world@hey.com launches and it can edit posts, which sounds clunky

Been following the Hey! email to blog post service for a couple of weeks, and it’s now live (a really impressive example of developing an embryonic idea into a product quickly – take note fellow app/service developers). It even lets you edit existing posts, which is something you need on a publication platform, but looks… clunky.

Can you edit your posts? Yep. Creating a new post is exactly like sending an email to the magic world@hey.com address, but once sent/posted, Hey treats such messages differently from regular emails. You can see all your Hey World posts in a list by themselves, accessed from a new item in the main Hey menu, and if you open a post, you can edit it. Hey World Blogging Goes Live

Hmmm. That doesn’t sound as easy as a web based editing system. Or maybe it sounds like recreating a web based system in your email app.

Like I’ve already noted: This is the wrong way round – email can provide an in-my-opinion pretty poor means of subscribing to content (just use RSS!), but it doesn’t really make sense as a means of publishing that content. Email isn’t that good at publishing emails. Which I think is one of the reasons Hey exists.

I’d really love to see what the creators of Basecamp would do with a simple, paid-for blogging service. Compare the idea of that with Medium’s grotty money-making model, or WordPress’s complex editing.