Let me give you an idea as a present. You may surely have thought of it. So here it is:

Notify me by email when someone responds to a thread I'm participating in. Simply (optional) add your email address.

Will get you many more traffic :) At the basis of Facebook success + Harvard. MySpace got this too late.

No need for Google / Facebook connect though although you may want to add this later.

Cheers.

Thanks Alex. I've been pondering this feature for quite some time, not sure yet if I want to start sending emails, or how to do it (when I send emails from my server, they usually land in the spam folder of recipients like Yahoo Mail or Hotmail, if I understand it right due to my server not being whitelisted or something).

Philipp: Set up a new gmail account like blogoscoped_mailergmail.com, next set up php to use the google smtp. Ideally use something better than gmail, because I think I read somewhere gmail will block you if you send more than x mails, but that would be the way to go.

Oh and, it might be smarter to do it through rss, like I tried with Blogora, before I gave up working on it for no reason (I might actually pick it up someday again :/). There I used a cookie to recognize the user and link it to a mail, and a standard rss feed would read out the cookie and serve the corresponding feed.

First of all, sorry for triple posting, but as editing isn't possible, I have no other option. Either way, the last sentence of my previous post made no sense, I meant: "There I used a cookie to recognize the user, and a dynamic php page (at a single url like http://www.blogoscoped.com/replies.rss) would read out the cookie and serve the corresponding feed." Naturally this meant anybody could read any feed, but that wasn't any problem as the comments were public in the first place.

Philipp: There is something called SPF that you have to setup and you'd have to get your mail signed by blogoscoped. Also if someone wishes to receive email notifications, you could imagine that this someone might also check his spam folder and mark all future emails as non spam.

* When someone responds with @my_nick_name the excerpt of what he is saying could also be included in the mail.

* You might want to notify people before closing a thread asking them if there is anything else they'd like to add.

* Of course let the user unsubscribe for a particular thread, included in every email sent.

* You might want to create a mailing list as another source of traffic to your site.

Yeah I've been using Google Apps for another site, then use some Google Appspot mini app to send emails. I'm currently looking into MailChimp for another site.