I think Futureme "letters" are actually emails, no? Or at least they do both. I've sent my future self emails via Futureme (and they called it a "letter" on the email). Nevertheless, this is still cool, congrats OP!
I highly recommend people try this exercise. I got an email this year which I sent myself five years ago. It was tiny, and still mind-blowing.
Ah also note that the one thing that would put me off from using this service is actually trusting that you'll (you as in Resurf) still be around 10 years from now to deliver the email.
Yeah great point...
It's kind of a catch-22, in that resurf has to be around for a long time, for people to think it will be around for a longer time still, haha.
Right now though, I set the maximum date in the future as one year from now, so should be able to guarantee that at least.
This reminded me of a more whimsical old service that used real snails to send email at some indeterminate time. Looks like their home page is still up but it's totally defunct: http://www.realsnailmail.net/ The only message I sent with it (or at least that made it through, maybe I sent more that I don't remember) was initiated in June 2008, at last collected by a snail in May 2011, and the snail Marko delivered it in August 2011.
I've been occasionally using futureme.org since ~15 years ago, in case you're a believer in the Lindy effect. FWIW I don't think I've ever used it for anything more than ~1 year ahead, that always seemed fun/interesting enough. Of course there's other considerations entering the picture if you plan ten years ahead, but then again this seems like the kind of fun/light-hearted thing where it doesn't really bother me that I might not end up reading it again --- life happens...
This is very cool and makes me smile because I used to use a simplified version of this as a take home project in engineering interviews.
One usecase I find particularly interesting is predictions. People often predict the future like “in 2 years we will have AGI” etc. It would be fun to fact check these predictions on the exact date 2 years later. Pick top tech leaders or politicians and scrape all their predictions and make a leaderboard of who got it right or messed up. could be fun to try.
Exactly. I give services like this - generally coded as someone's first "wow I know PHP now!" or the modern equivalent - approximately 5 years shelf life, at best.
Whereas I have notes-to-future-me on my calendar that I put there 30 years ago.
You might like Diarium, a local-first journaling app that will bring up past entries a year later. Since journalling is private, not everyone is comfortable sharing with an email provider.
Good point on the privacy. I did think long and hard about this... and ultimately it's kind of hard to do privacy well with email.
In-app push notifications are better in this regard, but I figured it's a lot harder to find users to try my app, and also, emails are very accessible.
Diarium seems like a great app!
I highly recommend people try this exercise. I got an email this year which I sent myself five years ago. It was tiny, and still mind-blowing.
Right now though, I set the maximum date in the future as one year from now, so should be able to guarantee that at least.
Will this application exist in say 10 years from now? 20? And even then will I be using the same email by then?
One usecase I find particularly interesting is predictions. People often predict the future like “in 2 years we will have AGI” etc. It would be fun to fact check these predictions on the exact date 2 years later. Pick top tech leaders or politicians and scrape all their predictions and make a leaderboard of who got it right or messed up. could be fun to try.
Whereas I have notes-to-future-me on my calendar that I put there 30 years ago.