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Going old school: how I replaced Facebook with email

blog.chaddickerson.com

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Re: Going old school: how I replaced Facebook with email

#41

Post by throwaway287391 »

bscphil wrote: post #21
joe_the_user wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With FB, a person has opted in to being your friend. With a mass email list, whoever knows your email can send it. With FB, you go to the site to get basically this stream of opt-in announcements. With email, they are mixed with things that might require urgent action and direct personal messages and spam and what-not. Of course, I don't have FB on my phone and if I did it would be more intrusive.

>With FB, a person has opted in to being your friend. And if for some reason you feel obligated to be someone's "friend" on Facebook, you can still opt out of seeing their updates. Not so with email, unless you write a filter that sends it straight to the trash.

> Not so with email, unless you write a filter that sends it straight to the trash.

Right, so how is that not the same thing as opting out on FB? Because it’s 3 or 4 clicks (in Gmail) instead of 2?

Re: Going old school: how I replaced Facebook with email

#45

Post by aeontech »

phs318u wrote: post #32

Not sure how best to express this thought but it seems to my geriatric mind that some kind of p2p-ified (server+client in one) variation on NNTP could provide a "social network" with similar qualities to email but (unlike email), is something I pull from rather than gets pushed to me. Discoverability might be an issue though. Is any of this making any sense?

Well, there's Scuttlebutt: http://scuttlebutt.nz

Previous HN Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16877603

Re: Going old school: how I replaced Facebook with email

#48

Post by miles_matthias »

I would use Google groups for this instead of a true newsletter product, but I totally agree with this approach. It's similar thinking to the philosophy behind ctolunches.com.

An earlier thread had me think about productizing this actually: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18585534

My thought:

For a social network, I see it being a cross between a Google Group and a newsletter. * List my profile somewhere with a sign up box to "subscribe to updates and conversation from Miles and his network." * Every 3-6 weeks, I receive an email from the platform asking me what's been up with me, and I simply reply, which then gets sent to people who subscribed from updates from me. * Calendar integration -- when I add an event to my calendar, I have the option of including it in my next update to my email network to let them know I'm doing it. (ex: I'm speaking next month at some conference) * Community participation -- if anyone who subscribes to my email updates/network wants to email my network (ex: do you know anyone who...), I get an email saying my subscriber Bob wants to ask my network a connection, would you like to include it in your next email update to your network? If I respond yes, then it is also listed in my next email update to my network. Something like that would be awesome.

Re: Going old school: how I replaced Facebook with email

#49

Post by baroffoos »

rubidium wrote: post #29
echevil wrote: post #12

For any social network to work you’d need most of your connections to get onboard the same thing, whether it’s Facebook or anything else. It’s easy for some people to start emailing their friends but it’s hard to imagine that the general public start doing the same thing, and without that, the alternative won’t go very far. In fact I’d find it much more annoying than Facebook if I start receiving such emails from fri…

Here’s the fundamental thing. We don’t need digital social networks. Email, just like mail, is sufficent.

Pretty much. There is simply no reason why I need to know what all my friends are doing and how they are feeling every single day. I just wish we had a good alternative for event organizing because that imo is the greatest value in facebook.
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