Given Google’s history of killing Reader in a possible attempt to help empower their G+ product, does anyone else see their getting rid of email subscriptions from FeedBurner as a play at an upcoming Newsletter service/app/feature?

It’s suspicious that in a time with increased interest in paid Newsletters, they’d be giving this sort of love to an old project.

Context from a recent Google email:

FeedBurner has been a part of Google for almost 14 years, and we’re making several upcoming changes to support the product’s next chapter. Here’s what you can expect to change and what you can do now to ensure you’re prepared.

Starting in July, we are transitioning FeedBurner onto a more stable, modern infrastructure. This will keep the product up and running for all users, but it also means that we will be turning down most non-core feed management features, including email subscriptions, at that time.

For those who use FeedBurner email subscriptions, we recommend downloading your email subscribers so that you can migrate to a new email subscription service.

For many users, no action is required. All existing feeds will continue to serve uninterrupted, and you can continue to create new accounts and burn new feeds. Core feed management functionality will continue to be supported, such as the ability to change the URL, source feed, title, and podcast metadata of your feed, along with basic analytics.

Watched Social Media is OVER: You NEED a Website and Email List by Roberto BlakeRoberto Blake from YouTube

You Need a Website and Email List, you can't rely on social media algorithms or policies can change. So you need to build a website or blog and start email marketing and growing an email list to keep access to your audience. Don't rely on social media. Rely on yourself. Email Marketing and Website Building are not something most social media influences and content creators want to do, because social media is free and comes with traffic. But you never know when you will lose access to your audience and that is why you need your own website and email list to keep that access to the audience you built long term.

He’s focusing on using the internet for business, but Roberto Blake has a great overview of why one should be thinking about and practicing IndieWeb principles. His advice is absolutely necessary if you’re running a business, but it applies equally well for your personal web presence as well.

User Interfaces for Networked Thought

Tantek Çelik (), in IndieWeb Chat
Kevin Marks (), in IndieWeb Chat


These two quotes provide an interesting framing for comparing and contrasting the UI and functionality for the way that feed readers, email, and blogging (or more broadly networked thinking and communication) work.

Modern social readers provide a reply button and functionality along with the broadcast capabilities. Throw in the idea of person-tagging, and one has the ability to generally broadcast a message to anyone who cares to read (either by search or subscription), as well as to send notifications to specific people (or perhaps groups) that might be interested in the specific message.

Replied to a post by Chris AldrichChris Aldrich (BoffoSocko)
Testing out adding email reply links to my RSS feed using the All In One SEO plugin documentation at: https://semperplugins.com/documentation/rss-content-settings.
It’s not exactly what I want yet because it doesn’t have an easy way to include the title of the post or the permalink to provide context, but it at least includes an email address.
Has anyone ever considered building an email extension of the Webmention specification?

By that I mean, a sender attempts to send a mention and if there is no endpoint or the send fails, then as a back up, the sender parses the receiving site’s page for an h-card and if an email address exists, sends an email notification there instead?

Might be helpful for those who don’t yet have Webmention set up, but could act as a backup. Then when they have things working later, they could force manual mentions to recollect them? Also useful for those who’d like notifications, but don’t want to build infrastructure or who might not want to show comments on their site either.

Watched Take a tour of HEY by Basecamp from YouTube
Email's been broken for years. Not anymore — we fixed it. HEY’s fresh approach transforms email into something you want to use, not something you’re forced to deal with. HEY.com.
A cool looking reimagining of an email client.

I like the idea of being able to annotate my emails.

👓 facebook backfeed via email notifications · Issue #854 · snarfed/bridgy | GitHub

Read facebook backfeed via email notifications · Issue #854 · snarfed/bridgy (GitHub)
this is a kinda crazy, somewhat dangerous, generally inadvisable idea that we almost certainly shouldn't do...at least, not as a public facing service for everyone. @chrisaldrich had the ...

❤️ readywriting tweeted How we know things will go south #Domains19 https://t.co/N2Iz8t9XDr

Liked Dr. Lee Skallerup Bessette on Twitter (Twitter)

👓 PBE: Shortcode to set post format · Issue #240 · Automattic/jetpack | Github

Read PBE: Shortcode to set post format · Issue #240 · Automattic/jetpack (GitHub)
Add a shortcode to the PBE parser to allow author to set Post Format via e-mail. Ported from https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/2055 See: 2443-wpcom
Sad that this is marked as wontfix

Testing out Posting to WordPress via email

I haven’t posted to my WordPress site via email in a long time, so I thought I’d give it another try to see what has changed. I’m also curious about how this might work best in an IndieWeb setting and how these pieces dovetail with things like Post Kinds, potential syndication methods, and other tidbits I’ve got set up on my website.

Let’s see how it goes?

👓 Post by Email | WordPress

Read Post by Email (Jetpack)
Post by Email is a way of publishing posts on your blog using your email. Any email client can be used to send the email, allowing you to publish quickly and easily from devices such as cell phones if you don’t have the WordPress mobile app installed. This module can be enabled by switching on “...