Today’s postal service has a reputation for being slow and hopelessly stuck in the old ways. The term “snail mail” doesn’t sound much like a product that Google would be rolling out anytime soon.

But it hasn’t always been this way:

The U.S. Postal Service has a long history of exploiting technology to offer alternate means of message transmission. At it’s inception, part of the Postal Department’s mandate was the construction of a network of post roads for mail to travel along, infrastructure with obvious secondary benefits for the young nation. From there, mail traveled by pony express, railroad and steamship, surmounting the technical problems to keep communication on pace with the country’s expansion. Soon after the development of powered flight, the USPS innovated again by delivering mail by plane.

Time and time again, circumstances have driven innovation,

Between 1942 and 1945, “V-Mail” (for “Victory Mail”) service was available for military mail. Letters were converted into microfilm and reprinted near the destination, to save room on transport vehicles for military cargo.[35]

From 1982 to 1985, Electronic Computer Originated Mail was accepted for bulk mailings. Text was transmitted electronically to one of 25 post offices nationwide. The Postal Service would print the mail, and put it in special envelopes bearing a blue ECOM logo. Delivery was assured within 2 days.[36]

So what happened? Why did the postal service suddenly run out of ideas? Did they sit back in a daze while the world changed or were they so harried and battered that there was no time or funds for innovation?

Here’s how I’d reinvent snail mail:

Today’s users have a dangerously low threshhold for hassle. Physically writing addresses and finding a stamp and writing a return address… too many steps. The USPS needs to design a cheap, dead-simple postage printer and give it away for free.

(Stamps.com, you say?  No, that’s too expensive and only does one thing.  A step forward but only for businesses.)

Make the top surface a digital scale. Add smoothly operating software that syncs up with any list of contacts and spits out a standardized sticker with address and postage. When it runs low on stickers or ink, it asks to dial home and order more, debited from your account. The same account gets dinged for a few cents if a letter hits the processing system and comes up “Postage Due” for a malfunctioning scale or an awkward shape.

Aside: Then there’s the secondary effect of having a sticker printer attached to every computer: Stickering goes mainstream. And no, nothing boring like putting your name on everything, real-life is now something everyone comments on. Public space is now public conversation, advertising posters are not a monologue but just the first voice in a conversation. The barrier to entry lowers, tech enables quality improvements, thus providing a more diverse group of voices, ie: people with something more interesting to say than drawings of penises or the letters BNE. /aside

Pair the printer up with free desktop publishing software that prints and addresses envelopes for any size letter. Market the whole package based on the lure of the physical in a digital world. WE HUMANS STILL LIKE TO TOUCH AND OWN THINGS. We just need to be reminded of that and given neat, easy ways to do so. Give us templates and let us make and share templates. Get HP, Lexmark and Epson to bankroll it but don’t let them touch the software, we want something that actually works.

Image derived from work by Blake Unger Dvorchik.

$5 Deposit Certificate

In many countries, it is not uncommon for the postal service to offer savings accounts. These often serve low-income populations with small savings who may not get the best deal from checking accounts geared toward salaried 9-5ers.  The U.S. Postal Service formerly had such a system, offering savings accounts from 1911 – 1966 that paid out 2% annually on deposits.

This might be just the moment to reinstate a postal savings account system. Personal savings are increasing while banks are cutting down on the freebies and easy access to checking and savings accounts that proliferated before the economic downturn (free checking and savings accounts are often only for students and direct deposit users). Free and easy bank accounts could go a long ways towards reducing the poor’s reliance on check cashing services that skim off a percentage of their earnings and could increase their personal savings rate.

There’s also the small matter of covering the gaps in USPS’s operating costs with the dividends of conservatively investing those deposits.  As long as the Postmaster General doesn’t take your savings account to the dogtrack or chuck it into CDOs, things should run just dandy.

The Postal Service already has 32,741 locations (give or take a few hundred).  Slap in an ATM or two at each, add an extra window and you’re on your way. Further, think about converting some of those blue street corner mailboxes into hybrid ATM/automated postal centers and postal banking could be an instant institution in every major American city without paying a dime extra in real estate costs.

Adding banking would also make post offices much more of a draw, creating a convenient hub for all manner of government services. The post office already handles passports, why not farm out some of the other basic citizen-government interactions to a satellite location? This especially makes sense as that the neighborhoods that need the most services are not always convenient to the downtown government buildings but would likely have at least one branch of the USPS.  Kiosks with video conferencing and a scanner could skip the need for moving the staff out of those hulking downtown buildings while still extending services.

OK, let’s pretend that Mike Kuniavsky’s idea of postal service as DNS service has come to fruition and let’s say I’ve paid for the distinction of being Aaron Cael, U.S.  Thus, all anybody has to do to direct any physical object to me would be to slap on adequate postage and write “Aaron Cael, U.S.” on it.  Bitchin’, right?

Well let’s say I’m something of a jetsetter, the type who regularly doesn’t see their mailbox for days or weeks at a time.  Having one’s vital communiques and well-wishes bound to something as old-fashioned as a physical location is the sort of thing that wears on a modern mind.

But what if one’s “postal DNS” resolved not to one physical location but to where ever one’s body happened to be?

Sync your calendar up with your postal account and that letter from your grandma and those sneakers you ordered off Amazon arrive at your hotel at the same time you check-in.  Buy toiletries and a tie online  before a business trip, delivered automatically to the hotel upon your arrival.  If you really want to stay up on your mail, allow the postal service access to your phone’s GPS and packages can be routed to you in real-time, for an extra fee of course.

Think of it as Google Voice for the physical world.

Naturally, these features would be elective and responsive to instruction.  Getting away from it all?  Leave mail forwarding off and don’t see a bill while you’re at the lake.   Text back an emphatic ‘no’ when its asks via SMS about delivering that cast-iron cookware and crate of wine just before you head to the airport with only a carry-on bag.

How would you use this service if it existed?

Again I’ll say it: the U.S. Postal Service is a strange and doomed beast, constantly hounded and bleeding from a thousand cuts but cursed to never die.  And maybe that’s why I love it.

A ways back we solicited opinions on how best to transform the struggling U.S. Postal Service, stirring up barely a leaf’s rustle of feedback.Said feedback suggested that we could best “help the postal mails by solicitously expediting transfer of good faith monies” to the Nigerian bank account specified.  Nearly a year later and I’m still waiting for my fortune in embezzled oil wealth.

But nothing’s changed.  The postal service is still hemorrhaging cash, still viewed as antiquated and a dead-tree dependent business that is haunted by technological changes, rather than an institution that stands to benefit from them.  Apropos of nothing but my own surging interest, I hereby declare June 3 through June 10th TITLE OF MAGAZINE’s POSTAL WEEK, dedicated to wild speculation on the reinvention of the US Postal Service.

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Mike Kuniavsky had a smart idea for a postal business model change over at his Orange Cone blog:

Here’s what I came up with in the bar: the US Postal Service (USPS) needs to become the equivalent of the Domain Name Service for geographic locations. DNS is the digital service that translates human-readable domain names such as orangecone.com into IP addresses, such as 168.75.111.15.

This, more or less, is exactly what the USPS already does, but it’s still tied to the sender writing the actual physical address on the letter. However, as any recipient of a slightly mis-addressed letter that still arrived knows, the service is actually pretty good at figuring out where the letter is going. The USPS is already resolving ambiguous address data into physical locations.
It’s been doing it for years…

Why not make name-to-location resolution the primary role of the postal service?
For example, rather than having your address be “Your Name, 1234 Oak Street, Town, State, Zip Code” you could pay to have it be “Your Name, Town, USA.” Microsoft could pay to have their address just be “Microsoft, USA.” It works for “Santa Claus,” why can’t the USPS charge MS to make it work for them?

On the back end, the postal service could provide a number of routing services using the infrastructure they already have. The “Microsoft” letter could go either to a regional office or to a central location, depending on what Microsoft wanted to pay for.

Be sure to click through and read the rest where he breaks down the numbers on potential profitability and other bits of the nitty gritty.

I think this is brilliant the way it builds on the core function of postal service–making everyone in the country locatable and able to be communicated with.

I propose that this could be taken a step further to create something like a physical version of call forwarding.  A Postal Meatspace DNS customer would input a list of common locations that they frequent–home, office, bar, camp–and be able to adjust their mail delivery to follow them via a simple web interface.  I’ll flesh this idea out a little later in the week.

NASA has been in the sick ward for some time. Few come to visit these days. The Shuttle is a flying Betamax of technolgy. NASA has been reduced to finding parts on eBay.

Perhaps the only thing George W Bush did I concur with was give NASA a reboot. The proposed Constellation Program was Apollo on steroids. After all, we have computers, CAD, and iPods so let’s use that awesome technology to go to the moon. Using proven rocket technolgy from the design of Saturn V and Soyuz rockets, the Ares would take us back to the moon.

It might have, but now the money and interest is gone. This has been the problem with manned spaceflight since it’s inception: money and interest.

The money is obviously an issue in the credit crunch economy. Interest also as many see other things to worry about. Interest, in the traditional knee jerk short sighted reaction.

Consider Sputnik in 1952: at that time there was no MLB Network, Internet, or cell phones. Sputnik had no clear benefit, no practical outcome. Soviet scientists were not sitting around saying “let’s put ball in space then it go beep beep. After, we will sell– how can you say– sports network to yankee blue jean American to watch on TV.” Nope, just a ball in space that went beep beep. Heck, most people didn’t even have a TV. Yet Sputnik’s development was absolutely critical in the world we live in today.

All that anyone could promise at best was the ball went beep beep and didn’t explode. That’s it. Today satelite technology is an invaluable part of our way of life but then it was simply ball that go beep beep.

Today where fortune and success come and go by the second space is a hard sell. The average person cannot afford a trip in space.

There’s a way to make money off space: get the real average Joe and make people excited about space again. The answer is a lottery.

At $100,000 Virgin Galactic isn’t cheap but it is cheap for space travel. If 100,000 people bought a $1 ticket (better odds than most lotteries) that would break even. Chances are though mote would buy– and outer space would start making money and interest.

This is the kind of viral and word-of-mouth advertising marketing types have wet dreams about. Even a few minutes in space is a lifetime experience and at $1 the price is right. Anousheh Ansari spent time in space and left feeling depressed– as if she had seen a fantastic world just out of arms length. As a result she created the X-Prize, offering a prize for affordable space travel; which in turn led to Virgin Galactic. Imagine when not just some guy on TV but your neighbor, your friend, or you journey into space. What we could accomplish with renewed money and interest in space is unimaginable. It’s unimaginable because right now we can’t get there, yet.

With a lottery, we could.

Libraries are storage repositories for books, but just certain books, not your books. No, you have to store those yourself.  Most of the time, those books are speed bumps or structural elements because most of the time you aren’t reading them.  While a well-stocked bookcase or two can be good for showing off to friends and potential mates when you have them round the place, there’s something to be said for not having a half ton of dead tree hanging about the place, taking up valuable space that could be used for holding broken electronics or a knife throwing range.  See where I’m going with this yet?

Two things about me: I’ve got no money and I live in what would be considered a treehouse if it was in a tree, rather than over a store that sells do-rags and tire chains. Thus I think a lot about making use of the limited space I’ve got and keeping myself stimulated without laying out a lot of cash.  Add that to my nerdish tendencies and it’s a no brainer that I have a pretty steady relationship with the local library.

I took a big box of books down there yesterday to donate after cleaning out the apartment. (My New Year’s resolution had something to do with house guests not getting tetanus)  They thanked me, dropped in a coat closet and would presumably be storing them until they can be bought at some semi-annual sale by other people who will also use them to clutter up their apartments.

So I got thinking: what if we applied out internet age expectations of resource sharing to Dead Tree Media?  What would that look like?

Now a library is an old, old approach to a problem that doesn’t really exist anymore: books being rare, expensive and the only way to reliably preserve and transmit the written word.  True, it can still expensive to build up a book collection of one’s own, especially if the knowledge you’re after is something that might be captured within the textbook/university publishing ghetto where the writing is dry and the prices are high.

These days, libraries are struggling.  Cities everywhere are deeply in debt and over budget so they’re slashing funding to everything they can.  At the same time, the gushing info pipe that the internet provides has made the modest offerings of the local public library seem less important to those well-off enough to afford their own computer and net access.

So how can we rewire libraries to increase their relevance?

Well, one suggestion would be to have them work more like cloud storage, crossed with a little bit of file sharing. (yeah buzzwords!) Dig: Libraries could take a patron’s books, either assuming full ownership or holding them for a mutually agreed upon term.  Then, the patron would be able to get them back at any time, provided no other library patron has checked them out.  Donating patrons would have priority on retrieving any books they donated (i.e.: could skip ahead of the line if an item was heavily reserved) and donated books would be stored in their donor’s home branch, keeping them nearby most of the time.  The donor gets imperfect access to his books but for most books, who needs them right at hand 24/7?  I could certainly wait a week if I ever got the yen to read Glamorama for the third time.

Downsides would include the additional cost for libraries to absorb many many more books.  This could be partially offset by requiring patrons to pay a fee upfront for storage of their books within the system. I’d gladly pay 10-15 cents a book to have it nearby but out of my apartment.  These payments could also be credited in-kind to a patron’s account to reduce their overdue charges or pay off future fines.

Another downside would be a significant hit to sales for book publishers.  If libraries were suddenly flush with free books, they wouldn’t have to spend as much.  Likewise, such a system could encourage less people to actually buy popular books if they knew that it was sitting there for free at their local library.

All in all, not perfect but worth a shot.  Thoughts?  How would you rewire your public library?

Russ George: The Man to Save the World?

“Give me half a tanker of iron and I will give you an ice age.” — Russ George

Russ George in the volume 18 issue of Make magazine says he has a solution for global warming. His plan sounds like a deus ex machina solution for our global warming problems: get some iron (0.5 micron hematite), drop it in the ocean, spread at the right times and places, plankton eats iron, plankton grows, and global warming and dying fish go bye-bye. He has also written a Google Knol article (yes, someone uses Google Knol) on the subject as well.

His company, Plantoks Science bills themselves as a “privately held ecorestoration and ocean  biotechnology company” though this sounds like “MacGyver style fix to global warming.”

Science to the rescue or psuedo-science fraud?

Global warming is a topic, like many important and pertinent subjects, largely debated by people who have no idea what they are talking about.

To play the role I hate/love called devil’s advocate, I’m skeptical. The guys math seems solid:

“Phytoplankton absorb 100,000 carbon atoms for every iron atom they consume. Do the math: just one ton of iron can fix 367000 tons of CO2.” – Charles Platt Make

The environment is a complex thing. To quote global skeptic Michael Chrichton “Nobody believes a weather prediction twelve hours ahead.” Or in other words the reasoning and logic may work out for a weather report twelve hours ahead, but the complex system of weather always prevents 100% perfect accuracy. Not even close to reliable accuracy.

The math can add up but not accounting for variables or other factors can destroy a theory. I’m fairly certain I could walk in a straight line in my apartment. I don’t want to try it on a tightrope between the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building because on paper it works in my apartment. In short, I would not bet my life or my planet on it.

I neighter accept nor reject global warming. I do reject “armchair scientists.” As in people who think they understand things more than people trained, working full time, and devoted to a particular subject based on a program on the Discovery channel or heard on NPR. You know, people with “degrees” and “training” and “experience.”

Maybe Russ George has a fix for global warming or maybe he has a hazy knowledge of climate science.

Alright, I confess: I still write and send actual, physical letters to people.  People I know even.  For non-special occasions, not even as a ritual or an outdated formality.  I’m a sucker for physical objects, what can I say.

As often as I think that I’m the last non-corporate entity who still uses the post office, there’s still that enormous line at every sad outpost of the U.S. Mail.  Weird.  Who are these people?

Before this devolves into a pointless antiquarian rant, let me get to the meat: there’s an article brewing that I want to get a conversation going about before it starts.

Topic: how would you go about making the postal service relevant?

Included in this would be the issues of improving the user experience, competing with email for ease of use, making all those hackneyed storefronts do something and running it all without just digging a big hole to throw money in.

Somewhat harder than all that would be: how can we revive the culture of sending each other tangible objects?  How does one create a market for the delivery of things?

Go nuts in the comments.  Let’s get talking.