Built on Delta’s “email as a substrate” architecture/approach, it would be interesting to explore different types of collaboration and communication tools that could be possible. For example:
- A social network application, enabling people to write posts and attach links/media. People without the application could still be tagged (and receive notifications via their standard email address), and potentially even subscribe/follow/connect with others — providing them an email feed of activity happening in the application.
For those who have downloaded the “Delta Network” application, of course, this would all be rendered in the app experience/interface. In technical terms:
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A post is some text, with a file or link attached, which can both be rendered as a “social media post” and sent as a traditional email
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A reply/comment on a post, can both be rendered as a message under the post in the application — as well as a follow-up email, after the first email post. (Threaded messages)
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The visibility of network posts could also be controlled by which emails are invited. So you could have a network for family, a network for school, a network for high school friends, a network for current work colleagues.
I suppose this is quite similar to a “group chat” functionality, but with more of a browsing + exploratory + creative experience — as opposed to the chat-centric, just-in-time message experience.
- A collaboration tool, which is accessible to people around the world (no need for sign-ups) — similar to GitHub, but more inclusive and accessible than just coding.
People can start projects, add contributors/peers, collaboratively manage/edit files and code, connect on audio / video calls, chat built in, etc.
For people who have downloaded the “Delta Collab” application, this would all be rendered in the app interface. For people who haven’t downloaded the application, they could still see all the same information:
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Receive email notifications when they’ve been added to a project, along with the project description (and perhaps a link to a web page for that project?)
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Send replies in conversations, upload files, etc
This would contain very similar functionalities to the network described above — except you could replace “networks” for different contexts, with the concept of “projects.”
Like, in the same way you could create a “network” for a specific group of friends who are all interested in discussing sustainability — in a Collaboration app, you could create a “project” with that same specific group of friends who are interested in working together on a native tree planting initiative.
The main difference would probably involve management/editing of files and access.
If anybody is interested in exploring these, let me know! I can support on product, design, UX/UI, lean prototyping / scoping / architecture, and some front-end — so it would be best if others who can code front-end/back-end could be interested in collaborating.
