21–30 of 54 posts
If you want to "take features away", you need to create a completely separate concept in people's minds. Twitter works because people don't think of it as "email that's limited to 140 characters". They think of it as a completely separate category.
This is pretty dumb and reflects the increasing mentality of "it's like X with the useful functionality removed". Email is nothing like twitter at all, twitter became popular because it allowed celebrities and the like to share their thoughts with their fans without feeling like they had to maintain a longform blog. Email is used for 2 way communication, yes companies like to build email lists and use it for push mar…
The point is not to remove a functionality but to further constrain a contract (and enforce it).
Something a little less extreme such as a whitelisting system might work better (only people on my whitelist may email me... if you email me and you're not on my whitelist you have to fill out a captcha or something in a response before I ever see the email, and then I have the option of either whitelisting you, doing nothing, or adding you to a permanent blacklist). That would allow me to whitelist the addresses I really care about while cutting out all other unwanted content. Main problems I see with something like that would be that email becomes even more asynchronous and unreliable than it already is.
Best solution is to just tear it down and replace it across the board with something better like XMPP. (A man can dream.)
How about an app that donates the 20 bucks it costs to send someone an email to charity? Seems like it would have a built in marketing strategy.
This is somewhat orthogonal but am I the only one that usually finds businesses built on "do X and help charity at the same time" as pretty weak? It's strikes me as though the business operator doesn't believe in the value they are providing so they piggyback off the value of donating to charity. There are exceptions, things like the Humble Bundles, but I tend to buy those primarily as call to actions for charity don…
The biggest problem with this idea is that it violates people's expectations. People already know how email works. They don't expect to hit a character limit. They will simply get annoyed. If you want to "take features away", you need to create a completely separate concept in people's minds. Twitter works because people don't think of it as "email that's limited to 140 characters". They think of it as a completely s…
This is pretty dumb and reflects the increasing mentality of "it's like X with the useful functionality removed". Email is nothing like twitter at all, twitter became popular because it allowed celebrities and the like to share their thoughts with their fans without feeling like they had to maintain a longform blog. Email is used for 2 way communication, yes companies like to build email lists and use it for push mar…
I don't agree that twitter popularity lies on how easy it is to publish on it but in the fact that it establishes a reading contract. I know exactly how much time reading a single tweet will take me so I can read them in many circumstances. That's why I think apps like TwitLonger make no sense. The point is not to remove a functionality but to further constrain a contract (and enforce it).
If you really don't want to receive long emails from strangers you can always add a filter in your mail setup that deletes any email over 500 chars long from people not in your address book with an autoreply that says "I don't read anything over 500 chars long".
The biggest problem with this idea is that it violates people's expectations. People already know how email works. They don't expect to hit a character limit. They will simply get annoyed. If you want to "take features away", you need to create a completely separate concept in people's minds. Twitter works because people don't think of it as "email that's limited to 140 characters". They think of it as a completely s…
In some cases you'd like to have the option to pay something so that it's processed in one hour.
Also, some people don't care if you're annoyed. VCs, celebrities, etc. get tons of email that they can't read anyway. What if Lady Gaga received 30 short emails per day from fans who paid $100 (adjust the numbers until it's manageable for her) instead of 100k emails that go to /dev/null ?
This is pretty dumb and reflects the increasing mentality of "it's like X with the useful functionality removed". Email is nothing like twitter at all, twitter became popular because it allowed celebrities and the like to share their thoughts with their fans without feeling like they had to maintain a longform blog. Email is used for 2 way communication, yes companies like to build email lists and use it for push mar…
I think there is something to this idea. It's wrong to call it "email" though.
Email is nothing like twitter at all, twitter became popular because it allowed celebrities and the like to share their thoughts with their fans without feeling like they had to maintain a longform blog.
This would be something to get brief, easily digestible feedback from their fans. Right now, this either means going through lots of messages, or relying on social media to filter the message for you, but the former takes time or money, and the latter results in only the loudest voices being heard. The proposal above would cause people to filter and edit themselves.
Email is used for 2 way communication, yes companies like to build email lists and use it for push marketing but that's usually seen more as a nuisance to email users.
You just contradicted yourself here. Email is versatile enough to be used in many ways. That's both the best and worst quality of it.
If somebody is going to charge me in order to send them an email the message I read into that is "My time is so much more valuable that if yours that if you want me to read what you say then you better make it worth my while".
Yes, that is the message such a service would have to send. (But in a more subliminal way.)
And sometimes emails need to be long, am I supposed to maintain 2 separate email accounts?
This is precisely why calling this "email" is wrong. It would be like the counterpart of twitter, going the opposite way. It would be the multiplexer to the Twitter demux. It would not be email, however users could possibly access it through email.
Maybe call it "Faninn" "Feedforward" or "Feedgram?" I would allow messages to be marked private or public, with the public messages appearing on a white-labeled website, subject to a reddit or HN style upvote system.
I personally think having the character limit that low is horrible but even if you love it, it wasn't some brilliant design decision imposed by Jack Dorsey it was just a limitation of the technology they were working with initially.
I don't imagine this would take off, especially once people realize they can't receive any automated emails anymore (sign up confirmations, email validation requests, e-bills, reciepts for online purchases, any kind of service notification, etc). It would require probably maintaining a second email for those kinds of things, and then you've got the same problem as before but now with a second (extremely limited) emai…