Show HN: FWD:Everyone – Making email into a social network
fwdeveryone.com
fwdeveryone.com
Different people we talked with had different use cases. Some people were sick of answering the same question from dozens of different people. For college professors, fifty years ago their correspondence would get donated to their university library, but now that it's in their inbox that will all get lost unless there is some way to archive it. And for entrepreneurs, their email is content they're already creating that could be used to promote their startups, it's just that they're getting cheated out of their followers.
So while for me it was all about getting a chance to peek inside the private lives of really interesting and accomplished individuals, for these folks they see it as a way to maintain a blog with 10x less effort. So we tried to build something that would fulfill both use cases.
In a couple months we'll also have public and private organizations. So with public organizations, you'll be able to, say, subscribe to all the public email from Steadfast VC partners. Or with private organizations, you'll be able to share email privately within your business and tag it with things like the project name, 'decision', 'deadline', etc. (Charging for private organizations will be our business model.)
This front page stuff was just redone within the last couple hours, so we'll clean up the design over the next couple days.
Some comments:
- I want to upload a thread, and it asks me to give Oauth to my entire email. That's a little too much! Can't I just forward an email? I figured that was the point, given the name. I just CC everyone@fwdeveryone.com and it gets published.
- I dunno if I want to include the entire thread when I forward. I'd personally rather CC justthismessage@fwdeveryone.com when I'm writing an email, and get _only_ this message, with the context cut out for privacy.
One of the reasons we do it through the gmail api is because if we accepted plain text emails through the typical forward process, the messages can be edited. On FWD:Everyone, you can make redactions, highlight text, and omit entire messages, but you cannot change what the messages say.
We think authenticity is vital to the site, and if you'd like to revoke access to your gmail inbox, Google provides a novel way to do so here:
Basically we wanted to make posting email double opt-in, so that you can't publish emails from other people without their permission. The problem is that without OAuth you would be able to change the text of the conversations, and also who the messages were coming from. So although we could still have a permission mechanism, it wouldn't really be enforceable. And worse, anyone getting a permission request would have to reread the entire thread to figure out whether the uploader had changed the text of the conversation.
When we build a Gmail plugin we might be able to get around Oauth if we're able to forward each message in the thread, since I think we'd be able to verify the authenticity of the messages with DKIM. I haven't fully looked into this yet.
For now what you can do is make multiple gmail addresses and/or revoke the oauth access after each time you use the service. (We do this with our own accounts dozens of times per day while testing the site, and it hasn't caused any issues.) I think also a lot of people in the tech community are more comfortable authing their work email accounts than their personal email accounts, so we're not necessary counting on seeing a huge wave of adoption until we have the organization features in a couple months.
With respect to not including certain messages, that's a feature we currently have with Oauth. You can redact any text within the message bodies, which then isn't stored in our database. And you can also exclude messages entirely from the thread, and again the text of those messages isn't stored in our database either.
We're going to add more fine-grained privacy settings in the future so that way you can white list certain people and organizations and whatever. But for launch we wanted to keep everything super simple, and make sure your first experience with the site isn't getting doxxed by your friends or whatever even if that means not getting any super viral content on day one.
We also think a lot of really great things get talked about over email that aren't inherently private. Conversations that showcase deep knowledge and understanding through the lens of relationships. For us, that's the magic.
We're also working on commenting, a gmail plugin, and a bunch of other stuff.
Once we have a copy of your email, we then take a hash of the messages before sending the text to the users. When we get the text back from the users (who can make highlights or redactions), we compare the text we receive back with the hash of the original message and throw an exception if the hashes don't match. We then delete the hash from our database, and store an encrypted copy of the message. The message remains encrypted until each of the message contributors gives permission. If this doesn't happen then the encrypted thread is deleted from our servers.
So yeah, we were pretty OCD about making sure that if something shows up in everyone's newsfeed that it was actually both written by you and approved for publication by you.