Faux Interview: Mark Percival of 2Prong
It isn’t really an interview but we exchanged a few emails and I thought it was an interesting situation. Avid readers of this blog remember my big temporary email shootout post awhile ago where I named MintEmail king. it turns out that behind the scenes MintEmail is using the Open Source software that Mark Percival wrote and is powering his own site 2prong.com. He emailed me a little bit ago just to give me the 411 on that and I started chatting with him a little bit.
I found it interesting on a few levels. The first is that MintEmail is running his software, but doesn’t contribute back. I find that mildly dubious not because everyone who uses an open source project needs to contribute back all their changes, but because this project in particular is a web service and MintEmail is a direct competitor to 2prong. It’s an interesting scene that I can’t quite think of another that would be analogous - although I do have a flu so that could limit my brain power. It is not the same as slashdot releasing slashcode, because slashdot isn’t primarily a service, it is a content site - so anyone can run slashcode, but it won’t matter if they don’t have the content. On some level (a much, much lower and less horrendous level) it’s a little like Oracle repackaging RedHat. Since in this case the competition is very direct.
On the one hand I think it might have been more neighborly for MintEmail to have contributed to 2prong’s codebase instead of starting his own site. However, it seems that there is a fundamental difference between the two. 2prong, very interestingly, changes email domains every week where MintEmail’s addresses are always at MintEmail.com. Mark does the domain change to manage the sheer ridiculous amounts of email he gets every hour (he tells me that around 1500-2000 people use the site daily and after a domain’s been active for a week he’s getting 2300 emails an hour - going into a mysql database). Changing email domains resets that counter.
That’s definitely a significant, fundamental difference between the two. On some level, MintEmail’s standing email address is more useful for registration purposes where you might need to receive an email further down the road. For most purposes, though, I think work just as well.
Mark himself doesn’t mind MintEmail because 2prong barely makes enough money to cover hosting costs - there simply isn’t money in it. People who come to the site, don’t click on ads. MintEmail, as far as I can tell has no revenue at all, I didn’t notice any ads. I suspect that it too was an itch that needed scratching.
With all that traffic and mail coming in Mark’s already been booted from one hosting service. If he gets the boot from his current one, it’s most likely all she wrote. The project was to learn AJAX, served it’s purpose, but simply isn’t worth the hassle of continuously getting booted from hosting providers.
I’m personally glad to have both options. Too many sites are asking for email addresses and selling those off to spammers.
July 5th, 2007 at 5:29 pm
Hi Faux(?),
I am running the site mintemail.com. I just got an email from somebody who directed me to your site. I just wanted to make a few comments.
I started mintemail.com to learn more about php and programming in general. I am not too sure about what you mean by “Oracle repackaging RedHat”. I am not a programmer. I don’t really plan to make money by running 2prong’s script on another site (no ads!).
As for contributing to the source, the php scripts I have writen are probably very inefficient and have security holes in them. This website is more of a learning process for me.
Also, when I started mintemail, 2prong’s site was down for more than 2 weeks. Now, I have been trying fiddle around with other things like automatic email verification.
July 6th, 2007 at 7:42 am
Hey there! Glad you stopped by.
I completely understand what you’re doing. I wasn’t trying to say it was wrong, just an interesting case of kind of sticky situations that FOSS can get itself into (and I suspect increasingly will). In this case, it’s no problem at all, but I can see how it could turn out very differently.
I’m curious to know if you are experiencing the sorts of volume problems that 2prong was? And if you are, how you’re coping with it without the domain change reset tactic that 2prong takes and how your ISP is taking it. :)
November 9th, 2007 at 5:29 pm
[...] type of action is something that free software is susceptible to. I find it interesting to watch and see how these [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 12:22 pm
[...] what form of verification is this? Anyone can get a hotmail account that says anything - 2prong.com will accept email to whatever address you specify and the domain changes every couple weeks! Email [...]
February 29th, 2008 at 11:11 am
2prong doesn’t work anymore. I really miss it bad. Every site I go to, mailinator and co have been banned. But they don’t tell you that mailinator has been bannned, they say, “your sign up email has been sent, wait for it to arrive”. So I sit there at mailinator, waiting for it to arrive and it never does. That problem didn’t happen with 2prong, emails always came through nice and lovely with 2prong, although I noticed that the domain didn’t always change everyweek.
I hope that a kindly millionaire will come along and breathe some life back into 2prong it was brilliant.
2prong made me realise that you don’t have to give a valid email address for blog comments like this and you can just type in any old jiberish and it works just fine.
With regard to mintemail, the auto verification doesn’t work properly on the forum i signed up with because it sends you the password. But mintemail doesn’t show you the email with the password in it, it just gives you a message saying the account has been activated, so you never get to find out your password and you can never log in and the username you chose gets lost forever.
So I’m all at a loss now that 2prong is no more, there’s a forum that i really want to sign up to but every disposable email service i have tried has been banned and i don’t use Yahoo mail anymore since i discovered 2prong and yahoo deactivated my account because i never used it for longer then 3 months.
This comment section asked me to provide an email address, you can guess what email address I gave?!?!
Pleeeases come back 2 prong!!!!!
February 29th, 2008 at 11:44 am
Heh, yeah, I’ve actually been having pretty bad luck with all these services of late, mail simply doesn’t arrive as you mentioned. Sigh.
In particular with regards to the email for blogs - that’s always an optional field, so you don’t need to supply any sort of email at all. :) It’s just there if you want to give the blog owners a means to contact you directly.