[megaduck]

It seems that a lot of people are looking to extend twitter with email-type features, but I wonder if the reverse strategy (extending email) might be more fruitful.

Email has some great properties that make it the ideal foundation for a communication service:

  1.  You can send arbitrary text with arbitrary encoding.
  2.  Attachments can be any type, size, or number.
  3.  Virtually any device on the planet can send and receive mail.
  4.  Everybody already has a unique ID that they've memorized.
  5.  There's a boggling amount of infrastructure already in place.
  6.  Spam filtering is quite mature, and remarkably effective.

Where email falls down is that it's stupid and slow. All intelligence is in the mail client, and email clients don't share information other than the mail itself. A smarter mail server (like Posterous) can do some really cool stuff. Couple smarter mail clients with a smarter server and the potential is huge.

I love all the new communications platforms and protocols, but I wonder if there isn't some life left in good old email.

[sirsean]

I was also expecting to allow arbitrarily long text, as well as attachments and additional (potentially user(or client)-defined) metadata.