
Decentralised social network built on top of email - jasonlingx
http://mobisocial.stanford.edu/papers/hotpets11.pdf
======
_sh
This is an interesting idea that uses email/IMAP as a transport for social
message passing. It plays to the strengths of multipart email messages having
a human-readable part that is as rich as possible for email client viewing
(when users aren't in a social-aware application), and a machine readable part
(JSON) for plugging in to the rest of the social infrastructure.

Here is their own summary of problems with this approach (from the article):

    
    
      * Not all users have a suitable email service (requires IMAP to support the
        “read it if you feel like it” model).
    
      * Servers tamper with messages as a normal part of existing infrastructure
        (especially mailing lists and spam filters).
    
      * Basic IMAP does not provide the full gamut of features required (some mail
        servers don't support all IMAP verbs).
    
      * Mail systems may have standard protocols, but individual implementations
        may have diﬀerent performance characteristics.

~~~
alexanderh
Something like this doesn't NEED to work "ontop of" email though. It just
needs to work LIKE email, and be decentralized, where anyone can run a
"facebook like" social networking server that all know how to talk to
eachother. I certainly do applaud efforts like Diaspora. If only they could
actually take off. Maybe this approach of working "on top of" the existing
email infrastructure will help adoption, IDK. But It seems like it will be
equally as challenging to make popular. Might as well write a new protocol
that is simply similar in its decentralized nature, so we dont have these
issues.

~~~
icebraining
The protocols already exist, but who will run the servers?

~~~
ryanhuff
Why not ISP's?

~~~
icebraining
What's their incentive?

------
dfc
GPG/PGP keys were the greatest missed opportunity for social networks. For
example widespread acceptance of gpg/pgp would have been a great way to reduce
spam.

~~~
mark_l_watson
About ten years ago I had two customers who liked us to all encrypt all email.
It was easy to do and fairly transparent - strange that this never caught on,
at least in my experience.

~~~
gallypette
"Why Johnny still can't encrypt" <http://chariotsfire.com/pub/sheng-
poster_abstract.pdf>

------
Joeboy
From
[https://github.com/tpurtell/socialbar/blob/master/chrome/con...](https://github.com/tpurtell/socialbar/blob/master/chrome/content/utils.js)
:

    
    
        //fallback for running in chrome
        function md5(str) {
            return "e4d909c290d0fb1ca068ffaddf22cbd0";
        }
    

Huh?

~~~
_quasimodo

      $ echo -n "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." | md5sum
      e4d909c290d0fb1ca068ffaddf22cbd0  -
    

It seems to be a commonly used example md5 sum.

------
AceJohnny2
I wondered where I had seen the name of Monica S. Lam (one of the co-authors)
before. Turns out she's one of the co-authors of the Dragon Book.

------
jaipilot747
I think this could be a part of the solution to the 'replace email' theme by
PG[1].

Since their API abstracts the email sending/receiving details away AND gives
specific tags to work with [SHARE, LIST, GET, WAIT], one could for example
write a TO-DO app or maybe a bug tracker that notifies and updates when a mail
with a specific tag comes in.

As I understand it, the problem with building smart mail clients is that there
is no standardised format that all clients will agree upon. Using this API
circumvents the problem, as the mail client does not actually perform any
actions. Using this API's capabilities for "smart" mail clients instead of
"social" apps could be interesting.

[1] <http://paulgraham.com/ambitious.html>

------
rotskoff
It seems that one doesn't have much of a social network without the "friend
discovery" and "stalking" aspects that this paper ignores. While e-mail based
clients for private exchange of personal data among friends would certainly be
welcome, it wouldn't quite serve the same role as facebook.

------
dools
Haha far out, I've had an index card on my wall for the best part of this year
that says "Email client as social network". D'oh!

~~~
readme
You beat me to thinking of the idea and not doing it first! I had only been
thinking about this for the prior week.

~~~
Joeboy
You know, you could both still do it. Or you could just build on the work
that's been done for you. Looks like nobody's committed for nearly a year.

Edit: [http://mobisocial.stanford.edu/news/2011/07/build-stuff-
with...](http://mobisocial.stanford.edu/news/2011/07/build-stuff-with-us/)

------
anthonyb
I would've thought you'd want it the other way around, ie. integrate email
into your decentralised social network. It'd certainly make spam easier to
detect, and email easier to filter.

------
sakopov
I gave the idea of decentralized social network some thought after reading
about facebook chat monitoring. Imho, privacy is becoming such a big concern
that i think this is what the next generation of social networking will be
like. Being able to store your profile data in your own cloud account on
dropbox or google drive would be pretty neat. Perhaps something more
sophisticated with its own data provider model and a protocol. Sounds like a
neat startup idea.

------
bcl
How is this going to mix with the user's other email? I certainly wouldn't
want to see all the Mr. Privacy messages in my mail client and while I can
easily setup a filter, many users would not be able to do that.

end to end GPG encryption also seems like required feature. Then your details
really are secure from all the intermediate parties.

~~~
jaipilot747
It automatically sets up a separate folder and routes all Mr. Privacy messages
(there is a specific format for these) into that folder. If you wanted to see
them, you could. But normally, they wouldn't crowd your inbox.

------
jaipilot747
Storage space is not really a big problem with most major mail services
offering >5 GB, but I wonder where all the static content would be stored, and
how it gets updated when there is a change (eg. user profile picture). Surely,
one wouldn't store those outside the mailbox?

~~~
icebraining
Why not just send them as an attachment to a "Profile Picture Changed" event
message? Then clients can delete the old attachments when they get the new.

------
jaipilot747
As the authors have noted, there is no way to invalidate content. So those
drunk posts cannot be certainly deleted from your friends's feed. Personally I
don't see a big problem with this, but it definitely needs to be addressed.

------
est
I hope they add encryption to it. Intermediate SMTP servers are untrust
worthy.

~~~
JamesLeonis
If you built a client on top of email, you could add PGP encryption as part of
the service. Getting and accepting friend requests performs the key exchange
handshake needed and _voila!_ encryption. There's some nuances here that would
need to be addressed, but nothing particularly showstopping.

~~~
est
Governments/ISP/School/Company could ban obvious encrypted SMTP message.

Encryption should be done in a obfuscated handshake way. That's what this
paper lacks (and this really matters.)

Also if you have your own IMAP/SMTP server running, you should really think
about some kind of TOR-like relay network to hide your server IP.

------
connorpm
Good idea - we've been doing something similar for groups/companies with just
the header data of email. The Datahug.com API allows developers to build on
top of the email social graph.

------
tuananh
we are gonna miss all the good stuff from recommender system.

------
h2s
This paper is two years old. Presumably if anything was going to come of this
idea, it would have happened by now.

What's the point of posting such an old PDF as it were new? To a site with the
word "News" in its name? It's interesting, yes, but it's misleading too.

~~~
rvkennedy
I guess I'd say It's valid if people weren't already aware of it.

I wasn't aware of it, and I'm actually _building_ it.

