Email is the schelling point where all of our cross-origin use cases meet.

· Bits and Bobs 3/17/25
  • Email is the schelling point where all of our cross-origin use cases meet.
    • When you visit a site or an app, you have to go to it.
    • Email is where that service comes to you.
    • If you go to a site and get distracted halfway through your task, you forget to complete it.
    • Email is where all of the origins can come to talk to you.
    • Email is naturally async and text based.
    • Each thread can advance on its own timeline, interleaved with other tasks.
    • Why hasn't email been a center of our personal operating systems?[ud][ue][uf][ug]
    • It's hard to make email interactive enough.
      • On a technical basis, email is static, because it's not safe to allow emails from a third party to be turing complete.
      • On a social basis, emails aren't interactive, because having a real person to interact with on the other side is too expensive for most businesses.
        • What percentage of the emails in your inbox come from a "do not reply" email address?
    • How much more could you get done if every email were interactive, if you could reply to every email and get a human-like response?

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