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Google Wave was an idea with the lofty goal of trying to replace email, that didn’t work out so well for them. Facebook wants to replace email, and Twitter seems to have the same ambition too (though probably wanting to replace text messages and IM over email). The problem with every service that has been a serious contender of replacing email is these services rely on email to function.

You can’t replace pants with shorts when your definition of shorts is: everyone buy pants and cut the legs off — pants will still be a viable business (the consumer is just altering the usage). Same too with Twitter, Facebook, et al, they are still relying on email for certain parts of their service (like adding new users or sending notifications) while wanting to replace email at the same time.

Take a look at the Twitter sign up:

Here is Facebook’s:

Neither service would let me signup unless I provided an email address. Two massively important communication tools — for millions of people — will not let you sign up without providing an email address, what year is this?

If these two companies were in charge when email services were a hot commodity, you would have had to provide a mailing address when trying to sign up for an email account.

So here’s a pro-tip to all current thinkers out there: if you want to build a service to replace email, **don’t** require the user to provide an email address when they signup.

There are many practical reasons for requiring an email address to sign up for a new service:

– Password recovery ((This is easiest when done over email, but can be done with a series of ‘challenge questions’.))
– Verification
– Spam control
– Helping other users find each other.

There are more reasons, but those four are at the core — the first being of huge importance.

Remember that when email first came about, it was not tied to anything for users — we had no way of looking someone’s email up (we still don’t). We built our email databases the old fashioned way: by exchanging business cards.

That’s not entirely practical anymore — however it’s not out of the question to assume that your user is not willing to slowly build their network. Provide robust search and have faith in the fact that users will want to broadcast their “handle” to the people they want to correspond with instead of relying on email.

Also, please make something that replaces email and fixes all of its problems. ((An impossible dream, I know.))

In the past six months there has been a lot of talk about ‘via’ links — the links that link-blog posts use to give credit to other people and websites for turning them on to particular links. It is a courteous practice to list a via link to another site and I tend to do it when I remember where I found the link, or if there is good reason to do so.

I have seen a few people now not doing via attributions and also saying that they find the pratice rather pointless. I couldn’t care less about whether someone cites me in a via link, and I doubt that I make any substantial traffic difference to sites that I provide via links to.

Or do I?

I have been reading *In The Plex* which is a sort of biography on Google itself — in the book they make reference to just how important linking is on the web. This got me thinking about how we conduct ourselves when link blogging.

We all know how PageRank works, the more links people are sending to a particular page, the higher the PageRank — the higher the PageRank the higher you appear on Google search results. PageRank is derived, by links between sites. ((This is a very simplified explanation, but accurate enough for our purposes.))

Additionally sites like Alexa.com, that try to “rank” websites, will use “sites linking in” as a metric for success. Ergo, by linking to the source site with a tiny and easy ‘via’ attribution you are essentially helping to support that site — indirectly.

Again, I don’t care if people provide attribution to me in form of via links — but I do know that I want to help out other sites that have helped to provide me with content. That’s why I use via links and have since the beginning.

In short, don’t use via attributions to be nice — use them to help show other people sites that you find relevant on the web. Use via as a way of sharing hidden gems with all of us, while also supporting those hidden gems.