It's my opinion that we should try to build a social network on e-mail. The social network is just a new e-mail client or a web front-end looking like the social networks we already know today (Reddit, Facebook, etc.). The challenge is to write a new e-mail client / wrap the back-end such that most people don't realise that they use e-mail.
Of course there are technical challenges like that e-mail is a very old protocol and for some use cases quite a bad fit. But we should have created new standards for e-mail2 instead of creating a plethora of incompatible messaging formats.
I hope that the privacy problems of Facebook is a wake-up call for many people and that we can reclaim e-mail as THE standard for messaging.
Are they? An application leveraging email for its transport layer could easily use standard email libraries, and social networks are little more than mailing lists with a different interface.
It's hard to see how email would not be worse, since anything you 'post' could be forwarded without your knowledge to anyone with an email account. You would have to solve that one first.
Of course there are technical challenges like that e-mail is a very old protocol and for some use cases quite a bad fit. But we should have created new standards for e-mail2 instead of creating a plethora of incompatible messaging formats.
I hope that the privacy problems of Facebook is a wake-up call for many people and that we can reclaim e-mail as THE standard for messaging.