Add Messaging affordance

[thelifeandtimes]

The analytics that vita provides are very helpful, but rather difficult to take action on. My current workflow is to export the json, convert to CSV, and then either manipulate in excel or manually review in order to do something like 'DM every star that has downloaded my application'.

@matthew-levan had a project a while back called %tell, which could be used to send bulk DMs to a list of ships.

We should add an affordance into %vita to make this possible. In particular, the great thing to have here would be a way to select for a particular cohort, i.e. everyone who downloaded a previous version of the desk, but not this most recent release or all planet level IDs who have not used the app in the last month.

@bacwyls, if this is something that are open to, let us know and @tocwex will think about how to help make it happen.

[gtimoth]

Interesting idea. Glad to hear you guys are using the bulk metrics csv too.

One thing that might help would be to add some ways to easily filter metrics for stars, planets, etc, perhaps from the dojo at first.

I would want to be careful about adding UI functionality that sends bulk DMs, because I'd want to make sure people don't accidentally spam their users while just poking around the app. At the very least, it would be cool to add a thread to the desk which sends out a DM to a set of ships. I am working on a similar thread to that right now.

[thelifeandtimes]

I hadn't thought about the concern of accidental spam, interesting. I had thought about it's potential impact on deliberate spam (including how to toe that line myself to be not-spam with the way I would use it), but kinda handwaved the impact of that with urbit fixes this.

I think it would be fairly straightforward to design a UI that would prevent accidental usage, but will think about if it is actually worth the effort to stub out and get back to you with something in the next few weeks.