

What would you name the baby of Email and Twitter? - sirsean
http://vikinghammer.com/2010/01/09/open-twitter-what-would-you-name-the-baby-of-email-and-twitter/

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SlyShy
How about "Emitter", which has all the appropriate negative connotations.

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steelhive
The name with _all_ the negative connotations would probably be FailMail. :-)

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lucifer
No, it would RealTimeSpam.

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megaduck
It seems that a lot of people are looking to extend twitter with email-type
features, but I wonder if the reverse strategy (extending email) might be more
fruitful.

Email has some great properties that make it the ideal foundation for a
communication service:

    
    
      1.  You can send arbitrary text with arbitrary encoding.
      2.  Attachments can be any type, size, or number.
      3.  Virtually any device on the planet can send and receive mail.
      4.  Everybody already has a unique ID that they've memorized.
      5.  There's a boggling amount of infrastructure already in place.
      6.  Spam filtering is quite mature, and remarkably effective.
    

Where email falls down is that it's stupid and slow. All intelligence is in
the mail client, and email clients don't share information other than the mail
itself. A smarter mail server (like Posterous) can do some really cool stuff.
Couple smarter mail clients with a smarter server and the potential is huge.

I love all the new communications platforms and protocols, but I wonder if
there isn't some life left in good old email.

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sirsean
I was also expecting to allow arbitrarily long text, as well as attachments
and additional (potentially user(or client)-defined) metadata.

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dutchflyboy
Well, all the dutch HN readers will agree it would be "Etter".

But I personnaly don't think this would change much. For me there are two
categories of information: private and public. For the private information
email is the only solution and for the public solution I have my personal
website. People who don't have their own website/blog won't care on who's
server the messages are.

* EDIT * I was just thinking, isn't this what sites like blogger are about? You can make a page where you blog, several people can follow you, and they can reply.

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sirsean
So ... why do people use Twitter, when blogs already existed?

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dutchflyboy
What I mean is that most people who use twitter don't care at all whether the
messages are on their own server or on a server owned by some company.

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sirsean
The same is true of most people who use email, but email still wouldn't have
become as widespread as it is today if it weren't interoperable with other
email servers.

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blasdel
What he's trying to build already exists (<http://identi.ca>), but will never
succeed in any form: the only reason Twitter has stayed so constrained is
because it's not federated. Only a walled garden can avoid basic features that
way -- an open platform wouldn't embraced and extended so shittly.

What he actually wants also already exists, and he's using it successfully
already. It's a goddamn blog.

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thiele
Google Wave! ;)

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secorp
RSSCloud is similar to this - <http://rsscloud.org/walkthrough.html>

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blasdel
That's just a pointless fantasy of Dave Winer's. He has the magical
combination technical and social incompetence, that thoroughly poisons
anything he is allowed to insinuate himself into.

Attempt no landing there.

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buss
Instant messaging?

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chaostheory
isn't that more like one of the parents of twitter (the other being email)? I
always saw twitter as slow IM

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rick_2047
if email is one of the parents of twitter and is now parenting a child with
it, aren't we looking at a live case of....INCEST here?

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witten
StatusNet: <http://gitorious.org/statusnet> <http://status.net/>

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SandB0x
Tweemail?

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SandB0x
But seriously, the word he's looking for is 'blog'.

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sachinag
Posterous in particular, really, given their short-post-via-email focus.

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talboito
sms

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dutchflyboy
No, sms is too personal. I think the point was that you can have several
followers.

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silverlake
Twitail

