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Inside continues to bet on email, the “largest social network”

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Re: Inside continues to bet on email, the “largest social network”

#71

Post by ronack »

bkanber wrote: post #59
jasonmcalacanis wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NYT and Netflix are an exceptional value at $10 a month, but those are large scale consumer content. In the B2B content space, any content that saves folks a couple of hours a week is worth a LOT of money. in this case, $10-25 a month is nothing... really, it's like zero dollars in the context of a business executive making six figures.

I'm a business executive making six figures ;) Still not sure I'd pay for it out of pocket (but who knows!), but I missed the B2B angle on the first read and was reacting to the price point as a news consumer. IMO neither the article nor the premium page does a great job of showing me that kind of value -- the only allusions to B2B value I saw were "research reports" in the article and "let us be your research team"…

I'm a longtime subscriber to Launch Ticker (their tech/startup newsletter). It lets me very quickly be kept abreast of fundraising and M&A activity relevant to my startup. Saves me about 30 minutes a day of visiting several popular tech news sites, so well worth $10/month to me.

Re: Inside continues to bet on email, the “largest social network”

#72

Post by cyphar »

pmlnr wrote: post #52

"[...] People seem to hate email for the same reasons they once loved it. Email's underlying triumph, the quality that made it revolutionary, was that you could instantly deliver a written message to someone even if they weren't there to receive it. [...] Email is neutral, meaning that anyone can email anyone else with an email address. If you have a person's email address, your message will be delivered no matter wh…

> (BTW this is what decentralisation people should understand: you need to build services using common protocols, not services which can be installed; mastodon is a bad example, activityfeeds or linked data are good ones)

Mastodon/GNU Social uses standardised protocols. ActivityFeeds is an attempt to unify the a different protocol as a W3 standard. With ActivityFeeds you also will need to install a service just like Mastodon. But the whole point is that you don't need to install Mastodon yourself, you can use one that's already hosted (similar to the early days of email -- these days you generally have to use hosted email).

The fact that the Mastodon craze still inherited the community from GNU Social is evidence that it is a well designed federated system.

Re: Inside continues to bet on email, the “largest social network”

#73

Post by deelowe »

alexmat wrote: post #70
gramakri wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Email is a set of protocol and thus it _will_ outlive any centalised, closed, walled garden. What stops email going the way of XMPP?

What happened to XMPP? Not trying to be snarky, I still use it. Is there an issue I should be aware of?

Guess the op is referring to federation

Re: Inside continues to bet on email, the “largest social network”

#74

Post by amorroxic »

azurezyq wrote: post #33

Maybe in US this holds, but things may be different in different places. I'm a Chinese living in the bay area. I think people here treat E-mails as part of their daily life probably because most of them began to use it before the mobile internet is a thing. On the contrary, in China where the majority internet users are mobile-savvy, WeChat is the new email. Actually E-mails are only for official communications there…

I actually tend to agree here. While purism is understandable (email is, should and will continue to be the gold standard) reality is that no-one has 10 years to spare waiting for users to realize its value once more and migrate back in droves.

Also, who's to say communication won't become my-bot-against-your-bot kind of thing for instance? Given choice between standards and convenience people don't seem to think too long before going with the latter..

Re: Inside continues to bet on email, the “largest social network”

#75

Post by frankdenbow »

justboxing wrote: post #3

> For others, it might mean one original article blurred out in a newsletter. (Inside’s newsletter CMS is built to handle toggling between paid-for and free content.) Anyone know of an open source or paid Newsletter Management CMS? I'm working on a content site like inside, for a very small sports niche, and am thinking of making it a daily newsletter with paid subscriptions, instead of a regular website driven by Wo…

Check out https://www.getrevue.co/

Re: Inside continues to bet on email, the “largest social network”

#76

Post by huhweirdyhat »

paxy wrote: post #42
Spivak wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody outside of business and advertising cares how annoying it is to write carefully formatted HTML emails. For any end user, email is the universal communication mechanism.

For text based communication SMS absolutely dwarfs email.

In what respect? I don't think i've ever gotten an important SMS outside of personal communications, let alone the 50+ emails I get a day that are considered "important" in some way.

Re: Inside continues to bet on email, the “largest social network”

#77

Post by alexmat »

deelowe wrote: post #73
alexmat wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happened to XMPP? Not trying to be snarky, I still use it. Is there an issue I should be aware of?

Guess the op is referring to federation

What is the issue with federation? It seems to be working for me between different domains and servers.

Re: Inside continues to bet on email, the “largest social network”

#78

Post by erikpukinskis »

paxy wrote: post #22
gsich wrote: post #2

Email is like the one and only vendor/device/programming language independent way of communication.

If you want to send plain text, yes. There is a lot of variation among clients when it comes to formatting and layout however. But then by those constraints you can also count HTTP or SSH or Telnet or any other protocol at that layer.

I think your OP probably meant to constrain the point to messaging. HTTP, telnet, etc aren't really messaging, implying asynchronous delivery, they're socket protocols.

I guess in theory you could leave an HTTP packet for someone to pick up months later, but existing networks would time it out.

Re: Inside continues to bet on email, the “largest social network”

#79

Post by duck »

joshmarinacci wrote: post #63
duck wrote: post #16

A shameless plug, but if you like HN and email, my side-project, http://www.hackernewsletter.com/ , might be worth a look. Rolling past 50k subscribers this month.

Ah. I think you are the reason my blog was slammed all of a sudden a few days after I hit the front page.

Ha, yep! That was a great post and generated about 2,000 clicks.

Re: Inside continues to bet on email, the “largest social network”

#80

Post by erikpukinskis »

jimktrains2 wrote: post #20
gsich wrote: post #2

Email is like the one and only vendor/device/programming language independent way of communication.

Also XMPP, but that's not gained a lot of traction. IRC also doesn't seem primed to burst back onto the scene. (To be honest, the only thing I really like about slack over IRC is history. I wonder if that couldn't be processed in a more peer-to-peer manner over IRC?)

I used to hear people saying all the time "well, the correct way to handle [messaging problem X] is to use XMPP" but more recently people seem to talk of it like a dead man walking.

Is it really so bad? Is there anything on the horizon that could replace email as an open messaging protocol?

I guess kilobyte-sized text snippets are probably a pretty good fit for a blockchain-based trustless messaging service. A million monkeys are hacking on that right now, right? Maybe that will just leapfrog everything else?

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