"I am leaving Xobni in late August and starting a new company."
"There are lots of challenges left in the email and communication space. I have some exciting product ideas for my new company, and I feel like I understand the space like few others do."
Those are good questions. Better email client would indeed be desirable. I am kinda surprised by the slowness of innovation in the space of email clients. I feel there is still a big opportunity in this area for some completely new product written from scratch...just nobody got it right yet.
I'm guessing that part of this would be the difficulty in getting the average corporate user to accept a radically different application. Even minor, release-to-release changes bother users--imagine what an entirely different interface might do.
It really depends whether we are a niche or the leading edge. If we are the leading edge then the masses will use these new systems later and it's worth building technologies now.
Bear in mind that your argument applied to email in 1986 when I first got the email address jgc@prg.ox.ac.uk.
We're talking 1986 here. That email was based on the command-line, but we did have IM: it was called talk. And we had anonymous peer-to-peer file sharing using FTP. And we had discussion forums using Usenet.
We didn't have Facebook, but we didn't need it. I knew everyone who was using the Internet :-)
I see 2 major divergences in email usage (or 3, actually).
1) a lot of people see email for personal use - as a TODO list, as a collection of your own information, etc. I think this constituent is made of of mostly males < 30 years of age.
2) a lot of people use email for conversation; ie, leaving messages to people where they know they will see it. Facebook is gaining ground on email because people feel more at ease gossiping through Facebook (which they associate with social activities) than email (dull, boring, practical). This constituent is probably the younger generation (< 22), and females.
3) the rest, which uses email casually or for business reasons. Email is just an open channel to talk or conduct business. The older generation uses it like this.
Email is difficult because people use it in so many ways that one interface for all the different uses of it fails to address specific needs. I think email needs to be sorted into categories that have their own user-interfaces that are optimal for that type of email (ie, email that is back and forth communication should look more like IM, an email that stores information should have the information distilled and be easily searchable, etc)
His mention of the difficulty of getting users to trust AI agents is dead right. All the supposedly wonderful Bayes-based filtering today STILL sometimes crashes and burns, to the point where Thunderbird often thinks that fairly important work emails are junk. I would be hesitant to install any other agents unless they performed extremely trivial tasks.
However...
RE: Number 3
Search is nowhere near good enough right now for most desktop clients. Outlook and Thunderbird alike are both terrible at intelligent searches. Only Gmail has a nice search function, which is why I continue to use it over most desktop clients. If he can make a cross-platform plugin that vastly improves searches without turning my client into a grinding mass of gears (hello Xobni!), he will have a red-hot product.
Point 1 is pretty good, actually. Email for me is mostly for "official" communications and bug reports from people that haven't heard of IRC. When I want to talk to a friend, I wait for them to come online instead of sending e-mail. When I want to talk to the author of some program I am using, I use IRC. At work, we use IRC for everything. Even our clients prefer IM to e-mail these days.
If all the mailing lists I read were on Usenet, I don't think I would even need e-mail. An interesting thought.
Pretty interesting post. I'm working on something cool that attempts to solve problems 1 and 2, plus what I think is currently the biggest problem with email (and every other form of messaging): incredibly lousy interaction design. I'll launch it here in a few days; I'm eager to get feedback and maybe some technical help from the community.
If you want to revolutionise email merge it with a task list since my inbox is basically a big todo list.
Let me create tasks right in my inbox (at the moment I have to email myself), let me sort the emails myself by dragging them up and down to prioritise them, and let me split single emails into multiple tasks with some link back to the original email.
To clarify: Yes, I will be starting another email related startup. However, I don't intend to make a competitor to Xobni.
Email is a huge space. So many things are broken today that it's hard to know where to even start fixing. I'm very proud of what we've achieved at Xobni but there are many exciting things beyond what our sidebar does - plenty of problems to attack.
Yes totally agree! Email space seems so stagnant and everyday I use them think of ways it can be improved!
The email experience can be improved so much with just simple data mining like collecting information about a project by just looking at project related correspondence. Who has been active or who is not. Great deal of information about user is hidden in those mails, I am sure an intelligent pass through them can tell simple things like gender of the person, career, location, purchase history, relationship status and much more.
Also, another thing makes me wonder how email clients will adopt themselves to manage messages in forms other than text.
Though the project is a failure, there are some of ideas from Chandler that might worth a look.
They had this notion of items - everything is an item and you can stamp an item into an item of a different kind. For instance, you get stamp a mail as a TODO item.
The real challenge is not just aggregating everything into the inbox but being able to present it in a way that suits the user's personal style.
Some of my facebook messages, some twitter messages and some RSS feeds (but not all of them) are more important than some (but not all) of my emails. Yet, the facebook/twitter/email divergence is also a part of my consciousness as a user. To identify these similar things across mediums, present these things in once place and yet subtly distinguish between them - this is the challenge.
I guess it is also easy for me to point out that the answer is a combination of machine learning/statistical analysis and good UI design. Implementing it is the hard part :) I have thought about it but I am a bit busy doing other things. It would be interesting to hear your take on this and your approach to this problem when you are able to reveal such things.
I don't think of any good faith contract as being un-American. I wouldn't sign one, but I think the response to companies requiring one shouldn't be to ban them, but to let them lose all the great talent through market mechanisms.
"I don't think of any good faith contract as being un-American."
It was kind of a joke. My American friends often tell me that the country's strength is its unfettered capitalism, so I was trying to point out that things that suppress competition are un-American.
"I am leaving Xobni in late August and starting a new company."
"There are lots of challenges left in the email and communication space. I have some exciting product ideas for my new company, and I feel like I understand the space like few others do."
;)