What would you name the baby of Email and Twitter?

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

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.

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.

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.

Google Wave! ;)

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

Instant messaging?

StatusNet: http://gitorious.org/statusnet http://status.net/

Tweemail?

sms

Twitail