Threadable (YC W14) makes mailing lists more awesome, less noisy
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
(There are other features too, which I entirely ignore without missing anything. In fact, other than "there are some HTML buttons in the email", which will probably also eventually have an option to turn off, our transition from our prior mailing list service was almost unnoticeable for somebody like me who didn't want to use the extra features. And that's a compliment.)
One of the key changes between how Threadable works and previous mailing lists is that we can actually customize fairly deeply each message to each user, rather than simply reflecting the same thing out to the whole list. This trickles out into a bunch of interesting use cases and features, which we've only just started to implement.
As an engineer what bugs me most in this space is the terrible email related protocols. They are broken and burdensome to deal with. I wish someone would attack that problem.
As a user what bugs me are the terrible native apps for email. I think this stems from the previous problem, few people innovate in email because SMTP and IMAP etc are terrible protocols. It explains why there aren't a thousand mail clients in the way there once were a thousand Twitter clients.
I don't know if Threadable has any plans of going beyond managing lists but those problems ^^^ really need solutions.
So far, a number of companies are doing well with abstracting the protocol layer away to make focusing on building good apps easier (see mailgun.com for SMTP, context.io for IMAP, etc).
As to Threadable's long-term strategy, it goes further. :) Right now, we're building a great mailing list. As it gets further along, we plan to make it into a platform so that other app developers can use us to do all the difficult parts of managing threaded discussions, client compatibility, etc. The idea is to turn every app and website's isolated comment stream into a threaded email discussion, so people can engage using the tools they're already used to.
There's already millions upon millions of mailing lists out there, but nobody's made major changes in this space in a decade or more. We think we can add enough value that people will be happy to pay for it, and make group email collaboration more popular at the same time.
Our overall goal is the engagement and inclusivity that comes from making key information available in the way that people expect. Team collaboration tools only work well when the whole team uses them. The mailing list is just the best way to get there.
Of course there are thousands of email clients! And sure, SMTP isn't as simple as a RESTful API, but it's been a standard since 1982! Backwards compatibility is a huge win for email.
If you don't want to deal with "broken" protocols, there are services like Mailgun and Sendgrid that wrap it up in pretty API calls.
One thing we know for sure is that we won't charge based on the number of users in your organization. We really value people being able to use Threadable for large-scale organizing outside of the business context, and we don't want our pricing model to limit that.
A threadable list can be divided easily into subgroups with their own subset of the list membership. Any member can create a group, and you can move threads between groups, even after they start.
In practice, this means you don't have to anticipate which groups to create in advance. You can just let discussion happen, and when critical mass around some topic is reached, move it off into a group without the overhead or interruption that comes from making a whole new mailing list.
This leads to more organic discussion, and also makes it possible for group members to help one another determine relevance. It's sorta like crowdsourcing your mail filters from the rest of your team. We've noticed that people are less likely to filter a Threadable list into another folder, so they participate more.
It's also more friendly to newbies, since there's less worry that a thread will end up in the wrong place. If it does, you can just move it.
Here's my requirement:
I have a lot of groups on my website (sports clubs in fact) and I want to roll a feature that they can use an email address (like google groups) to manage their teams via email. Is this something we can tap into on threadable?
Is that something you guys can do? How do we work with you guys to make that happen?
In the future, we have plans to do client detection, so that we can offer more advanced features to users with more modern clients.
The article reads a bit like reinventing usenet in the most complicated and difficult to use way possible ...
One key question. Typical startup conundrum. How can I rely on you to keep the discussion archive alive for the long term when you're just starting out with no revenue? Are the archives easy to export and rehost?
Going forward, we're very committed to data portability. Your data is yours. We want to keep your business by regularly delighting you, rather than controlling your content. The plan is to make it possible to export your list in a couple formats, probably JSON and mbox to start. This is down the roadmap a bit, probably June or so. However, if anyone needs their archive in the meantime, they can contact me and I'll make it happen.
In the slightly longer term, I want to build a feature that automatically syncs your list archive to your dropbox, so you can search it using tools like spotlight, and easily read it offline.
Are all email clients supported (Outlook, native mobile, Gmail)? From the screenshot it looks like there are HTML buttons to do most of the commands - will these work outside of Gmail or do they rely on some kind of browser extension?
The email buttons are HTML. We test them using Litmus, and they work well across all major clients. We need to do a bit more styling for older versions of Outlook, though. That's on the road map in the next week or two.
For that matter, if anyone reading this is working with an organization that implements this philosophy, I would love to talk to you!
Though IIUC Threadable latches onto Google Groups? That sucks. How about a clean break guys?
I'm working with the opensource http://github.com/kaihendry/imap2json & mlmmj, and I'm pretty happy.
And I have my data too, to boot.
I can find no pricing information on their website. Is it all free right now? Or does it not even exist yet? What's the deal?
As I said earlier, our plan is to charge for business features, and not by restricting the number of users in a given list. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7429550