Comment by rjd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rjd | Hacker News Reader

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I assume you don't use Snapchat then, because it should be fairly self evident.

For one thing, snap chat is audio visual, email is not. The second is snap chat is designed to work in manner to capture the moment without interfering with it, email on the other hand has a very interrupting flow.

So you end up with one product that captures the emotional state of a moment, and the other which doesn't. This weekend for example I received a snap chat taken a friend bombing a motorway exit on roller blades. The fact it self destructs adds to this as well, because its not the content that matters so much as the vibe of the message. When I got that message I was stunned and wanted to see it again, I had the impluse to contact my friend immediately and respond. I would never get that from an email.

I probably get in excess of 100:1 snapchats to emails from friends for those reasons. I also get maybe 20:1 vs Facebook messages now as well now.

My mom sends me videos of the cat via email all the time. My level of 'cool' is such that this is the extent to which people send me videos, but a video of a cat watching Netflix on my mother's iPad isn't any different than rollerblading hijinks: email would work great for either and wouldn't involve a third party trying to extract billions of dollars from this simple exchange.

I get it that the emailing a video workflow might not be that great, but all that's missing is a good app for it. You don't need an expensive middleman trying to squeeze profits out of simple communication (Facebook, twitter, snapchat, SMS, etc) when entirely free alternatives exist and have fundamentally better foundations.

E-mail sucks because you _can't_ funnel huge profits out of it, so it hasn't gotten much attention. There is a real and huge opportunity for making communication better without trying to vendor-lock your users into ad-laden privacy hell, but it hasn't quite been done yet.

I have ideas, but I don't yet have the resources or motivation to move on it and might never. I hope somebody does though, because I'm tired of dealing with the middle-men in personal communication and afraid of the potential for abuse of power many of them have.

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