Hexayurt

Which one of these email addresses is malformed?

fred@emu.edu.com

fred+smith@emu.edu

fred@emu..edu

Which one likely contains a mistake?

Odds are, if you're a programmer, or you've been on the internet for a decent period of time, you have some ability to parse and analyze email-address-like strings. You understand the first part is a user, like a unix shell account name. You understand the @ divides the user from the domain. The domain itself you know contains a variety of hierarchical fields separated by dots, and you know about things like country codes.

This is what email addresses look like to normal people:

234#%##%@#%#oooO.234

OO(#NN#}}{##>>)

##$@#Q$L()))N#@@@

Now, which one of those is well-formed? Which two are equivalent and are likely delivered to the same address?

Instead, you go to your Monkey-Compatible Communications Portal. You click on the face of the person you want to tell. You type. It gets sent.

Social Networking Software is anchored by it's ability to put a human face on communication.

Who's working on a face-based email client?

There are other implications. The "monkeysphere" of 150 people who's lives we can keep track of roughly corresponds to the typical "friends" list. You think about somebody you want to contact who isn't on your list, then you think about who they know that you know, and you "pass through" that person, clicking on the mutual friend to get to the person you want to talk to.

It's pretty simple, really. It's about humanizing communication.

Here's what I'm looking for. It should be a trivial service - something like a .JS or .GIF I can drop on to the pages of my site. When I start getting DIGG or REDDIT traffic, it should send a message to my email/phone/pager within 15 or 20 minutes, telling me that I'm getting nailed, and I should keep an eye on things. It should also tell me the URL I've got incoming from.

It'd be nice if it, or a second service, would cache the pages which are being nailed, and show me how to do a redirect to the cached pages for whatever software environment I'm on (i.e. auto-generate a .htaccess line for mod-rewrite, or the appropriate incantations for other configurations.)

And, just out of curiosity, why don't things like WordPress have an option to automatically generate a redirect to the Coral Cache version of pages when they get nailed?

Spike traffic is a really here-to-stay phenomena, and I don't understand why the only effective tool commonly recommended is "build a ton of overcapacity and let it sit idle the rest of the time."

There's got to be room for new approaches here.