FWD:Everyone

FWD:Everyone
fwdeveryone.com

- 99%+ of non-commercial email threads now parse correctly, better than Gmail in most cases. E.g. check out the inline reply parsing here: https://www.fwdeveryone.com/t/Gb8CYKvGS6uFSXdb_hwiTA/blog-po...

- We now support oEmbed, so you can embed email directly within Reddit and Medium posts. And also within Confluence, your own site / blog, and hundreds of other places. C.f.: https://www.reddit.com/r/nyc/comments/87a7my/restaurants_wor...

- The site now works really well on mobile and tablet.

- We've added organizations. Organizations can have public and private repositories. When publishing email to a public repository, by default permission request emails only go out to non-members of the organization. (And permission is never required to publish stuff to a private repository.)

- You can now anonymize any message contributor. Anonymized message contributors don't receive permission requests. Users can later anonymize or de-anonymize themselves at any point. (This works even if message contributors haven't yet created an account.)

- Threads are now SEO optimized. We basically take all the incoming garbage HTML that is modern email, and output it as really clean and minimalist HTML. (This also ensures that the redaction feature never breaks.)

- We now have pretty decent video tutorials: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zwh9TJWoG6k&list=PLJAEYmnEjI...

- Users and organizations now have RSS feeds of their email, e.g.: https://api.fwdeveryone.com/user/inbox.atom?username=alex391...

- Lots of recirc features, e.g. trending threads.

New features in the pipeline:

- Permission requests are becoming optional, at least for now. Previously we required permission for all non-anonymized message contributors, now there will be an option to publish stuff immediately and let people anonymize themselves later if they want. If this is excessively abused we'll re-evaluate this, but we've tried to build things to incentivize good judgment.

- The front end is being completely re-written in React. Right now the front end loads in about 800ms, we're hoping to get it down to half that or less. (In comparison, the oEmbed loads in 80 - 130ms, hard to get much better without changing the speed of light.)

- We're building a Gmail plug-in. This will allow people to publish directly from their Gmail, and it won't require read-only access to the user's entire inbox. (Even though our privacy policy is very good!)

When we built the site we knew that no one needs or is looking for a new social network, so we figured that we aren't going to get many sign ups until people have read at least 100 really good threads on the site. We're not quite there yet, in terms of having enough content and traction for this to be a real business yet, but we're trending in the right direction and I'm hopeful we'll be close by the end of the year.

But yeah, overall we're basically just trying to make the Internet fun and weird again, the way I remember it when I was a kid but with a more modern twist. And also a real business model, no BS advertising, ever.

Also, for all the stuff that gets published about how addictive social networks are, try actually building one; nothing is more addictive (or inspiring) than a blank page.

I've been on the home page a few times and haven't yet signed up.

My behavior on the homepage has been to click the "more example threads" button.

I'd guess that the thing that would make me more likely to sign up is to be able to see/discover more great threads before signing up. (Similar suggestions that people have given to twitter, i.e. provide max utility for logged out users so people who aren't yet converts can experience the magic. I think that might apply to your site)

Hope this helps and I'll look forward to seeing the site succeed!

Tl;Dr I'd personally be interested in seeing more cool threads on the homepage and perhaps displayed in a way that makes it easier to find ones that are particularly interesting to me, so that I can get "hooked" on the service.

(Makes me think of Chamath's talk, where he talked about facebook's magic moment being 7 friends in 10 days https://ryangum.com/chamath-palihapitiya-how-we-put-facebook... - I wonder if your magic moment is getting people to discover a thread that is both really useful or interesting to them and that they feel is secret/that they likely wouldn't have been able to find elsewhere on the internet)

This is horrible! I mean, people can always be jerks, and publish private email. But you're facilitating that. This could readily be used, as an example, as a type of revenge porn. Sure, victims can anonymize themselves. But only after the information has been published, and potentially scraped. And you know that jerks will be scraping your site, for just this reason.

The default must be requiring explicit permission from all participants. Without permission, even anonymization is insufficient to protect against abuse.