Five Open Questions in Email
gaborcselle.com
gaborcselle.com
"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."
;)
Bear in mind that your argument applied to email in 1986 when I first got the email address jgc@prg.ox.ac.uk.
good point though
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.
If all the mailing lists I read were on Usenet, I don't think I would even need e-mail. An interesting thought.
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.
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.
They had a lot of great ideas and vision but the project didn't turn out to be a success unfortunately.
I think there is a book called 'Dreaming in Code' which documents Chandler's failure in more detail. Probably worth a read! :)
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 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.
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.
In the startup world, everything moves faster, even evolution.
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.