Jason Fried:

Email is the internet’s oldest self-publishing platform. Billions of emails are “published” every day. Everyone knows how to do it, and everyone already can. The only limitation is that you have to define a private audience with everything you send. You’ve gotta write an email to: someone.

So I thought, why not expand the possibilities here? Of course still let email be email, but what else could email be?

The folks at Hey.com are experimenting with a weblog publishing platform where your email client is the editor. It’s an interesting idea. It is worth noting that other platforms already have this as an option. But I get it, they have their own take on the idea.

I am curious how editing an entry would work, though. On WordPress, if you were to publish by email, you still have an editor you can go to for changes after publishing. Would this service offer something like that?

It would be weird if that wasn’t option, but truthfully, anything that gets more people publishing is good for the web.

Andy Nicolaides, on the announcement:

A blogging platform in this style will also remove one of the elements that always feels like a bit of a blocker for me, the design and naming of my blog. I’m consistently unhappy with the design of any blog I make, and then when I do write I spend too much time worrying about adding images and making it look nice instead of just getting the words out / down.

In addition to the publishing by email, HEY World is also de-emphasizing the design of your site. Their thinking is that it causes too much friction. I can understand the sentiment, but fortunately that isn’t something that has been too much of a barrier for me personally.

Back to Jason:

For now, this remains an experiment. I’ve got my own HEY World blog, and David has his. We’re going to play for a while. And, if there’s demand, we’ll roll this out to anyone with a personal @hey.com account. It feels like Web 1.0 again in all the right ways. And it’s about time.

I’m not a Hey.com user, but I am excited to see where this goes. And speaking more broadly, there does feel like something neat is happening right now. An undercurrent of interest in moving away from the existing social media sites. I hope many will move to publishing on their own domain, but at the very least, it would be nice to see the Facebooks and Twitters of the world shrink a little bit — both in active users and influence.

➝ Source: world.hey.com