Email Is The New...I Don't know...Twitter?

For a long time, I've been wishing I had a blog posting tool that would let you use email to post to your blog. Let's say the service is called blogmastergeneral. I'm at work, I see an image or screen I want to post, I use SnagIt to grab it to my clipboard, I paste it into an email with some Markdown-like syntax for the post, send it, and its done. In practice, I have no idea how this would work (how does the blogmastergeneral know my email came from me?), but I've always thought it would be cool.

I never thought, though, that someone would think about building it, because here in the blogosphere, rich clients are uncool, right (ummm..with a few blogger-approved exceptions? So why would we want to build stuff to interact with them (blogmastergeneral isn't really that compelling with webmail, IMHO, mainly cause of the lack of image pasting)?

It seems that rich client or no, email is making a big comeback since the dark days of October 2006.

I've seen a lot of new stuff lately thats based on the idea of email-as-version-manager, email-as-collaboration-tool, etc. One of the most memorable email-related demos I've seen lately was Rael Dornfest's Sandy demo at UTR. part if which is recapitulated on the Values of N blog:

And it dawned on us that the core product had been there all along.

We noticed that active Stikkiteers — ourselves included — tended to interact with Stikkit from the comfort of an already-familiar interface: email. We already know how to use email to collaborate and share; and with the addition of Stikkit's "thinking," our email had become more useful.

As much as email sucks, we've got a real lot of tooling built around it that's pretty thoroughly debugged and pretty powerful. Arguably more important, we've got social norms around it. It seems like there's a general pattern that you can tell if a social tool like email is successful if people abuse it. If it's unsuccessful, there's no payoff, cause there's no audience (so stay tuned for some serious Twitter spam). People know how to use it and even the normal people are willing to use it, so it doesn't run as much of a risk of sitting there with one "Welcome (content goes here)" page set up like the wiki you set up for your bar league softball team to schedule stuff. So a lot of this is a "pave the cowpaths" mentality. I'm a big buyer of cowpath-paving. I can't let this paragraph go by without pointing out again that this another reason why RESTful web services built on top of HTTP are the Right Thing.