As I was sitting at my desk this morning reading my email, a new message arrived. When I switch over to the inbox view, I read the subject line of the new message and discover I have a new message on a social network I’m part of. How exciting—I don’t get these very often. I click on it to find out what it says, but I am quickly disappointed by a message telling me to go to the inbox on their site to read the message. What the hell?

They send me a message telling me to go check another inbox for a new message. Does anyone else see the redundancy in this? Then I wonder: why do they have a messaging system in the first place? If you think about it, all messaging in social networks really is just email. Why reinvent the wheel? Worse, why force people to check yet another inbox?

Let’s take a look at the differences between my MySpace inbox and my Gmail inbox.

Not much of a difference uh? From a developer standpoint this just seems counterproductive.

I can understand why some people might like this. It keeps things seperate. MySpace messages stay in one inbox and regular emails stays in another. But is there anything substantially different that people write in MySpace messages that merits separation?

So here’s my proposal: a social network messaging system that allows you to read and respond to messages via email. So if someone sends a me a message, the site forwards it to my email where I can read and respond to it—without leaving me email—and the site automagically forwards the email to the recipient who can respond however she wants to as well. Ideally the inbox on the social network would be kept synchronized.

Anyone who wants to implement this has my permission to use my idea.