A quick guide to innovations in Email

I have been writing about email and possible improvements and innovations since last year. Jatspeak’s analysis of email improvements(til june 2007) can be read here. A couple of days back, i revisited one of my favourite topics and wrote about the recent happening in context of email innovations. The last post received a lot of interesting comments and emails. This post is a continuation of that.

Emails keep most of busy. With an increasing bandwidth penetration and available of better email products, more and more conversations are happening over email than any other time of history. Many startups are working day and night to bring relief to reduce email overload and to enhance the usability in order to provide a rich touch to age old grey haired emailing experience. It is a big opportunity and a whole new set of realms exist which need addressing. Some of them are being worked upon by various people. It can broadly calssified and understood as follows

1. Organization of the mailbox :- Email’s usability did not change over time. Arguably, we can say that gmail introduced better usability. Upon its release, conversation feature was a big hit. A simple idea scored big time. They offered the amount of space that not many used to offer in those days. it lead to more and more types of information being put up in the mailbox. xoopit and xobni are two startups which attempt to ease up lots of things as far as usability is concerned. Xoopit organizes photos, videos and attachments. The best feature is listing of videos from YouTube. A lot of folks send me one line emails containing a link to youtube video. only 10% of time i actually click on that link. Xoopit’s organization helps me to list all youtube videos in my mailbox. First time i used it, i said wow! i never knew i had so many videos in my mailbox. Xobni, on the other hand has an outlook plugin. I use it primarily to search (search in outlook is below standards), and view conversations. It also arranges things nicely in context of a person.
2. Increasing access points to mailbox :- Email has been traditionally used for sending information to a certain set of recipients. In last few years, multiple alternative means to produce and consume information have been developed. Instant messengers, RSS, newsgroups, and lately efforts like twitter, facebook status messages, SMSGupshup groups, Vakow! etc have added to the web of information production and consumption. With time, the number of options has exploded, and we all want to be part of everything. This calls for efforts in integration and convergence of multiple services. One of the startups attacking this realm is www.circleup.com. They offer a smart messaging platform for interaction across various social, email, mobile and privae web networks. Thunderbird also does an rss and email integration in its mail client. Pingie send your RSS feeds to your mailbox and SMS.
3. Learning from mailbox content and highlighting the dark matter :- “You can identify a person by his shoes” goes an adage. Similarly, you can know more about a person by his email. Likes and dislikes, friends and foes, loves and hates are some interesting things. In short your mailbox reveals everything about you. With help of this information, an individual can be profiled into a set of rules. Now other information sources like online news portals, blogs, aggregators,  comments, twitter, social networks, video sources, podcasts etc can be cross referenced across these rules, and information of your interest can be served to you. Sir Paul Allen backed Gist does this task quite effectively. The first screen itself has a halo effect on other features. Gist provides an outlook plugin, as well as can speak gmail too. I tried out the gmail plugin, and i must admit that it is pretty clean, robust and informative. Without going into technical details, i would like to summarize that it is one of those products that put an instant smile on your face. It is typically helpful is used on your business email, as it is able to list your company, the latest blog post about your company, the newest presentation you colleague made in a recent conference, the margin your stock gained today, your rivals new announcement, a new book by your ex colleague  and lots more.

With all such development happening around us, we can see that our mailboxes have finally taken off. We are going to see more in coming quarter.

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