

Discuss my Idea: How about a more generic version of posterous? - Skywing

I've been thinking about this idea over the past few days. I've even already written code for it and have a functional prototype. But, everyone I tell the idea to doesn't seem to grasp the concept or just can't see why it would be useful. I was even told that I "could achieve more" by looking for new ideas, lol.<p>My idea is simple and came to me in a simple manner. The idea is this - a hosted database service (a la MongoHQ) with an easy and highly accessible CRUD interface via SMTP (a la Posterous).<p>The idea came to me while thinking about writing my own SMTP-based blog, like Posterous. I wanted to write my own blog that I was able to write to using any email client I had, instead of using some annoying WYSIWYG editor. I'd just use Markdown for formatting. But then a friend suggested, "why not generalize it for more than just blogs"? I'm not sure to what extent he meant, but I immediately envisioned something similar to Posterous but much much more generalized. Basically, a database that anyone could perform CRUD on using their email client.<p>Why email? Everyone has it. It's easily accessible. It doesn't take much explanation. There are email client implementations in pretty much every environment you can think of.<p>It obviously wouldn't be for heavy read/write traffic database applications, but more for casual users that don't fully understand the internal workings of how to use their own database. It could perhaps be used by myself to write my own Posterous-esque blogging platform. It could be used for email storage and backup. It could be use for file sharing, backing up files with associated meta data. A simple API could provide non-SMTP read access to your data - perhaps REST.<p>I feel like this idea excites me because of two reasons, A) it has a clear cut hosting-based business plan and B) I don't even know if I fully know how this is entirely useful or what the applications of it could be. I haven't gotten very good feedback on it, though. So, to exercise some of what I've read about lean startups and just throwing your ideas out there, I figure I'll see what you guys think about this?<p>Here is what I have running for it so far. It's just something I wrote in a single afternoon as kind of a proof of concept for myself. I wrote a simple SMTP server that does nothing but handling incoming emails and performs some simple, crude authentication on them. Authentication is done by signing up on the site, downloading the provided "db.auth" file. To submit data to the database, address an email to "db@collabreate.co" and attach the "db.auth" file. The records will appear on the website. There is no other functionality in this demo.<p>http://collabreate.co:8080/records/<p>You have to include the /records/ otherwise it won't load anything. It's port 8080 because it's running on my home fios connection. The domain is just something I use to play with - it's not related to this particular idea.<p>So, what do you all think? :P
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Staydecent
I really like the idea of using email for, well, everything. And I prefer
blogging by email (like posterous) and implemented it myself for App Engine
(<https://gist.github.com/462907>).

As for this generic crud service. I think the problem is, just as you don't
know how it could be useful, neither do others. A hosted db would be useful
through an API, but communicating with email programmatically is probably a
larger overhead compared to a standard GET or POST request.

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Skywing
I can't put my finger on it, but for some reason I just can't stop
brainstorming about this concept. I think it'd need to be marketed as a lower
level service than Posterous. It wouldn't create a nice web page for you, it
would just store the data and let you do whatever you want with it.

I guess you're right though. If somebody was going to code something and use a
database, they'd probably just go with something a little more direct.

Edit: Also, in regards to overhead of GET versus an SMTP message. I think the
payload for SMTP might be about the same or maybe even less than GET in size.

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Skywing
Clickable: <http://collabreate.co:8080/records/>

Also, it's probably pretty easy to blow up right now. It should just ignore
any other file attachments. If it's not working then it probably got blown up.
I'll restart it when I notice. Also, you can technically send an email to
<anything>@collabreate.co. :P

