Better email. Please. Thank you.
I’m not starting a new email company (well, as of today anyway) but I have been talking with a lot of friends about the state of email. There are several companies supposedly working to make email more useful to include Fuser, Orgoo, Xobni and Xoopit . Xobni is the only company in this group working to enhance Outlook. I think there are several evolutions that email could make. Here’s the thought process I’d take if I were going to work on a new, better email company along with some features that I think would be very cool.
- Determine whether you are targeting a business user or the consumer. Features and functions could not be intelligently prioritized if you don’t have clear focus in this regard
- I’m tired of toggling between facebook and my email clients. If a contact in email is not in my networks I want to know it and I want to publish them to my networks direct from my email client.
- I would like to see prefabricated email “response widgets” in a toolbox that I can just drag and drop into my message.
- An example of an email response widget might be, “Hey you guys, I’m thinking about buying this car. What do you think of it? Then, I drag a “SCALE OF 1-10″ slider into my message. People just check what they think and hit return.
- I want messaging capability to be INTEGRATED into my browsing experience, particularly around images. For example, I’d like to right click an image on a web page and “message it” directly with a brief comment. Why do I have to cut and paste? Most emails have to do with something you are looking at online anyway.
- I want threaded messages to have more personality. For example, why is a growing email thread so boring? Attach my face/character/avatar to each part of a message/thread where my comment is. If that message was subsequently forwarded to someone else not originally part of the message, add their avatar too! And, hotlink their avatar so I can email them DIRECTLY from the thread instead of making me cut/paste their email address from the header.
- Connect to the GMAIL pop/smtp system so that all these new features could be accessed while still using your Gmail address. Gmail could be sent and received through the new system (not really sure if this is currently allowed or not).
- Add an easy way to embed media players so I can forward songs and videos VERY easily.
- Offer a robust API so developers can add new applications that can be plugged in and also removed easily - just like Firefox.
- Give me controls to adjust how messages and priorities are handled. In other words, make email less TIME BASED. You know that important message you’re reading today? You tend to forget about it weeks later because it got “pushed down the stack” as more mails came in. What you want to be able to do is say, “ok, ANY emails from my boss should ALWAYS stay at the top of the pile, in red font and font size is 22 unless I move them or delete them.
Think of email like a powerful web application. Forget what we think about how email is “supposed” to work. Just because its always been done that way doesn’t mean it always needs to be that way.
I’m sure I could easily think of many more features if I spent time on it. What can you imagine? How would you like to see email evolve? My guess is that this is still a HUGE market opportunity for somebody that executes well and offers real value. It just hasn’t been done right yet.
comments
4 Responses to “Better email. Please. Thank you.”
Leave a Reply
sick of old email? wanna make over? send us email from your gmail address to try xoopit. info@xoopit.com. sub: new user request.
bijan marashi
ceo - xoopit
I love your list. We’re already working on a few items from your wish list. If you aren’t on our beta, send me a email and I’ll make sure you get to try it out.
Cheers,
Matt Brezina
co-founder/Xobni
Thanks for the thought provoking post. At Fuser we’re definitely trying to re-think what’s necessary in email (and communications in general) and where there are opportunities to simplify and improve how it’s managed.
We think we’ve taken a big step for simplification by providing a tool to pull together disparate communication accounts (multiple emails, MySpace, Facebook) into a single Inbox, and we’re actually looking into some of the ideas you mention as far as offering additional value. One area where we think there’s a lot of cool new things to be built is in the realm of providing insight into what all this communication data actually means. We think this might be similar to some of the other companies you mention, although none of them are open to thee public so I haven’t actually used them
What strategies are you using for managing multiple accounts today? I’m guessing from the article that you’re a Gmail user…are you forwarding emails to a single Gmail account? Using Gmail’s POP and IMAP to read multiple accounts inside the Gmail client? Something else?
Wow, thanks everyone for the follow up. Glad smart folks are working on this! Kelly