
Friendsweekly – A weekly newsletter to stay in touch with people you care about - jaymeh13
https://friendsweekly.com/
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ourcat
I agree with the need for 'safe' social places like to be built.

But since the entire system is based upon lists and lists of email addresses,
there REALLY needs to be a Ts & Cs and Privacy Policy in place here.

I'm assuming this is a one-man-band (Jayme?) behind this which I also commend,
but if you don't add those things and also some background info about who's
behind it (and how safe are all those email addresses) it's going to have a
hard time winning trust.

(And yes, though I can kind of see where he's coming from, 'RSS' in the title
title is misleading. Rather like Spotify calling a 'talkie' audio file a
'podcast'. It simply (and really) isn't.))

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whiddershins
Can you elaborate on the podcast thing

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ourcat
A 'podcast' is (or was!) a media file located at the 'url' of an RSS feed item
'enclosure'.

When a podcasting downloading application (aka:'podcatcher') 'subscribes' to
the RSS feed, it gets notified (actually via a 'pull' or 'ping') that a new
latest item is available. The application then automatically downloads the
media file and places it in a playlist in your media player for offline use.

At least that's how it always used to be when we started building these things
years ago. ;)

Hope this helps.

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ourcat
The term has been somewhat evolved to mean an 'episodic' series of media files
(audio or video). Which is why so many places call them a podcast now.

Rather like when people online post a big blurb of text _anywhere_ and just
call it a 'blog'. it diminishes the true meaning of the term.

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jhot
I can't find a link to their privacy policy. I like the idea but would be
hesitant to give it a go without giving that a glance-over.

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scjody
This looks great but I don't see anything about pricing / business model,
which worries me. Are they going to start charging for subscriptions once
they're established? or inserting ads everywhere to make money? or do the
intend to pursue freemium features with a solid "free forever" feature set?

I only really want to invest the time and energy into getting my friends using
this service if it's the latter.

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cklaus
What kind of premium service on top of this would you suggest?

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thunderrabbit
File or photo storage

International pen-pals

Long term journal archive

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rahuldottech
Hey, this seems really neat to me. I'd really like it if it takes off.

That said, many people I know are 'addicted' to social media (mostly
Instagram, some Facebook). It's less about sharing what's going on in your
life with loved ones, and more about 'showing off' – a carefully curated feed
of text and images. Often with the purpose of seeking approval or validation.

I have left all (traditional) social media for the most part, but I don't know
if many people will be willing to do that, and/or replace/supplement it with
this.

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panarky
_> I don't know if many people ..._

Every service doesn't need to appeal to every person, or to destroy FB.

Would it be successful with 1,000 users? 10,000? 100,000?

Certainly there's some small fraction of the world that would find this
useful.

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bootlooped
Is that small fraction in the same friend group? If not they'd be just a bunch
of random strangers on the internet. The problem is that FB, Insta, etc... is
where most people's friends are. I don't have any use for a social network my
friends don't or won't use.

I really do like this idea. I have a few friends I send a long email to every
2 or 3 months, just to keep them up to date on my life, touch base, see how
they are doing since the last time we spoke. I quite like the format. I don't
need to tell people about my life daily, or in most cases even weekly or
monthly.

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panarky
_> Is that small fraction in the same friend group?_

Certainly if you just select people at random, it's unlikely they'd all want
this service.

But if you already send a long email to friends periodically, and if they
appreciate reading your long emails, and if they occasionally send you lengthy
updates, then chances are the folks in your friend group would like the
product.

To quote patio11 talking about financial services:

 _If there is a 100x100 matrix of broadly consumed financial products and
potential customer segments for them, we can compete on product for one cell
of that matrix, win by utter domination, and then start expanding from there._

[https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1208909582896181248](https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1208909582896181248)

This approach might not work well for financial services, but shouldn't it
might be feasible for like-minded groups of people.

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klyrs
This is extremely sweet, quaint, and I absolutely love the concept... but...
what RSS? Where's the privacy policy? Support via twitter? Who's project is
this and what else are they doing with my data?

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puranjay
Can I at least see what the email will look like or how you'll pull all this
data without signing up?

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foreigner
While I like the intent here, I personally would be really annoyed if a friend
gave my email address to a site like this. It is NOT OK to give your friend's
private email addresses to third parties.

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jeegsy
Indeed. Especially when all this can be implemented with regular email
directly.

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thunderrabbit
I created an account and tested the subscription function.

1) The subscription URL starts with http: instead of https: though your site
has SSL set up.

2) The subscription URL can only be used by someone who is logged in. To
improve onboarding, I think it should go to the create account screen as
opposed to the login screen.

For me personally, I won't use (divulge my friend's email addresses to) this
software unless it's open source and I can host it on my own server.

I'd be happy to donate $20 if I end up using it.

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stevenicr
so it says it keeps your fam stuff out of the public social feeds... but uses
email.. which makes a lot of stuff public, like sending postcards around the
world right?

I think people are already confused enough about how email works and how non-
private it is.. so I would be careful with that wording.. unless the emails
are encrypted of course - then good on you for working on something cool.

RSS in the title is kind of mean - I was hoping to see a new mobile friendly
version of netvibes / pageflakes that allowed friends and family to check off
boxes to get notified about updates in some of the categories (rss feeds)- and
make opml shareable / clone-able so people could start their own..

I tinkered with the idea of doing just that with buddypress and rss widgets
for profiles. Have not researched a good way to close a profile or set of
feeds, but the other pieces are there.

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stevenhubertron
As others have said. The idea is good but without a privacy policy that is a
lot of PII to be forking over.

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avian
RSS in the title is misleading. This looks like an email newsletter thing and
has nothing to do with the syndication format you can subscribe to in a feed
reader.

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asdff
Bit of a tangent, but you can pipe email newsletters into an RSS feed.

