I personally like email because I don't usually have to deal with the worst of it, but the argument that it's useful because we all use it seems... incomplete. We all have addresses, should we be sending more mail? We all have pens, should we switch to longhand? Email is good for some stuff but not other stuff, no need to oversell it as a platform it was never meant to be and never will be.
Good thoughts and I agree! The overloading of email is a huge problem, and no one wants more junk. So it comes down to receiving things that you really want.
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.
"it's easy to unsubscribe with one click. If people didn't want it, they would have unsubscribed"
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.
That was my knee-jerk reaction too, until I actually clicked on the link to Bit of News page. It's very simple and straightforward. It says "Daily 60 sec news summary in your inbox" and asks you to enter your e-mail address to subscribe.
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.
I agree! There are also a lot of spam-mailers that use their unsubscribe link just to confirm that the email adress actually belongs to a human. Thats why I tend to ignore the unsubscribe button, when the mail looks fishy.
That's a good point but I think it's a weak assumption.
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...
As mentioned below, giving spamm'ers a way to test a block of (presumably random/dictionary-generated addresses) for valid subsets isn't a very good idea.
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.
This is the argument I see everyone using, but I don't understand it. Why does it matter if a spammer knows your address is valid, if they've already decided it's valid enough to spam it? Do you think spammers really bother to validate their address-lists before reselling them to other spammers? (Even if they do, though, I think it'd be irrelevant. If your spam filter is effective, it doesn't matter how much "true spam"--things you have absolutely no chance of finding interesting--you get. It all gets filtered away before you see it.)
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.
Maybe more importantly, they would know whether their message was classified as spam (or a pretty good heuristic thereof). A naive bayes classifier for spam relies on the spammer not knowing whether the message was marked as spam or not. Such a classifier isn't difficult to fool if you can test how a given message is classified. (Presumably gmail's spam filter is more advanced these days, but the idea that it is easier to fool if you can tell the result still seems reasonable.)
Here's an alternative idea: what if clients would only honor rel='unsubscribe' links with an HTTPS URL scheme, and only finish the TLS handshake for those requests if the host sends the client a valid Extended-Validation certificate?
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.
>Why does it matter if a spammer knows your address is valid, if they've already decided it's valid enough to spam it?
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.
I don't know if that's quite true. I think in a script in the bottom is fine, as thats where people expect it to be. If its a simple, one-click thing, then its fine. I think adding big unsubscribe buttons at the top is just noise and obstructive to people that are actually reading your emails. Sure there are people that will just mark your email as spam or filter it to the trash, but I don't know how much of a difference the location of the unsubscribe button will make to them because I suspect they likely aren't even opening your emails to begin with.
Hey, if people want news in their email, your service seems great. I just think email is a weird platform for it, you know? Email is where I go to exchange electronic mail with other people - it's asynchronous electronic mail. For alerts, news, and time-sensitive stuff there are a lot more platforms or on-demand stuff (like going to a news website, or in my case just glancing at a news overlay i have on my desktop).
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.
News are usually not as time sensitive as you think, and if they really are then all your colleagues around you will already be talking about it.
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 see what you mean. I made Bit of News based on my experience as a student. A lot of my friends read email in the morning on the go on iPhones - walking to class, riding the bus, etc. And I imagine it as a way to quickly read what's happening in the morning while you have nothing to do. That's also why every change I make, I always prioritize how it looks on the iPhone first lol
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!
Email is great for read-mostly (or even read-only) things like email lists and various summaries and or editorialized contents -- if you have a good email reader that lets you clearly distinguish the two (eg: filter out mails with precedence: bulk/list-id set etc to folders that doesn't pop up alerts or get in the way of "actual people" trying to reach you).
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.
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.
My main business is sending news in a variety of programming niches on a weekly basis via e-mail to over 170k subscribers.. and it's a successful and growing business (at least by historical standards, though not VC/SV ones - six figure net profits). I would agree with most of what it said in this post.
i subscribe to nearly all of these and can vouch for them being a welcome sight in my inbox. sure, a lot of the links are HN repeats, but some are not :)
Thanks! I should note HN is not a big source for us but due to the time lag involved with weekly publication (about 50% is e-mailed in), a lot of stuff ends up on HN more quickly.
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.
It only takes one reader to agree with you that something is interesting for it to end up on HN after all :-)
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.
We help people do this with our service: https://www.feedsapi.org/ , maybe it's exactly what you are looking for. It works not only with email but with Evernote, Instapaper and rss readers + it clips the full article content.
This article reminds me of why I find the buzzword usage of "social" so irritating. The web has always been social! My most memorable and rewarding experiences on the internet will always be in the e-mail conversations I've shared with others around the world.
Not to be too pedantic, but email isn't part of "the web". Historically the social aspects of the internet were elsewhere email, IRC, Usenet, etc. The Web was mostly(only?) a network of documents.
Totally agree! There are some experiences I'd personally experience alone. That's why I chose against making Bit of News social.
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!
>Reading is, and has always been, an individual activity.
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.
Ditto, although replace "email" with Usenet / Forums.
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).
IME, it's only really en-us speakers that pronounce "#" as "pound".
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 £.
Email sucked for a decade because spam got out of control. I ran a hand-built email server in my home for years, and know this problem decently well. However, with the ability to train their filters based on SO MANY people, Google fixed it. (Other systems vastly improved as well.) With the signal-to-noise ratio being largely a solved problem these days, it makes email a viable "platform" again.
I've been using email as an application platform for years, and I agree with everything this author is saying.
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.)
> 1) Email suffers from the tragedy of the commons. The more email that is sent the less valuable each email app is.
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.)
>> 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...
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."
You can at least get some of that with flags/stars, but I agree, most clients won't allow persistent sorting, and for some use-cases that could be useful.
I think 8:30am is a bit late to send the news. I think a lot of people who work "traditional" hours are already up, out the door, and have made a dent in their day. I like to read the news before I get started.
How many people still work traditional hours? How many of those people would be interested in an email news service? Seems entirely reasonable to me that the intersection might be small, and that the people who want to read the news at 6 AM would not be interested in doing so by email.
I usually wake around 6:00 and check my mail. For me the best is a short summary of stories on email, say the first 4-5 lines of each item, and clickable. If a web page was customizable, that would be fine too, but as the OP says, if you are already in email it is easiest to stay in email.
I have no data, but I bet you're an exception. People read emails when they get to work (yes, even personal emails); by sending them at 8:30, they get the email to reach people when they're already at their desk or at least at the top of the queue (since emails clients sort from newer to older).
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.
I actually did tons of A/B testing and 8:30am works way better than 6am (in terms of open rates). Honestly I've no idea why, but I have a few theories.
One of my side project is trying to make email as a web portal, that is, letting people do as many things as possible in email -- http://snipek.com. Well, I dogfood this project a lot in my daily life :)
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.
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
From metrics, seems users use web@snipek.com more than other functions of this project, so I just made snipek.com/web the front page (snipek.com) last night ...
I like getting news in my email; when Google Reader died I switched my RSS over to mail and haven't missed a beat.
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 been using Circa for the past few months (maybe even up to a year?), and I much prefer it to email.
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.
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.
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.
Filters and labels do nothing for this problem at all, because the email still either says, "I'm here, look at me" in some way, or it doesn't, and is entirely forgotten.
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).
Yes, I was thinking about checking the label when you want to read the news. I'm not criticizing your approach if it works for you, I'm just saying that email doesn't have to be pre-emptive and force an activity upon you; you can shape it.
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 :)
I'm usually more frustrated by the restrictions imposed by apps. Can't copy-paste, can't adjust text size, can't export the list of stories read or archive them, can't apply my own filters, can't use it on my desktop, etc.
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.
Yes emails tend to be associated with all the bad things. Usually though if a user subscribe and expects it everyday, it'll unlikely get marked as spam / unsubscribe
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.
Yeah, what is it that makes theSkimm specifically for young women? The woman in the logo? I read theSkimm and I'm a young woman, but my impression is that it's written for the busy general public.
How is "young women" more niche a target than male techies or, say, ops developers?
> 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.
Yeah sounds like a perfect way for Square to latch onto an already-popular platform and ride the wave.
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.
IMO, I don’t think the platform is the key in this kind of business. As you can see in this thread some people like emails and other people like apps or whatever.
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.
I run a similar service over at The Daily Water Cooler http://www.the-dwc.co/ so I definitely agree with your line of thinking regarding email as one of the most easily accessible platforms.
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.
A lot of psudeo arguments against this in this thread. I don't think there is any problem with using the "platform" in this way its pretty much a newsletter or a mailing list which is very standard.
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.
Cool! This sounds like http://www.news.me/ before the team bought Digg and pivoted. It seems social news via email didn't work for them, so I'm looking forward to how nuzzel will handle this.
I'm a News.me subscriber and it seems to still work the same.
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.
I have used nuzzel since beta. It is neither curated nor trying to figure out whats relevant to you. Instead it uses your twitter stream to show you relevant news and also has a few featured feeds of other prominent tech people. I can easily catch up on my tech news (most of what I follow in twitter) every morning.
Is it really that strange an idea to build a startup focused on email? Sendgrid, mailchimp etc seem to do fine. Not to mention the various tools and services for email migration, backup, hosting etc.
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.
Sendgrid, Mailchimp are email services. They them-self don't provide the content.
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.
Jason Calacanis has his Launch Ticker (http://launch.co/) that sends a couple emails per day with summaries of the day's top tech news. It's now a subscription only service, but it definitely cuts the time I spend looking for Tech News.
Not 100% sure, but I think he's launching Inside.com that may have a similar take...
Maybe I didn't specify clearly, but it's targeted toward young professional women. So that's around ages 17-29. Checkout their latest issue[1]. It's heavily editorialized and obviously appeal to a very specific audience. Not my cup of tea but a lot of people enjoy it.
I could say the same about snail mail to a degree.
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??? =)
I like the idea. I received the first mail today. News about negative happenings over the world. What I personally would like is positive news delivered to my inbox. For negative news I can watch CNN, Fox and whatnot.
subscribed! I think its a good idea. Its like in the old days when my dad looks at the newspaper everyday. Instead i don't look at the newspapers, i read emails.
In terms of people covered worldwide, yes. That was my initial reaction too.
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.
This reminds me of a service that I used in the past, called Evening Edition (http://evening-edition.com/). Thank you for bringing back a service where I can receive a daily digest of today's news. Combined with SaneBox or Unroll.me, your daily email helps to raise the value of the few e-mails that make it to my inbox.
That's what elite marketers have been telling us for years. The problem is many people are attracted to bells and whistles that is without substance. In the end it's all about the content of the message; the messenger would soon be forgotten (or be a lot less relevant, at least).
