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Comment by falcolas | Hacker News Reader

Dear <whomever wants to kill facebook> - the answer is simple: Leverage email.

Send marked up messages that look good in both HTML and can be transformed into threaded comment strings in your client. Embed XMPP chat, and set up enabled-by-default encryption around the whole thing. Leverage mailing lists for your special interest groups and your public pages. Sell server time for managing the mailing lists and image hosting, and for a web client.

The infrastructure is there, just forgotten.

This has been banging around in my head for a few years now, but I'll never have the time to do it myself. If you can poke holes in the core concept - please do. It needs to be fleshed out.

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> Send marked up messages that look good in both HTML and can be transformed into threaded comment strings in your client.

Sadly, that is impossible. The only mail client that does real HTML is Thunderbird (because under the hood it uses the fully featured Firefox engine).

Outlook even in modern versions still uses the horrifically broken Word HTML engine. Lotus Notes uses, depending on client configuration, either a OS-provided web view or its own stripped-down, worse-than-Word engine.

The webmailer options are even worse. Lotus Notes webmail passes most, though by far not all, HTML tags over to the client, which is pretty cool but you can't do anything with mediaqueries etc. as <style> tags get removed. GMail strips next to everything except images. GMX / Web.de are similar.

And mail support on mobile... don't get me started on this one. Android default mail does stuff differently than the Google Mail app; on iOS Mail at least responsiveness sorta works. Android Lotus Notes Mail is a mixture of "works" and "works not", probably decided by the current position of the moon or whatever.

And Javascript: doesn't work everywhere I tested except on Thunderbird, but there it invokes a prompt...

> The only mail client that does real HTML is Thunderbird (because under the hood it uses the fully featured Firefox engine).

And this is widely considered to be a bug and a source of insecurities, not a feature. The few remaining people I know who use Thunderbird use it in text-only mode in order to control its HTML-rendering tendencies.

Most people don't want a full-fledged browser in their email; it opens up too much attack surface, opportunities for "read receipts" and tracking cookies, etc.

That said, I think email is a good and underutilized tool, and it's unfortunate that more MUAs don't support features like digest handling properly. I think there's a pendulum that's going to swing away from public services like Facebook and back to direct-communication services (Snapchat might already be arguably a part of that) and email is already well-positioned there.

But forklifting the web and HTML into email clients is probably never going to happen.

Thunderbird by default doesn't load external web content, you have to explicitly allow it.

Very true.

I didn't appear to flesh out the details enough - the actual contents of the email is simply a transport mechanism - not the implementation of the client. All that needs to happen inside the email is that it looks like a good, well formatted email message when viewed with a regular email client (and interact properly when treated like and responded to as an email), with predictable content in predictable locations.

The app can then take the contents of that email and format it to appear like your standard social networking platform.

A social networking platform is simply a combination of 1-1, 1-many, and 1-all broadcasting of messages; a format which email is currently capable of.

Maybe you have a great concept, but as a general principle that sounds bad. If someone doesn't have your special client, it will be disjointed. If someone does have your special client, why didn't you just use a saner protocol.

Also, email is not really very decentralized. You need to be one of the major providers to avoid the spam filters.

It would not be any more disjointed than any other form of email exchange - just not as well organized as a social network.

> You need to be one of the major providers to avoid the spam filters.

Yes, but you could take advantage of the existing email providers' IMAP and POP implementations, and companies have long worked to ensure their emails are not sent to spam folders; it's not entirely a black art or impossible.

I realized I didn't address the more important of your two points, figured I'd do that now.

> why didn't you just use a saner protocol.

Mostly because your email network with your friends and colleagues already exists. Even more - we already rely on email as the ultimate identity authority for just about everything based on the web. My idea simply adds crypto-based authentication, UI improvements, and chat over the top of that.

Emails are so simple and ubiquitous that people have already implemented email <-> help-desk bridges, this idea just takes that bridge concept and applies it to interactions between user.

Take a moment and picture what it would be like to have every thread in Facebook delivered to your inbox. It would be a mess with the current mailbox UI, but there's not much impedance mismatch. Now picture the reverse - every email you get shows up as a "post" on Facebook. Both consist of the asynchronous distribution of messages from one user to many others, it's just that one relies on Facebook's network of servers, and the other relies on mail servers.

Is this not what Google Buzz was supposed to be?

Google Wave to be more precise :)

Even better - leverage NNTP. Choice of transport is nearly arbitrary.

Gmail / Inbox does some really cool stuff with markup like that:

https://developers.google.com/gmail/markup/

This sounds like something you could have proposed 15 years ago. It assumes local, custom email clients for "enabled-by-default encryption" and XMPP support. People have moved onto web and mobile email clients, and you can only use whatever is compatible across all platforms.

I also think it overlooks mobile adoption. Many people using the internet today have only accessed it from a phone. They don't necessarily have email addresses. They may not have ever used a full sized keyboard.

This idea does not preclude the use of a mobile app. The mobile app will simply act as a IMAP and XMPP client on the network side, and look like a Facebook/Google+/MySpace app on the user side.

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