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Show HN: Enter a message, delivery at a random time up to 6 months from now

futuremessage.me

66 pointsyid52 comments

I think this is an interesting idea with some potential. Good job building something for people!

I'm sure you're not at this stage yet, but the best way I can add value is to offer a few design notes as you move forward:

- The alignment, especially around the form, is sort of wonky. "E-mail" is separated to two lines (at least in Chrome), and the "Schedule for delivery" button is neither left aligned or center aligned. The e-mail field is also way longer than necessary for an e-mail address.

- There is a bit of dissonance between the old-looking, message-in-a-bottle font and the highly rounded edges of the forms. I'm not sure which direction is better, but it seems like it might be better to either go for tech-looking or aged-looking than splitting the difference in this way.

- The background, which is a not-great quality, black and white photo of a woman in a bikini, is distracting and strange whichever direction you go in. I guess the beach is where you find messages in a bottle, but it just feels very confusing and distracting from the core product.

- The name, FutureMessage.me, made me assume that I was going to send myself a message. If I can, and am even prompted to, send a message to someone else, there is no future message being sent to me. I read the name like "message me", as in "send me a message." I don't think this is a big problem, but it's definitely not as good as it could be.

- I was able to enter a non e-mail, "asdf asdf asdf" and schedule a message. I wasn't given any feedback on the thanks page telling me the address, so if I mistyped an invalid email, I might end up waiting for 6 months and not getting anything. Would add a bit more polish to correct invalid email accounts, and also to confirm the email on the thanks page.

- The thanks page is obviously thrown together and doesn't make much sense. I don't understand who the person is, and why he relates.

- The explanatory text isn't very strong. Coming to the site, I get what it does, but I don't understand why I would want to use it. At least for me, I didn't have a response like "finally, I can send myself a randomly timed message!" I think it would help if you fleshed out some ideas for usage, something to hook me in and think "yeah, that's something I'd want to set up."

- I'd work on the colors. The all grayscale with just the two words in fire-engine red is sort of harsh and doesn't look very appealing.

- The stream-of-consciousness stuff at the end is interesting, but might need to be adapted into another form. I think you've started to reflect on what might be interesting about your tool, but I don't think you're communicating those reflections very well.

- The tagline, "Messages to the Future", doesn't add much to the name. It might be good to rewrite this.

- Because it's so simple, there's no reason to use so much vertical space. I should be able to use the tool without scrolling like I do now on my laptop.

- Having the background on the wrapper and pushing the wrapper to the left makes the grey background on the right look just like dead space. Either center the wrapper, or find a better way of relating the backgrounds.

- After making the more important changes, go over carefully the spacing and padding of the different elements to make it look harmonious. As an example, the space between the name (which shouldn't have a colon) and the tagline doesn't look right.

Keep up the good work!

Thank you SO much for the feedback...working on some of those changes right now.

EDIT: changes are now live, thanks again!

Great! Already much improved.

Had a few extra minutes, made a mockup of the more literal approach. Needs a lot of tweaking, and not exactly the right bottle, etc., but just something quickly thrown together to get you thinking:

http://forrestnash.com/mockup.png

I dunno if this is a reliable service and how long it's been around. 6 months is also a bit limited.

I've used futureme.org, which does work. In fact, I just got a message from myself from 3 years ago in the last couple of weeks when I just turned 18. Creepy to say the least, and awesome.

I just set it up, and I can assure you that it's reliable (uses Mailgun for delivery, which is top-notch). Very interesting to look at futureme.org, I guess the difference here is that the time is chosen randomly for you, which allows an element of chance.

Great idea, but not very great execution. It looks nice to use once, but hardly will be used again until see it again. You should add some things that will connect tha user with the site. Like "if u asked yourself a future question, post on our wall the answers" or something not like that! Don't limit yourself!

Make A plugin for facebook and an App for iphone. The result that the software gives you is small, so if u build something (an app for example) that usually gives you small result, it will fullfil your expectations. If you don't know how to improve the design and build an app for ex, look for some technical partner.

It really have potential. I just think that u should take care of what will bring the user back to my app/site/whatever.

This idea reminds me of ohlife. An email based journal service where every day they randomly choose a previous entry to send you. Its a cool idea. I just don't see how you'll get people to repeatedly visit.

Interesting idea, I sent my girlfriend a soppy message for the heck of it and I'm thinking of sending myself some tech message reminders for example re-check this framework/site/idea/open source project in 6 months.

I'm always finding stuff that I'm interested in but don't necessarily have a use for now or I'm interested in seeing how the project turns out in the future, this will send me a reminder that I will actually take note of.

What's the e-mail address the message will be sent from? I want to be sure I receive the message; I don't want it ending up in my spam box.

It's going to be from ThePast@futuremessage.mailgun.org

I'm using this to propose to my girlfriend.

Let us know how it goes. BTW, it's been 45 minutes -- have you proposed yet?

Using this transfer protocol is not recommended in this case.

This type of message SHOULD be delivered synchronously. In case it is delivered asynchronously, the receiving peer MAY refuse it.

Another possible problem is that, since 6 months is a long time, you might get time-out before the message is ever delivered.

That reminds me of something I've been thinking about again and again over the past years. Is there any reliable way to send myself a message that I would receive, say, 40 years from today. So far I haven't been able to come up with a good solution.

Lets say you get cheapo hosting @ $5/month. 40 years = $2400, which isn't a terrible investment. Although you'd probably want a VPS where you can ensure that the OS setup doesn't change over 40 years...

That all assumes your host and even hosting and even the internet still exists in 40 years.

Implant the message into your skin with an LED indicator light set to turn on in 40 years. Power the whole thing (timer and light) with a self-winding watch movement. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_quartz

Get a locket engraved with the date. Write the message on thin paper, roll it up, and store it in the locket. Wear it everywhere until it's time to open it. Keep some spare copies in a safety deposit box. If you lose the locket, you'll notice, so you can go and get another one from the box.

>Keep some spare copies in a safety deposit box.

// Prepay for 40 years, leave the message in the box, forget the lockets. The bank will chase your for an extension for the rental of the box.

Far from foolproof but if you're already relying on a deposit box ...

Right, you should definitely prepay. But if you don't use the locket system then you have to remember to go and get the box. The nice thing about the locket is that it's always there around your neck, so you don't have to remember that the box exists or the date (which is engraved).

Pay $2000 to a local school to host a time-capsule event where all the kids write letters to themselves for 40 years from now.

Pay another $1000 to dig a hole in the school yard and put a proper decorative cover on the thing so people remember to dig it out when the time comes.

That might work but it's expensive and what if the school is refurbished or relocated or something?

My own best ideas so far are:

a) Find a large reputable law firm and tell them to find me in 40 years.

b) Write some kind of distributed agent, a virus if you will, that learns about new communication media, runtime platforms, free hosting options for its code, etc. It has one goal: Keep track of my identity until the time comes and then hit me with the message on all channels it knows at the time.

That would be very difficult but not impossible I think. Yes, the internet may be long gone, but it's very unlikely that another platform like the internet would emerge without a very long period of transition and lots of interoperability giving the agent time to pick it up.

But what may be the downfall of such an agent is any change in the legal system that bans all anonymity on the net. One day, no code of any sort might be a allowed to communicate without using some kind of electronic signature.

Set up a trust.

Pretty cool, I submitted a message for my future self.

I would add a privacy note, stating what you said here about dropping the emails/message after sending - I couldn't find anything on there that resembled a privacy policy.

Other thing that would make it slightly more useful, is to add the ability to schedule it versus just random (I would keep the random choice as well, make it the default option even.) But for it to actually be a useful tool, I think the ability to schedule is important.

As a computer scientist, one wonders what kind of randomness? Is the date picked uniformly at random, or is there a bias involved (for example, a negative bias towards the coming days)?

The exact second is picked uniformly at random using an approximation of 30 days per month. The code is:

    my $sendAt = time + int(rand()*86400*30*5) + 86400*30;

You should use a Mersenne Twister rather than rand().

That rand() probably only has 32767 discrete values. So your time is quite imprecise, in addition to being biased. (C's rand() is very biased, so if that code forwards to rand(), then it's biased, not uniform.)

Not that it really matters much in this case.

http://www.math.sci.hiroshima-u.ac.jp/~m-mat/MT/emt.html

http://www.math.sci.hiroshima-u.ac.jp/~m-mat/MT/MT2002/CODES...

Interesting, I didn't know Perl's rand() was that terrible. Hopefully, the auto-seeding using srand will add some entropy. Also, since I'm choosing an epoch second, the times should hopefully be uniformly distributed at the scale of days...

Actually, if you seed your random number generator more than once ("re-seed"), then you're completely destroying your entropy. Which is obviously the exact opposite of what you're trying to achieve.

Just curious...why exactly would you say reseeding adds bias? AFAIK, srand in Perl on Linux uses /dev/urandom, which uses at least some bits from the hardware entropy pool.

Swapped out rand() for MT in any case... :)

Wow, that was fast. Nice.

The truth is this: if you ever hear the phrase "re-seeding", you should reinterpret it as "warning! danger!" because if you seed a random number generator more than once, you destroy any entropy ('true' randomness) that generator otherwise might've had.

When you seed a generator, you're saying "give me a queue of uniformly random numbers. Each time I call rand(), pop one from the queue and return it."

If you re-seed, you're saying "throw that queue away; give me a different queue of uniformly random numbers".

If you do that for every rand(), then you no longer have a queue of uniformly-random numbers. You have bias.

One way to think about this is: The resulting output over time is no longer uniformly random, because it's the first random number of every queue of uniformly random numbers (every seed). And the first number of every seed != uniformly random. It wasn't designed to be.

It's both hard to understand and hard for me to explain, sorry. But if you want to know more, feel free to ask more questions and I'll do my best.

tl;dr: if you seed Mersenne Twister (or any other RNG) more than once, you'll be losing most of the benefits of the Twister (from a mathematical point of view). So don't! =)

I'm very familiar with MT from my PhD research :) It's a nugget of gold hidden in a single .c file.

I asked the question in relation to the LC generators in stdlib, where it seemed like reseeding from the (probably MT? I believe BSD uses Yarrow) generator in /dev/urandom would actually result in more entropy than the internal state of the LC generator in Perl/C stdlib. Totally agree with not reseeding MT though -- I have it in a persistent FastCGI script with an initial seed from /dev/random now.

Oh, sorry... if you're asking whether it's possible to hack the "crappy rand()" such that it has more entropy by constantly re-seeding from MT... then I have no idea =) I just use MT itself.

If I had to design this, I would pick the time according to a power-law curve with closer times being more probable. In fact I would be willing to send ALL my normal emails through such a filter.

Reminds me of a friend's snail-based email service [1] which also had slow delivery time.

[1] http://www.realsnailmail.net/

How does this differ from http://futureme.org ?

I used that service in the past to send myself a message from me pre-PhD-completion self to my post-PhD-completion self to ask how it was. Although it was basically procrastination at the time it was surprising and strangely cathartic to receive an email from a very different sounding me.

Nice one :). Good tool to add a little randomness into life - several months is enough time to forget about all the messages one sent to one's friends. And then, one day, somebody gets the message and replies... :).

Thanks, I'll be sure to enable replying to the originating email address... :)

Neat take on the scheduled email idea!

(plug our own Momentomail service requires you to schedule a precise time)...random delivery might be a fun take on the idea -- surprise yourself!

With Boomerang for Gmail, you can send a message/receive at a random time. You might want to ask them how popular it is before pushing forward.

Just a side project, as far as pushing forward, I'm pretty done :)

this is very interesting. we used a similar service in the past, though for a fixed point in time (i.e., send a message to us in 3 weeks).

who are the primary users you imagine for this?

out of curiosity, are you using a system like postmark to deliver emails, or are you handling email delivery internally?

I don't really have a user demographic in mind, this was just a fun project that was easy to set up. I'm using mailgun to deliver the mails, or rather I will use mailgun in about a month.

Thinking outside the box!

echo "echo message | mail -s subject recipient" | at "now + $RANDOM hours"

So... what are you going to do with everyone's emails? (Besides delivering their past messages)

The delivery script drops them after sending. :) I really have no interest in the email addresses or the messages -- this was just something I wanted for myself, and something that is intended to be write-run-forget.

So how many messages have you gotten queued today?

The response has been amazing! The DB currently has 153 messages, 3 hours after launch... :)

> And yes, it works.

[citation needed]

I set up the site as a curiosity (and to use it myself), and I can assure you that it works. It will, however, be at least 1 month till you get that citation (but more likely several more months).

I use it to record startup and research ideas that I don't have the time to pursue right now, but want to be reminded of in the future.

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