I wrote a post on The Future of Communications is Passive on Sunday and had an idea that evening about a product or feature that would accelerate this trend.
Attention hackers — please steal this idea!
What I would really like to be able to do is to turn any email into a vitality feed on my social network. Instead of forwarding a funny joke or interesting link via email, I would like to just send it to Facebook, FriendFeed, or Twitter and have it syndicated as part of my feed for anyone to click (or to ignore).
Three ways to do this:
1. An email provider like Yahoo! Mail could add a button to “add this email to my feed,” for turning emails into feeds. They could handle the authentication on the mail side by having users to do a one-time destination (e.g., Facebook) account authentication to confirm that the sender = recipient.
2. An existing feed syndication business like Facebook, Twitter, or FriendFeed could accept email as a source of feed input by creating an email destination for each user (e.g., mikespeiser@feeds.facebook.com). They could handle authentication by having users review items prior to publishing, or they could sign deals to allow for authentication between Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail, and possibly even Microsoft Exchange, Notes, etc…
3. A third party could build an email to feed translation service that simply accepted emails and then turned them into authenticated feeds. I haven’t thought through the best way to handle authentication on this one (other than options discussed in approaches 1 & 2).
The service would strip headers but would use the email subject as the feed subject. The email sender would need to make all edits prior to sending as the entire contents of the email would become the feed.
A service called Mailbucket does email to RSS translation today (source code is posted on the site), but it is focused on sharing public email lists through RSS. The key is to make sure that only the people in my network get the feed/email, so thinking nailing authentication is critical here.
Getting this right could dramatically increase the audience and volume of feeds and would hopefully decrease this type of sharing within the core email experience.
17 Comments
August 6, 2008 at 4:30 am
#3 is def be doable and I am working on something like this. I will post when I am done.
August 6, 2008 at 4:32 am
As for twitter, there is: http://www.twittermail.com/
Not sure if that is along the lines of what you are thinking.
August 6, 2008 at 4:38 am
It is easy to build but I’m not sure that it is as interesting as you think. If you really want it, I’ll build it for fun though, maybe this weekend.
August 6, 2008 at 5:17 am
Posterous accepts emails (with attachments) and turns them into good-looking blog posts. A few days ago they came out with support for autoposting to major blogging platforms. This sounds like your #2:
http://blog.posterous.com/autopost-to-everywhere-even-yo
August 6, 2008 at 5:18 am
As for FriendFeed, there is: http://mail2ff.com/ .
August 6, 2008 at 5:30 am
gmail outputs your mail to an atom feed.. it doesn’t do labels (only inbox) and truncates the item body field. ;/
you could just subscribe (no group/contact auth system, only the owner), then share in your rss reader. it would work nicely if it output full messages but truncation rules out what you’re trying to describe above.
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i like the concept though.
August 6, 2008 at 9:30 am
Facebook has a bookmarklet for the first-party Posted Items app. I use that to do basically what you want to do.
August 6, 2008 at 1:13 pm
I could tweak http://www.fubnub.com to handle this (it actually does most of the back end stuff via email anyway)…it doesn’t currently dump feeds to facebook (and with twitter you would really just be feeding it urls because you couldn’t dump most emails to it due to size)…but I’ll add it to the list of things to support. Thanks. ;-D
August 6, 2008 at 1:55 pm
drop.io just added a pipe out to Twitter ( http://drop.io/wecallittweetio ). I don’t think you can pipe stuff out to FriendFeed or Facebook with them (maybe using RSS somehow?), but they are a pretty elegant way to push data to one place via email, sms, voice, fax, etc.
August 6, 2008 at 4:24 pm
Seems like something that ping.fm can add to their services.
August 6, 2008 at 5:33 pm
Hi there,
As Mikhail mentions, Posterous JUST launched auto-post to Twitter, Flickr, and every major blog platform.
This is in addition to the posterous blog (yourname.posterous.com) that we create for you. You email post@posterous.com with whatever, and we reply with your new blog.
Posterous is all about making things just work over email, so we think it fits perfectly with what you’re proposing.
Please give us a try — http://posterous.com
Best,
-Garry, cofounder, posterous.com
August 6, 2008 at 9:33 pm
Hello Mike,
Multiply.com has a ‘Post via E-mail’ feature where the member sets up a one-time PIN, then just send an e-mail to PIN@username.multiply.com
and Multiply will post e-mails as blog entries, photo attachments as photo albums, videos as video posts and if there’s just a URL in the body, those get posted as Links.
These posts are pushed out to Multiply’s Inbox (Message Board/Newsfeed)
You control the access level of the Inbox, so you can decide to see just ’stuff’ from your Contacts, or you can expand to browse further out into your network.
This feature has been around for about a year.
Also wondering if anyone has checked out Multiply lately?
-Lyle
multiply employee
August 7, 2008 at 12:04 am
[...] Killer feature for FriendFeed, Twitter, and Facebook. I wrote a post on The Future of Communications is Passive on Sunday and had an idea that evening about a product or [...] [...]
August 7, 2008 at 9:15 am
I call it SocialRouting.
Software tools augmenting the routing of messages in our social network:
- all sources connected (emails, rss, twitter, etc)
- routing that can be fully automatic, automatic but managed by the user of the node or fully manual
- the user does not need to check all the routed messages, but can
- every user can choose his own routing algorithm
- the routing algorithms can compete between themselves and evolve by natural selection
The key assumption with this architecture is that every user will have incentive to improve his node to better serve his friends. This does not differ very much from the way we act today, we do route information about, for example, job offerings to our friends.
August 12, 2008 at 10:12 am
I found your site on technorati and read a few of your other posts. Keep up the good work. I just added your RSS feed to my Google News Reader. Looking forward to reading more from you down the road!
September 19, 2008 at 5:19 am
From what I understand from you post, you could set up a WordPress blog. You can update your WordPress via email. WordPress then makes the RSS which can be read by twitter.
Would that work?
December 4, 2008 at 11:29 pm
It seems like Posterous is, in a roundabout way, accomplishing this. It has dead simple blog posting via e-mail, and syncing with Twitter.
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