Fuzzy Mail

December 14, 2007 4:07 PM

Fuzzmail records your email as you type it and provides the actual composition for the person, or people on the receiving end. [via]
posted by cashman (40 comments total)

So its like a typing scene in a movie?

All work and no play makes jack a dull boy.
all work and no play, makes Jack a dull boy.
All work and noplay makes jAck a duLL BOY.
posted by R. Mutt at 4:15 PM on December 14, 2007

Animations seem like a logical possibility given the time based element. Cool.
posted by R. Mutt at 4:25 PM on December 14, 2007

I'm sort of confused. Why would I want people to see my editing process?

It may just be me, but generally the stuff I delete corresponds to things I have decided I don't want to say (ex. poor analogies, spelling errors, or just horrid writing). Showing people that sort of defeats the point.
posted by Orange Pamplemousse at 4:26 PM on December 14, 2007

Alright that's just the coolest thing ever. Very last-scene-of-a-Doogie-Howser-episode.
posted by sneakin at 4:30 PM on December 14, 2007 [1 favorite]

My first thought was "why". Then I read your note, and had a good laugh! ;)

I'm not sure why you would possibly use it, though? I like delayed communications like email and posts like this, because I get to say exactly what I wanted to say. It doesn't matter that the intermediary version of this post wasn't very clear, or that I changed my mind while writing. All that matters once I hit send/post is what my final thought was. I just don't think I want others to see how many misspellings I make, or how I muddle the argument at first.
posted by gemmy at 4:30 PM on December 14, 2007

I think it would be a very effective, and cruel device for a "dear john" letter.
posted by R. Mutt at 4:32 PM on December 14, 2007

My response to your note, good sir
posted by R. Mutt at 4:35 PM on December 14, 2007

Of course, to make this work, you have to plan (and edit) your fake edits in a separate document, perhaps story boards, for humorous-est effect.

I like the Dear John or any kind of apology email.

I am so sorry

--erase erase erase--

I am deeply troubled

--delete delete delete--

-pause-

Mistakes were made.
posted by ClaudiaCenter at 4:37 PM on December 14, 2007 [3 favorites]

Those crazy muppets.
posted by cortex at 4:39 PM on December 14, 2007 [14 favorites]

Hm, this seems entirely pointless.
posted by puke & cry at 4:42 PM on December 14, 2007

Great moments in political correspondence.
posted by cortex at 4:48 PM on December 14, 2007 [6 favorites]

I think fuzzmail should inspire the next great MeFi feature: comment composition replays!

How could that not be awesome?

OK, maybe not. But it beats the <strike> tag by a mile, for comedy purposes.
posted by C.Batt at 4:52 PM on December 14, 2007

Too bad this doesn't work for metafilter comments. I would love to see the histories of some of the really asinine remarks. How many versions does it take to produce a doozy like -- oh, fuck it. I'm too lazy to find an example, but you know what I mean.
posted by diamondsky at 4:57 PM on December 14, 2007

Us hunt and peck types are doomed.
posted by R. Mutt at 4:59 PM on December 14, 2007

But it beats the strike tag by a mile, for comedy purposes.

Maybe, but one of the nice thing about the web and modern computing is that you dont see much cursor animations. You dont see the deletes and what nots anymore. I remember when the old 80s BBS's starting using ANSI for everything and the cursor would dance like a mad hatter, often deleting things for comedic value or just to make prick programmers smile. Or using things like unix talk in which you watched your buddy type stuff out and backspace. It was annoying then and as fuzzmail has shown its still annoying today.
posted by damn dirty ape at 5:01 PM on December 14, 2007

ha! this reminds me of the one-on-one chat system my local BBS used to use. it was a split-screen where you could see the other person's typing in realtime. a neat way to message, though i can see how it didn't catch on in the era of IM.
posted by maus at 5:07 PM on December 14, 2007

I'm sort of confused. Why would I want people to see my editing process?

Questioning the usefulness of this program is like questioning the very purpose of the Internet.


It exist to amuse.
posted by MiltonRandKalman at 5:07 PM on December 14, 2007

Reminds me of the first time I hacked my way into a local BBS (long time ago obviously) and gained Sysop access. I was high on the thrill of achieving such power, but had no idea what to do with it. So, I watched someone logged in on the other line, writing a message. Neat! Direct insight into the thought process behind someone's writing... damn this guy types slow. Okay, he's deleted the first sentence and he's starting again. Hmm, seems he can't decide whether to start with "The." Looks like he might go with "You". No, he’s written "the" again and he’s written "a" and there’s a second word coming up and it’s "sat". "A sat ...", doesn’t make sense, "a satur ...", "a Saturday", it’s "a Saturday", and the crowd are loving it, they are really enjoying this. And "this afternoon", "this Saturday afternoon in, in, in know ..., knowvember", November is spelled wrong, ... but he’s not going back, it looks as if he’s going for a sentence, and it’s the first verb coming up, the first verb of this message and it’s "was"! – and the crowd are going wild! ...

Or using things like unix talk in which you watched your buddy type stuff out and backspace.

I liked 'talk'. That could be annoying yes, but presumably you and your buddy would eventually learn not to bother with backspace, just hit enter a few times and move on if your current sentence is not working out. You had to completely give up any desire to fix your spelling and grammar to use it effectively. It probably did permanent damage to my ability to write properly.
posted by sfenders at 5:23 PM on December 14, 2007

I dig the ASCII-art progress meter at the bottom.

I am so going to steal that.
posted by sdodd at 5:42 PM on December 14, 2007

I was going to snark..

then..
no

I looked again..
neat..

I sent my wife an email
composing sexual, then not sexual, then sexual again stuff..

if this pays off, I'll let you know..and will owe you big time...

if not, this post sucks...
!
posted by HuronBob at 5:57 PM on December 14, 2007

Heh. Reminds me of those old terminal-based chat programs.
posted by Down10 at 6:07 PM on December 14, 2007

ha! this reminds me of the one-on-one chat system my local BBS used to use. it was a split-screen where you could see the other person's typing in realtime. a neat way to message, though i can see how it didn't catch on in the era of IM.

If I recall, ICQ had this as the default way to IM back in the day. Man, I haven't thought about ICQ in a long time. Does it still exist?
posted by SmileyChewtrain at 6:22 PM on December 14, 2007

Oh, sweet baby Jesus. No one needs to know how much I dither vacillate second-guess rethink edit my comments before posting.
posted by mumkin at 6:59 PM on December 14, 2007

before the interweb I used to chat with a terminal connection between 2 computers like that
posted by bhnyc at 7:02 PM on December 14, 2007

DO NOT WANT

Actually, I believe the old BBS joke was to use ^H like:

Free Beer^H^H^H^HSoftware

And actually, in some bulletin boards, you could embed deletion characters and people would do lots of little trickery to have fun with that.

But man, why allow a company to see all your e-mail like that?
posted by jscott at 7:03 PM on December 14, 2007

Yeah, next thing they'll do will be to put ads next to it based on what your email says. No one would ever go for something crazy like that.
posted by smackfu at 7:46 PM on December 14, 2007 [2 favorites]

Me likey.

I just wish the URLs were hackable.
posted by Autarky at 8:20 PM on December 14, 2007

Cortex, those were wonderful.
posted by CitrusFreak12 at 9:27 PM on December 14, 2007

I was skeptical but on reconsideration I really love it. However, I think it's a concept that will only be useful if it gets integrated into other systems (say, Gmail...). Anything that requires you to redirect recipients to a standalone website is kind of a non-starter in my book.

But I do like the idea of giving the recipient of a message the option to see the process that went into creating it.

It reminds me of a letter I sent to a friend, a long time ago, back before email. I wrote it on a typewriter and must have gone through 20 versions before I found the right one. It was an apology note and they accepted it with good grace; years later on a whim I showed them the pile of tortured, unsent versions that led up to the one they actually received. They were pretty floored by it -- I don't think they had really considered how much time had gone into it.

In the same way that I kept all those drafts in my correspondence file, I'd really love to keep the "edit record" of all my outgoing emails as I actually typed them ... but I'm not sure how often I'd actually send them along. I think, like with my paper letter, I'd probably only send them along after the fact, or when I really wanted to make a point.

Still, it'd be a cool feature for a webmail system to have.
posted by Kadin2048 at 10:34 PM on December 14, 2007 [2 favorites]

cortex +1.

but wasn't that the Electric Company?
posted by ManInSuit at 10:59 PM on December 14, 2007

> but wasn't that the Electric Company?

Answers own question:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M98-5g3TYTI
posted by ManInSuit at 11:00 PM on December 14, 2007

This is how mefi comment editing should work
posted by Lanark at 3:46 AM on December 15, 2007

I just realized the left silhouette is Morgan Freeman in ManInSuit's link. Awesome!
posted by spec80 at 5:47 AM on December 15, 2007

It looked more like the two-headed monster (YT), what with the slowly moving together. It had all of the rhythm of them.
posted by jb at 6:07 AM on December 15, 2007

jb's got it—I didn't really see Electric Company growing up, so it was those two monsters (with their complementary horn curves! Yes!) that I was thinking of.

Unrelated but related: this spelling song.
posted by cortex at 9:16 AM on December 15, 2007

Hey Citrus, what did you do??
posted by lildice at 10:23 AM on December 15, 2007

I can't get it to accept the to: email address... I've tried a couple different ones - it says it doesn't exist. Is it not Firefox-friendly? Damn, it looks fun.
posted by bloomicy at 11:37 AM on December 15, 2007

REQUIREMENTS: Safari 1+, IE 4+ or Netscape 6+ browser with javascript enabled.

Can I just erase my last post????
posted by bloomicy at 11:47 AM on December 15, 2007

I just got very nostalgic for talk.
posted by gluechunk at 3:04 PM on December 15, 2007

This cracks me up. Someone funnier than I should write the asking someone out fuzzmail email.
posted by ClaudiaCenter at 9:57 AM on December 16, 2007