Ask HN: Could this kill email? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Could this kill email?

5 pointspadobson16 comments

I really enjoyed Paul Graham's latest essay on Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas, and I've been thinking about some of the problems posed in the article for days.

The one I like the most is Replacing Email. The solution that came to me seems feasible as a starting point, so I thought I'd post it here to see similar ideas and get some feedback.

Important emails are most often written by important people. So I submit that the starting point for killing email is to create an exclusive email service for important people.

People with over 100,000 Twitter Followers. People with over 250,000 Likes on their Facebook Page. People with over a 95 Klout score. People that can authorize a $1,000,000 purchase.

Those who get into the service can send emails to anyone on the service without it being caught in a filter.

Everyone on the outside has to earn access to each person on the inside, one person at a time. To earn access, they have to write quality emails to that person for a period of time. Quality should be measured algorithmically and never brought to the attention of the recipient until that quality threshold has been met.

I have lots of other ideas concerning this, but I'd like to hear some feedback on the basic premise first.

Hi Patrick :-)

So you want to tackle the spam issue. The problem with your system as far I see it is:

1) it can be easily gamed (as other people have pointed out)

2) there's not enough incentive to use it

So what? You have emails and a second email-like communication system?

I think email is unlikely to be killed any time soon. Its versatility makes its force. Still, it's used for many use cases, and the way to use less email is to have better alternatives for specific use cases (for example, file attachments - todo items - meeting arrangements).

Better solutions actually exist for each of the use cases but it's then a matter of getting enough velocity to have enough people using it (for e.g email attachments has probably decreased with dropbox and file sharing services).

Part of my problem might be that I don't experience this particular problem either. However, it is something I see the target audience complaining about a lot.

I agree that there might be some problems with gaming the system - any system can be gamed, we hackers know this better than anyone.

So what are some ways the system could be made more secure? A LolCat page could get 250k likes on Facebook easily, but could it consistenly get 5,000 likes a week for a year? Maybe staying power should be more important than overall popularity.

What are some better metric to measure importance?

>A LolCat page could get 250k likes on Facebook easily, but could it consistenly get 5,000 likes a week for a year? Maybe staying power should be more important than overall popularity.

Exhibit A: The Cheezburger Network. That said, if you change it to work such that it's personalized for every user, so that it only shows emails from people who are important to them, rather than emails from people the system considers to be important, then maybe people will appreciate seeing emails from the LolCat page of their choice.

Also, a better way to measure importance would be to go through the user's sent items history and map out the people they email most frequently. I once wrote a classifier which classified email contacts as important or not important based on the sent items history of the user and it worked pretty well for me.

You could also use Bayesian classification of the contents of the emails the user sends and the emails to which the user replies and use that data to determine if the user would like to see an email, based on it's contents (rather than the sender).

I think PG's idea of replacing email is important from a functional UI perspective. On the backend, replacing STMP with some other format is irrelevant. The email replacement will better address the issues inherent in human information processing.

One problem has been the focus of email improvements has been driven to a significant degree by technical issues rather than user productivity issues. Spam is the prime example.

The emphasis on spam is primarily because of the impact it has on bandwidth and storage for service providers, not because of the effect on email users. Spam is irritating but not a huge drag on personal productivity because it readily becomes self identifying and thus largely manageable - e.g. "buy viagra" and "Hi" from Tawney don't require much effort to deal with.

The real problem with email is dealing with all the extraneous crap which is presented when the user goes to process the information it contains.

When I click on the email from Kelly entitled 'latest update', what I want to know first is what the hell Kelly is talking about.

What I get first is action options: reply, reply all, etc.

Then comes a full formal presentation of the title, sender, recipients, detailed information about when it was sent - essentially a legal document designed to be read by a machine.

Finally, I get to what to Kelly has to say.

That's the point at which I have to determine it's degree of relevance and what action if any action I should take.

Compare this form of communication with the text message, "Server maintenance on Saturday -- Kelly."

Why doesn't my email client simply parse Kelly's email and let me know "Kelly says there will be server maintenance on Saturday," and add a note to my calendar?

Or rather why doesn't my communication client tell me that regardless of whether Kelly emails, texts, or leaves a voicemail?

Intelligent communication clients are the email killer.

We already have SMS though :) The answer to killing email isn't turning it into SMS. There is a lot of value in long emails, not everything is an action item. Email is a todo list, a social networking medium, a message queue. This is why superseding email is so hard.

Of course we have SMS, but why should there be a difference to the user between an SMS message and an email?

This barrier is entirely artificial - I don't benefit by having both a text application and an email application on my phone.

Yes long emails are useful, but their utility tends to be different from short ones - why doesn't my client handle them differently, e.g. by offering to file them.

The problem isn't email, the problem is managing communications.

With respect to emails, most emails that I read are actually written by people important to me. You may or may not think my boss is important but I'm going to read his email. It's going to be really hard to find a common metric that measures the non-spam-ness of a person. It's all relative.

Maybe, if you took it to the next level, and said each person has their own custom importance function...

Even then, it's still email (less spam, maybe) and not a replacement per se.

I agree that the quality of an incoming email needs to be measured relative to the recipient.

By using some sort of genetic algorithm that takes the recipient's interactions with other emails (e.g. keywords that attract them, types of emails they respond to), then you should be able to build a system that only allows in quality emails relative to the recipient.

When someone responds to an email, this could be the ultimate judge of quality - especially if the email came in from the outside.

Most of this can be gamed, even the $10^6 purchase: a bunch of shell-companies, buying and selling between them, but the net result is that no money ever changes hands. Also, is "250,000 likes" a meaningful metric? Everyone can post a lolcat ;)

More importantly: Reed's Law. Assuming I'm "famous" (by whatever metric, let's assume its usefulness), what for do I need a separate system that only works for connecting me to other "famous" people?

Well, this should be used like any other email service. I, myself, have 5 email addresses. One of them I use specifically for things I think will eventually attract spammers. I never read those emails unless I need to change the password on my MySpace account or update my GoDaddy information.

So if you're an important person that has accounts with hotmail and ymail and gmail, you could add this to the list and use it specifically to interact with other important people - knowing that your inbox here is never going to have junk in it.

That's sort of my point: what makes me want to communicate specifically with famous people?

Well, here's a user story:

You're Kanye West. Lots of other aspiring hip-hop artists want them to know about you because you're Kanye West. As a result, your regular inbox gets 250 emails a day from said hip-hop artists. So if you're Kanye West, you stop using email all together because you can't filter out the noise.

You go to this email service, though, and you get 5 emails a day, and they're from Jay-Z, Rihanna, Def Jam Records, Barbara Boxer, and an up-and-coming regional hip-hop artist who sold 12,000 records, has a growing following, and just barely met the standard to gain access to the service.

Those emails would be far more useful to Kanye, and he would check that inbox far more often because of it.

I'll pass on communication-as-a-service to replace email. Any email replacement must be distributed. You cannot beat email with a rails app.

I really don't get what is so fundamentally wrong with email. Sure you get a lot of it, but with spam control, filters and tags set up stuff gets sorted out pretty well.

And if you have something that can be solved with a 2 minute call don't waste an afternoon of back and forward emails.

I tend to agree with you. I spend 5-10 minutes a day getting to Inbox 0.

However, the target market seems to have this problem in spades. I don't know any wealthy or famous people who haven't complained about their inbox here or there.

> Those who get into the service can send emails to anyone on the service without it being caught in a filter.

Which is fine until an important person's PC/phone/tablet gets malware.

How often do important people use infected devices?

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