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Comment on All you need is e-mail, e-mail. E-mail is all you need.

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It helps to remember that the first social networks (See: Usenet) were built out of email.

EDIT: All email needs is the ability to display information like the web can. Properly formatted and threaded.

So are some of the later ones. Twitter built a multi-billion dollar business by duplicating the functionality of email and listserv in a proprietary service.

Listserv had an SMS-oriented design? It automatically made every user their own independent channel that other users could choose to subscribe to?

I don't use Twitter, but saying it's just email/listserv is rather silly. Also, it's only a mutli-billion dollar business by investment; it doesn't generate even 1bn in revenue.

Email-to-SMS gateways have been around a long time. And sure, an email provider could set up a service that automatically gives every email account their own listserv. I'd agree that Twitter's valuation is arguable, but the investor consensus is that it's a multi-billion dollar business, whatever the revenue is.

in what sense was Usenet built out of email? only thing that comes to mind is re-using some of the syntax of RFC 822.

I think it was more at a conceptual level rather than technical. It's like sending a e-mail to a public mailing list that anyone can view, join or reply to.

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