Email is our personal informational compost heap.
- Email is our personal informational compost heap.
- Email is extremely noisy, but also tons of signal.
- What you decide to subscribe to, even if you don't read it.
- What services you use.
- I'm not the only person to have noticed this:
- "Email is the only protocol on the Internet that centers the individual. Email clients, however, have not evolved to recognize the ways in which email is used. Your email is a todo list, a library, a recipe book, a transactional history, and more."
- What if interactive, useful software just for you could emerge out of that compost heap?
- Like an ecosystem of friendly bacteria, a slime mold.
- At places like Google it's impossible to do this because although they have your data[akt], they would have to build, not grow, software.
- When you build software you need PMs to figure out a piece of software that will have a large enough market, and engineers to build it.
- Software in that style requires users to have a stranger with an ulterior motive be able to see their stuff.
- It also runs into the tyranny of the marginal user.
- As the provider scales, it gets harder to coordinate on planning small things, and everything regresses to the mean.
- What if instead, software could grow?