Vaporstream or no Vaporstream?

Want to have a confidential email conversation about a sensitive issue? There’s not really been such a thing so far, really. Better to pick up the phone and talk in person. Or meet at random near that noisy fountain in the park. But wouldn’t it be nice to be able to send an email and not worry about it being forwarded on, saved – or “reply-all”-ed to the entire organization? I just heard a piece on NPR about a company that claims to offer this service. It acts as the place where you can send and pickup these mails. Once they are read, they are gone. Self-destructed. All very Mission Impossible.

The service is called Vaporstream, and you can hear more about it in the NPR story, by going to the NPR site. I can’t give you a link to the clip directly as it does not seem to be on their site anywhere, so perhaps you will just have to listen to the whole program. (All Things Considered- The Monday 22nd Jan show, toward the last half hour or so.)

Interestingly, it seems that there’s only 8 posts tagged with it on Technorati. It’s been a long time since I saw something with so few entries there! I wonder how long that will last?

I wonder if Vaporstream will catch on and we’ll all be using it regularly in a short time. Will it be one of those things, like YouTube and Google, where we’ll all be wondering what life was like before them?

I find myself confused by why this elementary possibility is not a problem: While reading an email on Vaporstream’s site, what is to stop you from simply taking a screen shot of it while you’re reading and then just email that along, or save it… Perhaps I’m just missing the point… after all, the agent in Mission Impossible could simply have brought along a tape recorder and recorded the message from his controllers before it self-destructed, no? I suppose the point is that you are not trying to protect yourself against someone maliciously spreading the content of a message you sent. It’s the casual spreading of sensitive content that this will help stop, which I suppose is useful.

Here’s where I make a completely random prediction that goes spectacularly wrong. I can see that this could be a service that companies and organisations pay for their emplyees to use, but I don’t see this catching on in a really big way with individuals in its current form. First of all, they charge for the service, which pours cold water on the whole thing right there. The thing to do to make this take off would be to make it an application that embeds itself into common mail readers. A user simply chooses to wrap their email with your self-destruct service. It would be jsut another button to push on their usual software. Make it free too (make money from it by having a few more advertisements sprinkled here and there – or gmail or Yahoo mail give you a cut of their advertising revenue if the user wraps their email with your self destruct service). Only then will it spread like wildfire.

There it is. My prediction of the day. I expect to be proven wrong within a short time. Either that, or someone will implement the above, make millions from it by year’s end and – once again – I’ll be kicking myself for not having done it myself^a.

Ok, back to computing partition functions. Sure to make my fortune this way one day…

-cvj

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^aOr maybe the kind and grateful clever developer person who reads this will email me and we start the company together… Hurrah! I can then start that physics institute I’ve always wanted to and…

“What? It’s time for what? Louder, I can’t hear you!”….