search

haystack / murmur

A mailing list designed to reduce noise and encourage sharing
25 stars 13 forks source link

Allow bots #86

Open amyxzhang opened 8 years ago

amyxzhang commented 8 years ago

Would be cool to allow a bot hook in so that people can add and implement email bots to their group. Then you can call the bot via email to reply in a thread.

karger commented 8 years ago

This may be the tip of an iceberg, as it kind of suggests "build a server for arbitrary types of communication", i.e. something that could serve for chat, twitter, etc. The point being that we are demonstrating the value of building a back end server whose primary interface is its api, as opposed a site (twitter, snapchat, instagram, whatsapp) which locks you in to a particular front end in order to use the back end. This would be far better for consumers who could choose from (and even create) a variety of front ends to access the service in a variety of ways. Email is a beautiful example of this----think about the diversity of email clients compared to the diversity of facebook clients. Everybody can pick one they like.

This will never fly in the for-profit world, because the front end is where you stick your advertisements and make your money. But it would be awsome for society.

On 4/26/2016 5:12 PM, Amy Zhang wrote:

Would be cool to allow a bot hook in so that people can add and implement email bots to their group. Then you can call the bot via email to reply in a thread.

— You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread. Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/haystack/murmur/issues/86

amyxzhang commented 8 years ago

Yep, this is how I've been envisioning murmur! We will write the hook-ins to a lot of those applications (for instance I think bridging the synchronous/asynchronous gap will need some alterations to the discussion) but certainly it would be great if other people wanted to write them too.

The bot API I thought of just from looking at the popularity of Slack bots (and Twitter bots and soon FB messenger bots). You could call a giphy bot to chime in to a conversation or hook-ins to post when there are automatic notifications (each with their own tag so you can mute/divert) (one of which could be the papers survey for instance!)

On Tue, Apr 26, 2016 at 6:17 PM, David Karger notifications@github.com wrote:

This may be the tip of an iceberg, as it kind of suggests "build a server for arbitrary types of communication", i.e. something that could serve for chat, twitter, etc. The point being that we are demonstrating the value of building a back end server whose primary interface is its api, as opposed a site (twitter, snapchat, instagram, whatsapp) which locks you in to a particular front end in order to use the back end. This would be far better for consumers who could choose from (and even create) a variety of front ends to access the service in a variety of ways. Email is a beautiful example of this----think about the diversity of email clients compared to the diversity of facebook clients. Everybody can pick one they like.

This will never fly in the for-profit world, because the front end is where you stick your advertisements and make your money. But it would be awsome for society.

On 4/26/2016 5:12 PM, Amy Zhang wrote:

Would be cool to allow a bot hook in so that people can add and implement email bots to their group. Then you can call the bot via email to reply in a thread.

— You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread. Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/haystack/murmur/issues/86

— You are receiving this because you authored the thread. Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/haystack/murmur/issues/86#issuecomment-214904803

Amy X. Zhang | Ph.D. student at MIT CSAIL | http://people.csail.mit.edu/axz | @amyxzh