4 ms·

Hey, if people want news in their email, your service seems great. I just think email is a weird platform for it, you know? Email is where I go to exchange elec

Hey, if people want news in their email, your service seems great. I just think email is a weird platform for it, you know? Email is where I go to exchange electronic mail with other people - it's asynchronous electronic mail. For alerts, news, and time-sensitive stuff there are a lot more platforms or on-demand stuff (like going to a news website, or in my case just glancing at a news overlay i have on my desktop). Don't get me wrong - people who want to use email this way deserve the most customizable and yet straightforward way of getting it and this looks useful for that. I just think email as a platform in this case is a one-forward-two-back thing.

xux 13y ago
I see what you mean. I made Bit of News based on my experience as a student. A lot of my friends read email in the morning on the go on iPhones - walking to class, riding the bus, etc. And I imagine it as a way to quickly read what's happening in the morning while you have nothing to do. That's also why every change I make, I always prioritize how it looks on the iPhone first lol I'm not in the work environment so I can't personally imagine Bit of News to be read in Outlook / Apple Mail / Gmail on desktop while sitting in a chair. Like you said, in that environment email is probably best for time sensitive / work related things. YMMV!
Too 13y ago
News are usually not as time sensitive as you think, and if they really are then all your colleagues around you will already be talking about it. I would find it comforting to be able to finish reading the news every day, just like a news paper. I also like the way you can refer to stories if everyone read the same news, "did you read the top news", as opposed to hacker news where items on the front page can go up and down by the minute. The constant refreshing of news is such a time sink. Picking the right stories for a fixed list of stories of course requires good editorizing
e12e 13y ago
Email is great for read-mostly (or even read-only) things like email lists and various summaries and or editorialized contents -- if you have a good email reader that lets you clearly distinguish the two (eg: filter out mails with precedence: bulk/list-id set etc to folders that doesn't pop up alerts or get in the way of "actual people" trying to reach you). I suppose part of the reason why I like email lists so much is the lack of redundant formatting. Just stick to the de-facto plain-text ways of formatting mail: star for bold, _underscore_ for underline (arguably redundant in itself), angle-brackets for quotation. Reply inline/below the person you're quoting. No graphical smilies. No suddenly changing text size. Just a strong focus on content and prose. Granted, for actual news, I might want to see images -- and that's a bit of a challenge, sending out attachments to a large list doesn't sound all that appealing -- then again, we do have more bandwidth now than 20 years ago -- shouldn't actually be much of a problem.

xux 13y ago

I see what you mean. I made Bit of News based on my experience as a student. A lot of my friends read email in the morning on the go on iPhones - walking to class, riding the bus, etc. And I imagine it as a way to quickly read what's happening in the morning while you have nothing to do. That's also why every change I make, I always prioritize how it looks on the iPhone first lol I'm not in the work environment so I can't personally imagine Bit of News to be read in Outlook / Apple Mail / Gmail on desktop while sitting in a chair. Like you said, in that environment email is probably best for time sensitive / work related things. YMMV!

Too 13y ago

News are usually not as time sensitive as you think, and if they really are then all your colleagues around you will already be talking about it. I would find it comforting to be able to finish reading the news every day, just like a news paper. I also like the way you can refer to stories if everyone read the same news, "did you read the top news", as opposed to hacker news where items on the front page can go up and down by the minute. The constant refreshing of news is such a time sink. Picking the right stories for a fixed list of stories of course requires good editorizing

e12e 13y ago

Email is great for read-mostly (or even read-only) things like email lists and various summaries and or editorialized contents -- if you have a good email reader that lets you clearly distinguish the two (eg: filter out mails with precedence: bulk/list-id set etc to folders that doesn't pop up alerts or get in the way of "actual people" trying to reach you). I suppose part of the reason why I like email lists so much is the lack of redundant formatting. Just stick to the de-facto plain-text ways of formatting mail: star for bold, _underscore_ for underline (arguably redundant in itself), angle-brackets for quotation. Reply inline/below the person you're quoting. No graphical smilies. No suddenly changing text size. Just a strong focus on content and prose. Granted, for actual news, I might want to see images -- and that's a bit of a challenge, sending out attachments to a large list doesn't sound all that appealing -- then again, we do have more bandwidth now than 20 years ago -- shouldn't actually be much of a problem.