I used to be a heavy Google Reader user. Besides the joy of going one place and reading my whole internet, I took a lot of pleasure in sharing great things from around the web with friends. Some of this happened within Reader, but mostly I was a prolific emailer in college of interesting things.

I miss the correspondence my friends and I had over email about interesting block posts or stories or funny things I found all about the internet. It was one of the joys of email, and the joys of leisure time.

I continue this practice somewhat today— if you’re unfortunate enough to be a close friend you probably get some combination of iMessage, Twitter DMs, Instagram messages, or Slack messages about the things I find. But it’s all scattered and sent through highly disruptive mechanism.

I don’t really like to link blog because half the fun is curating who I send things to. And I miss spontaneous groupings of my friends who might like the same things.

I think within all this is an inkling of an idea for a web app/service only useful to me that I’d like to write. If I could collect interesting things in a queue almost like Buffer, and then at a set interval, empty that queue. It would send off a custom email to each person collating the items I selected to share with them. The result is almost a newsletter, but actually a collection of “fun things Jason thought you’d like or would love to talk with you about”.

I think I could maintain a lot more of my friendships with this package. In many ways, sharing the fun stuff I find on the web or debating a news article or blog with you, probably because I thought you’d have interesting things to say or it would challenge your thinking in some way, is my love language.