Ask HN: imap-based Facebook-clone without privacy concerns?
I work on a system which retrieves your mails from your imap-inbox and outbox and displays them like you know it from facebook. The first message is clearly highlighted and all replies are shown as comments. If you enter the site for the first time you see nothing. Maybe there must appear a friends-suggestion. If you search for friends you get a list of whom you received mails and whom you wrote mails. If you add them as friends all mails between you and your new friend appear in your stream. The other one will not get informed, that's not necessary. You can comment or reply to every message. If you comment your own message the receivers of the message you comment on will get your new comment as email. If you reply to someone else message, the sender and the other receivers will get your comment. The idea is not to force other people to use this system. If it fits for me, that's enough. The others will get my messages as regular mails and their mails got to my message-stream. There is no media break. Maybe the outgoing mail is styled so the receiver notices that I use a very interesting system and want to try this himself. An idea for the future is to send hidden information within the outgoing mails. If two friends use this platform to communicate and maybe they hit the "like"-Button for a message or picture this information can be send afterward with your next email to this person. His system will get informed to display the "like"-info. To avoid privacy concerns I though of making this open-source so that everyone can install this on an own secure server. But what about those who do not have the skills to install a php-script with database-interaction? Maybe a standalone-php2exe-version can help?
What are your ideas about this? Is it to fail? Or might this be a way to use email in a better way? Maybe for a closed group to organize the messages in a better way?