Email, an idea so old that it's new
blog.bitofnews.com
blog.bitofnews.com
With Bit of News, it's easy to unsubscribe with one click. If people didn't want it, they would have unsubscribed. At least that's what I would do.
I've found that people tend to like emails that they expect, and dislike the ones that are out of the blue. If you expect it everyday, it's a pleasure instead of an annoyance.
Be careful with this assumption. It might surprise you how many people won't bother to click unsubscribe (no matter how obvious you make the option) b/c they just click "spam". I have friends who have been caught by this one in the past.
I've been in a lot of situations where I gave out my e-mail address to some site because I needed to have them let me know about something specific and then I started receiving unrelated stuff from them. That's what I would call a form of spam. But receiving periodic content you explicitly signed up for? I personally can't find a reason to call that spam.
If there's anyone who decides to subscribe to this and then later can't be bothered to unsubscribe, that's really their own problem.
So far I haven't received any spam reports from Mailchimp - hopefully that's because I haven't received any instead of Mailchimp failing to catch any haha...
It would be nice if everyone that actually allows unsubscription would set the correct headers. In my experience, only traditional mailing-lists do, and all the stuff you really want to unsubscribe to reinvent a new interface over http(s). Which isn't great if you're in an email reader, not a web browser.
If people could get their act together and actually supply an accurate text/plain part to all the "fancy" html crap, that'd be great too.
It always makes me sad when companies realize that they've not got an interesting enough offer that stating it in a short concise text is going to get any conversions, an then assume that if they format it so it's unreadable on a small screen, add a lot of images that'll be blocked for privacy reasons, their offer will be more enticing.
Makes me even more sad that it (apparently) works.
Think about it this way: if there was an auto-unsubscribe mechanism, which ethical bulk email senders honored and spammers didn't, then it would become much easier to filter spam: any message that clusters into a message-cluster that the system has sent out an unsubscribe-request for already, is junk.
Every spammer who wanted to "trick" the auto-unsub mechanism would basically have to first dox themselves for all the world to see. And any certificate that turned out to not be a valid means of contacting the spammer would be quickly revoked.
Because then they can dictionary attack a large list of random emails, send out a trivial campaign, and collect a list of valid users then sell it to someone else.
Don't get me wrong - people who want to use email this way deserve the most customizable and yet straightforward way of getting it and this looks useful for that. I just think email as a platform in this case is a one-forward-two-back thing.
I would find it comforting to be able to finish reading the news every day, just like a news paper. I also like the way you can refer to stories if everyone read the same news, "did you read the top news", as opposed to hacker news where items on the front page can go up and down by the minute. The constant refreshing of news is such a time sink. Picking the right stories for a fixed list of stories of course requires good editorizing
I'm not in the work environment so I can't personally imagine Bit of News to be read in Outlook / Apple Mail / Gmail on desktop while sitting in a chair. Like you said, in that environment email is probably best for time sensitive / work related things. YMMV!
I suppose part of the reason why I like email lists so much is the lack of redundant formatting. Just stick to the de-facto plain-text ways of formatting mail: star for bold, _underscore_ for underline (arguably redundant in itself), angle-brackets for quotation. Reply inline/below the person you're quoting. No graphical smilies. No suddenly changing text size. Just a strong focus on content and prose.
Granted, for actual news, I might want to see images -- and that's a bit of a challenge, sending out attachments to a large list doesn't sound all that appealing -- then again, we do have more bandwidth now than 20 years ago -- shouldn't actually be much of a problem.
Yes and no.
It is a more intuitive interaction that keyboard for a lot of things, and has been used as such for a lot of things… Including by Steve Jobs who introduced the iPhone with one argument only, one that tops yours: better than pens (or rather, he said stylus) we have fingers and those are more convenient. The rest of ‘touch’ is history.
Penmanship is great but as an experienced calligrapher, trained fast hand-writer and reasonably fast typist: no one writes faster and legibly than they type, not after basic training.
Finally: Yes, you should consider switching to longhand when you do what that service does: think hard about the quality of the content. Hand writing goes a tremendous way in showing and triggering appreciation. I am actually devising a business plan with a friend around those lines.
EDIT: Thanks. Subbed.
That said, I see at least one item a week that hits HN an hour or two after us, and occasionally stuff that even hits HN months after we covered it ;-) So it's swings and roundabouts.
I wouldn't worry about that -- most of the really interesting (hacking/programming) stuff on HN isn't time sensitive. A tutorial/intro on <lang/stack/arch/design> that's great today, will be great in a year as well.
Reading is, and has always been, an individual activity. Just you and the words. The rise of social media just cluttered our attention span, sharing this and sharing that. Reading is enjoyable when you're completely focused!
That's not true. Novels written in the 19th and 18th century, which featured long and complex passages, were often read aloud. Poems with meter are usually read aloud as well. Religious prayers are still sung and chanted.
>The rise of social media just cluttered our attention span
A generation ago, people said the same thing about a kind of social media: television. The generation before that worried about movies, as well as the decline of letter writing because of spread of telephones. The generation before that was worried about the telegraph destroying the art of letter writing as well.
Movies, telephones, television, and texting do not have permanent deleterious effects on your attention span. All you need to do is make a commitment and set aside time for reading.
I'm unfortunately too young to remember BBS systems. But I bet BBS is how I learned of Motal Kombat Fatalities (an older friend usually set me up with those... behind my parents back).
(jk)
We should use "pound" for twitter, too, since it is faster and easier to say. Just a single syllable.
It is especially confusing to British people when people reference # as "pound", as we have completely different notion of what a pound sign is, namely £.
I wish, however, that he hadn't written this article for two reasons. 1) Email suffers from the tragedy of the commons. The more email that is sent the less valuable each email app is. 2) Current email tools are woefully inadequate to deal with the existing volume of email users receive. Worst is the fact that email forces users into a LIFO queue and doesn't allow for import-based ordering. We need innovation in email processing more than we need more email based applications. (Even SMS has a better model for organizing data than modern email: one thread per counter party group.)
I'm not sure it's so much the tragedy of the commons, as it is "any fool can mash some text and whatever random markup he thinks works down the pipe and call it email". With proper use of headers (and x-headers) most setups can handle mail just fine (filter on delivery with sieve or similar).
> 2) Current email tools are woefully inadequate to deal with the existing volume of email users receive.
I've yet to see anyone roll out proper server based filtering that truly enables the "regular" user to do what "power users" already can do easily. I think sieve coupled with imap and server-side search holds great promise, but I don't know of any clients that actually make good use of this.
The alternative approach of indexing for fast search/filter on the client only really works for a single client (eg: "hosted" mail, either webmail, only reading email on a single computer (eg: laptop) or reading email over ssh).
I suppose we need a standard way of a) syncing email (like imap), b) syncing filters (like sieve) and c) syncing indexes and search/view/tag preferences. I'm not aware of anything that fills c).
> Worst is the fact that email forces users into a LIFO queue and doesn't allow for import-based ordering.
I'm not sure what you mean here. Are there clients that don't allow reverse sorting by message date? That sounds like a broken client. That people don't use the feature is another matter...
> We need innovation in email processing more than we need more email based applications.
Looking at the design of MH [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MH_Message_Handling_System ], and sup/notmuch -- it would seem we should've come much further than we have. As a vim-user I quietly resent the cult of Emacs for probably having a "good enough" email system, and therefore no longer contributing improvement for "the rest of us" ;-)
> (Even SMS has a better model for organizing data than modern email: one thread per counter party group.)
Most clients allow sorting by thread ( http://www.jwz.org/doc/threading.html ) or grouping by participants?
Now, if you want to argue that the state of email readers on Android is atrocious, I'll agree without further comment.
> I'm not sure what you mean here. Are there clients that don't allow reverse sorting by message date? That sounds like a broken client. That people don't use the feature is another matter...
LIFO and FIFO are the only real sorting options. I want drag and drop of "this is top priority, this is second, this is third" that doesn't get pushed down when new mail comes in. Email is used as a processing queue, but at the volume most of us receive advanced ordering is desirable but impossible -- I want to look at my email and see the top five things I have to do then the new messages not vice versa.
Email as a consumer is currently "OK" but I'd like to see it upgraded to "good."
If they sent it sooner, by the time people sat down and opened their inboxes, the email would already have been "submerged" under a bunch of others sent afterwards.
1) Readability inside email (http://snipek.com/read). Send a url to read@snipek.com and you'll get a reply with readable content of the web page. And it becomes a way to navigate through links in email. You send a link to read@snipek.com, then you'll get the content of the web page in email, without leaving mail client to browser.
2) Read news (http://snipek.com/news/)
3) Create web page for your email messages, so you can share the web page on social network (http://snipek.com/web) -- forward any message to web@snipek.com
One thing I would like, though, is a link batcher - whether I'm on the train or just busy I often see something I want to read later, and I use Pinboard to save it like that (and I've used Pocket and Instapaper before), but the backlog just builds up into a bottomless hole. It'd be great to get an email the next day saying "here's your queue" so I can do a second round of pruning.
I've come to associate email with either personal correspondence, technical support, or spam.
The thing about a website or an app is that it's segmented. I have to actively decide, "Now's the time for this activity" instead of an email deciding for me.
Also, I didn't know theSkimm was a young-women's thing. My girlfriend (a young woman) gets it, but I didn't think it was specifically "for" her.
That's what filters and labels are for. I follow a few medium-traffic mailing lists, but I don't let them flood my Inbox, they go straight to the label which I can peruse later.
Nowadays even "noobs" are using them, thanks to Gmail recent tabbed interface. We just need a new for News and this service would fit right in.
The solution would be to incorporate checking the folder every time I want to read some news, which involves way more gestures/taps and intent than if I want to read news in Circa (one tap).
The solution would be to incorporate checking the folder every time I want to read some news, which involves way more gestures/taps and intent than if I want to read news in Circa (one tap).
Well, I guess it depends on your OS/email client. Gmail on Android has a widget for opening a specific label directly from the home screen, so it would be just one tap as well.
I use K-9, which I don't think has the same feature, but two taps (open client, click on folder) is good enough for me :)
Not to mention all the one-click-for-more, filter-by-category, etc. features that come with a native app.
It just doesn't make sense.
For example, I can't use Circa, due to [1]. With email, this kind of stupid restrictions just don't exist. Though I agree that email is not the best platform for this activity: I prefer RSS/Atom.
[1] http://circa.helpshift.com/a/circa-news/?s=general&f=why-isn...
And yeah that's their target market. I forgot where I read this but they "aim to change the way young female professionals read the news". Don't quote me on that though.
How is "young women" more niche a target than male techies or, say, ops developers?
> 2.) Engagement in email far outshines apps.
> 3.) Everyone else is too jaded to take advantage of it.
This is no doubt the same rationale for Square Cash[1] i.e. send cash to your friends via email. I wonder how their adoption has been though, compared to an analog product like Venmo[2] which uses a mobile app approach.
It just makes sense. You're already emailing the other person, why not also send money too? You're already reading your email, why not checkout today's news?
I'm interested to see where email goes. Maybe it'll become a hub for all your internet activities.
--Jamie Zawinski
I think the key is the quality of content. When I read this: The Ivy experience We select from a variety of topics and sources to help you become well informed. Join thousands of Ivy League students in reading bit•of•news.
I think , “who are “we”?”, “who are choosing instead of me the news?”, “you” select a variety of topics that maybe I (as a user) don’t even care… which makes users get bored or jaded… and opt-out of it.
I have just subscribed and I haven’t been asked if I am interested in sport, tech, politics, science, biology,fashion,travel,business… and if I start receiving that kind of topics that I don’t like or think are not interesting but the person in charge thinks they are cool… there is a problem…
The quality content is different for almost each user. For example, Flipboard asks you before you open an account to know what you want to be informed. They have quality content for each user.
My service might be closer to Dave Pell's NextDraft or a more general Term Sheet by Dan Primack though because it's really just me curating the content so I generally add more personal flavor and don't really have an algorithm to help source the content.
Kind of curious where TheSkimm goes though. They got some nice funding recently from Homebrew but clearly are aiming to be more than just a newsletter. They also used to be more young professional woman-centric, but have started to slowly downplay that.
I gotta wonder though, why the Ivy League focus?
Anyway, good luck with the venture! Happy to see more people informed about the news.
I'm interested in seeing what you can really do with email looking at it as a platform with 2.0 eyes in mind.
One other thing. I think call intent will be what sets you apart and if that's the case why does the platform matter, why can't you have email, RSS, and a web app?
I get you want to focus on doing something new with something old. That's cool. Just dont cut potential power readers off because you use the wrong platform. Be email first RSS second if it helps you think about it. (No reason you can't pivot other platforms later)
They had news for a few different time-zones and it was amazing, but I don't think they got enough funding to keep it going, they stopped at the end of 2013.
They did sign up me up (I think?) for the Digg Newsletter, which is annoying. But I still get the News.me newsletter too.
I know part of the original value add for News.me is that it was informed by bit.ly data on who actually clicked which links. I assume there's very little of that data left as bit.ly usage is not what it once was. But just by counting links (and replies? faves?) of people in my twitter stream it is still very useful for me personally.
full disclosure: I know the folks that built it.
If anything email seems like a much safer bet than building something for twitter, considering the number of businesses that rely on it and the fact that you're less likely to be screwed over by some policy decision.
Where as Bit of News is a news services that relies on email. And yes emails are unstable, especially with the way Gmail handles them / attempt to segregate different types of emails.
Not 100% sure, but I think he's launching Inside.com that may have a similar take...
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Plenty of start-ups have talked about how their thank you cards were "revolutionary." NextDoor is using postcards to validate addresses and for some good old fashioned marketing. Where else can we go back in time??? =)
Kinda wish hackaday had one. Btw what's with the countdown?
Press Y on it
Got a question though. How do you determine the news to send? Do you check read it all or you have an automated system in place for it?
It's part manual, part automated now. I queue up popular stories and pick them by hand - so there's a diverse range of news.
It does suffer from proprietary standards and massive costs, tough; message length is also far too small for news summary, and the addition billion from e-mail are less interested in global news and more in news that isn’t always digitalised yet. So: technically right, but for all intents and purposes, it’s the largest possible for the service considered.