into a LIFO queue and doesn't allow for import-based ordering. I'm not sure what you mean here. Are there clients that don't allow reverse sorting by message date? That sounds like a broken client. That people don't use the feature is another matter... > We need innovation in email processing more than we need more email based applications. Looking at the design of MH [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MH_Message_Handling_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MH_Message_Handling_System ], and sup/notmuch -- it would seem we should've come much further than we have. As a vim-user I quietly resent the cult of Emacs for probably having a "good enough" email system, and therefore no longer contributing improvement for "the rest of us" ;-) > (Even SMS has a better model for organizing data than modern email: one thread per counter party group.) Most clients allow sorting by thread ( http://www.jwz.org/doc/threading.html http://www.jwz.org/doc/threading.html ) or grouping by participants? Now, if you want to argue that the state of email readers on Android is atrocious, I'll agree without further comment.
- teemo_cute 13y agoThat's what elite marketers have been telling us for years. The problem is many people are attracted to bells and whistles that is without substance. In the end it's all about the content of the message; the messenger would soon be forgotten (or be a lot less relevant, at least).
- minikites 13y agoReminds me of http://evening-edition.com/ http://evening-edition.com/ They had news for a few different time-zones and it was amazing, but I don't think they got enough funding to keep it going, they stopped at the end of 2013.
- califsp484 13y agoThis reminds me of a service that I used in the past, called Evening Edition (http://evening-edition.com/ http://evening-edition.com/). Thank you for bringing back a service where I can receive a daily digest of today's news. Combined with SaneBox or Unroll.me, your daily email helps to raise the value of the few e-mails that make it to my inbox.
- betadreamer 13y agosubscribed! I think its a good idea. Its like in the old days when my dad looks at the newspaper everyday. Instead i don't look at the newspapers, i read emails.
- unicornporn 13y agoI'm afraid I stopped reading when he called email a platform.
- p_ngu 13y agoI run a similar service over at The Daily Water Cooler http://www.the-dwc.co/ http://www.the-dwc.co/ so I definitely agree with your line of thinking regarding email as one of the most easily accessible platforms. My service might be closer to Dave Pell's NextDraft or a more general Term Sheet by Dan Primack though because it's really just me curating the content so I generally add more personal flavor and don't really have an algorithm to help source the content. Kind of curious where TheSkimm goes though. They got some nice funding recently from Homebrew but clearly are aiming to be more than just a newsletter. They also used to be more young professional woman-centric, but have started to slowly downplay that. I gotta wonder though, why the Ivy League focus? Anyway, good luck with the venture! Happy to see more people informed about the news.
- lugg 13y agoA lot of psudeo arguments against this in this thread. I don't think there is any problem with using the "platform" in this way its pretty much a newsletter or a mailing list which is very standard. I'm interested in seeing what you can really do with email looking at it as a platform with 2.0 eyes in mind. One other thing. I think call intent will be what sets you apart and if that's the case why does the platform matter, why can't you have email, RSS, and a web app? I get you want to focus on doing something new with something old. That's cool. Just dont cut potential power readers off because you use the wrong platform. Be email first RSS second if it helps you think about it. (No reason you can't pivot other platforms later)
- jmzbond 13y agoI could say the same about snail mail to a degree. Plenty of start-ups have talked about how their thank you cards were "revolutionary." NextDoor is using postcards to validate addresses and for some good old fashioned marketing. Where else can we go back in time??? =)
- polm23 13y agoI like getting news in my email; when Google Reader died I switched my RSS over to mail and haven't missed a beat. One thing I would like, though, is a link batcher - whether I'm on the train or just busy I often see something I want to read later, and I use Pinboard to save it like that (and I've used Pocket and Instapaper before), but the backlog just builds up into a bottomless hole. It'd be great to get an email the next day saying "here's your queue" so I can do a second round of pruning.
- MojoJolo 13y agoHi Xiao, how you doin'? Still using PyTeaser? Got a question though. How do you determine the news to send? Do you check read it all or you have an automated system in place for it?
- xux 13y agoHi Jolo! It's part manual, part automated now. I queue up popular stories and pick them by hand - so there's a diverse range of news.
- joerich 13y agoIMO, I don’t think the platform is the key in this kind of business. As you can see in this thread some people like emails and other people like apps or whatever. I think the key is the quality of content. When I read this: The Ivy experience We select from a variety of topics and sources to help you become well informed. Join thousands of Ivy League students in reading bit•of•news. I think , “who are “we”?”, “who are choosing instead of me the news?”, “you” select a variety of topics that maybe I (as a user) don’t even care… which makes users get bored or jaded… and opt-out of it. I have just subscribed and I haven’t been asked if I am interested in sport, tech, politics, science, biology,fashion,travel,business… and if I start receiving that kind of topics that I don’t like or think are not interesting but the person in charge thinks they are cool… there is a problem… The quality content is different for almost each user. For example, Flipboard asks you before you open an account to know what you want to be informed. They have quality content for each user.
- 0bp 13y agoI like the idea. I received the first mail today. News about negative happenings over the world. What I personally would like is positive news delivered to my inbox. For negative news I can watch CNN, Fox and whatnot.