Movable Ink Launches Service To Stream Live Content In Emails | Hacker News Reader

Movable Ink Launches Service To Stream Live Content In Emails

techcrunch.com

26 pointsmnutt14 comments

Hmm... lots of us in the email marketing world did stuff like this years ago. Almost every top-flight email marketing vendor can do this today. Perhaps I'm missing what's the truly new, but customized emails linked to when/where they are opened crossed by profile variables and up-to-second content like auction prices is old hat. Looking at the demos, it looks like they either generate an image live on the fly with whatever content you have linked in, or use GeoIP to make a map image for local relevance.

Over the years, we found that these features don't always mesh with the "mental model" folks had about email... so that sometimes, the effort to create really dynamic content like this didn't really pay off; in some cases, however, such as auctions, limited offers, and other countdown situations, it could work really well. Some folks tried to send one mail and tell people "hey, keep this mail, whenever you open it, it's new!" hoping that they would go back to it during the day or even across a few days. But it would get buried in the flood of mail. And many people assume email is static, that what they saw this morning is what will be there that afternoon. Having it change (deal of the hour stuff, for example) can really confuse some readers.

So, glad to see that what's old is new again, and I wish these guys luck. I'd love, however, for someone to point out what's really new compared to the stuff that's been done in the past. Because yes, the email game could use some spice, and if it does something really new, perhaps this could help improve the email experience.

Back in the late 90s, when Netscape's email client supported it, I used iframes in email content to display the latest/current state of a complex workflow. We used emails to notify people of some decision they had to make, and needed an obvious way to avoid someone doing the same action twice without having to click around and leave the email client. The iframe would be populated with content from a webserver showing the current state. The first time they opened the email, they were able to take action immediately. If they later opened the same email, it would show the current state with the result of the action. If multiple people could take the same action and got the same email, the email would appear to always show the latest state and it avoided some workflow confusion issues.

Hello, Movable Ink co-founder here. You raise valid points, in that dynamic emails challenge users' perceptions of what is static and dynamic. It'll take some time to see what resonates well with users.

I'm not aware of anyone else doing actual dynamic content and updates, but our product aims to make it very easy to build the dynamic email content using standard web technologies like HTML, CSS, and javascript. You can just create the dynamic web page, point Movable Ink at it, and whenever someone opens the email we'll load the web page and continually render it, sending down updates to your users' email clients.

How does it work? I'm in the same boat as jsdalton -- I thought it was't possible.

The person sending the emails creates a dynamic web page. It can use all of the latest and greatest web technologies. (AJAX, WebSockets, CSS3, SVG, etc) Then they create a Web Crop in our dashboard, and we give them an HTML embed code.

When a user opens the email, it points to an image on our servers. At that point, we load the dynamic web page, take a screenshot, crop it, and render it in your browser. But at that point instead of closing the connection, we leave it open. Every second, we repeat the process, replacing the old image with the new one.

Crafty! How do you get the image to overwrite? I would think that you could only append to the image data that's already been transmitted.

Our current method uses the content-type multipart/x-mixed-replace. (Remember http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/5.03/ff_push.html? Good times...) When the request starts you specify a boundary string; then every time the browser sees that boundary string it knows to replace the existing image.

it's (very) cool, but x-mixed-replace is not supported in all browsers. I sure hope the browsers that support it don't end up dropping their support.

That's cool, thanks for the explanation.

I confess to not understanding how this is possible. Both Javascript and Flash are severely limited (if not outright blocked) in most email clients. How are they doing it? And if it's a proprietary technology, is that a good thing?

It's image swapping every few seconds. The image is based on the clients "Web Crop". So they update screenshots over and over and over again.

Congrats guys. Very cool product.

We've found lots of opportunity to make email marketing more sophisticated, and not enough smart engineers thinking about it.

BTW There's a belgian company called 8seconds ( http://www.8seconds.net/ ) with some similar dynamic-image loading tech, combined with (I think) multi-armed bandit split testing on the backend.

- Aarlo from MiraPost

Such an amazing platform. These guys prove that email is far from dead -- it's the lingua franca of web apps.

What is this I don't even...

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