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Comment by terryjsmith | Hacker News Reader

I've thought about this on and off for a few years and have one thought: e-mail will find a way out of the inbox. It is now an almost ubiquitous way to deliver something to a contact, especially on mobile.

I know this is fuzzy, but I imagine Facebook notifications being sent via e-mail and if Facebook is "installed" either on the device or via opening the browser, opening the e-mail would deliver you to Facebook, or just display as a regular e-mail otherwise. Taking this one step further: if I deliver you a to-do list item, it would open in my default to-do list app making e-mail more of a platform or launcher than anything else.

If you ever figure out how that would work, let me know. I've tried and haven't been able to connect all of the dots connecting those sending the e-mail and those receiving the e-mail as a platform, how it interoperates and where to start. I'd use the hell out of this though.

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>> I know this is fuzzy, but I imagine Facebook notifications being sent via e-mail

A while back I envisioned an open-source Facebook app. Updates would be sent through email. The email client would recognize such a message and forward it to the app. Decentralized Facebook with direct communication would be great for users. I envisioned much more than just that, but you get the idea. By using email, things can be non-realtime, distributed, and private. There are already protocols for encrypting email, so not even your ISP could monitor your stuff.

Wow, I had the very same idea. But everyone I told the idea basically said: "email is a horrible protocol stack, you don't want to build anything on top of it" or just something like "email is dead". I still think it is good idea.

I also buy that it looks like a great idea, and will like to see how far it can get.

How far do you want it to get? Ping me at sethjgore@gmail.com with the answer. I have something under the wraps that centralizes email and all messaging into a form of interaction.

Like many things, it's a fantastic idea for people and a poor idea for business. The main advantage is that it keeps business out exactly opposite of how facebook invites it in and ruins everything.

email is a fan-fucking-tastic protocol stack BTW. It's detractors all want to do something the user doesn't want or need.

"fan-fucking-tastic protocol". I agree completely. it's time for our systems to centralize email as a first-class citizen and treat it as among the main ways to interact with the system.

Ping me at sethjgore@gmail.com if you agree. I'm organizing something and I want to have people who think email is still underused onboard.

Are you pursuing your idea? I am organizing a team focused on building a system that centralizes email as an essential mode of interaction.

Ping me at sethjgore@gmail.com if interested.

> A while back I envisioned an open-source Facebook app. Updates would be sent through email. The email client would recognize such a message and forward it to the app.

I would have to replace my email client to use your social networking app? That's a problem.

Google does integrations close to this inside GMail (adding calender events, adding context-specific buttons). Outlooks calender requests are an example where embedded metadata is recognized by a lot of clients.

I suspect the problem would be like when Microsoft was making Comic Chat (a visual, comic-strip-based chat client) and their users were flooding IRC channels with useless metadata that normal clients didn't know how to filter out. I feel like this as a transitional period would be worth it though, and not significantly more painful than right now clients dealing with ical/outlook event notifications. I am really surprised nobody's made even a toy implementation of a social network on top of SMTP.

This actually sounds a lot like what the folks at Pebble are doing with the new timeline based flow. I recommend reading up on it a bit. Not that their platform is the future, but a good experiment toward what you're taking about.

Not even close. Facebook and its creation have not enough of public trust, especially after Internet.org initiative.

Actually imo no popular company has it anymore. We will wait for new big player.

There are solutions already, but no big guys would trust them to any corpo existing atm.

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