Comment by guynamedloren | Hacker News Reader

Comment by guynamedloren | Hacker News Reader

> While there are products out there like Convo, Yammer and Evernote for Business, Saarinen said he views e-mail as the main competition.

Yes, they have that right. Email is definitely the competition, and I'm glad this team is upfront about it. Lots of group chat platforms brush this off.

> But these kinds of discussions are not best supported by long chains of e-mail.

Ah, you can't end on that TC! Why are these kinds of discussions not good on email? I've tried a bunch of group chat/discussion/collaboration platforms. I use them for a while, and they're fun and exciting during that honeymoon stage, but I always end up going back to email. It's dependable, robust and evergreen. And everyone has it. I don't know if it's ever not worked. Seriously.

I want to believe that something is better than email, but I have yet to see it. I had HUGE hopes for Google Wave, which was supposed to kill email. Didn't work. Checking out Inc, and it feels a lot like Wave. I hope it doesn't suffer a similar fate.

What's the huge problem with email?

It looks like you can email in content (there is special address in the Settings) - so you could email Bob, Jon, and CC the Inc address and share a link.

You can also get digest emails on new stuff/mentions. So it seems like you could interact entirely via email and then only go to the web if you want to search/see groups.

That's interesting.

Header on their website: "Say no to email, build a better workplace"

When they say something like that and then build a service that is dependent on email (at least somewhat), and even go as far as allowing the service to be used in it's entirety via email, I have to wonder if they genuinely believe email is broken. If they really believed in the "say no to email" matra, they would have simply said no to email themselves.

Apologies for the bluntness. My skepticism stems from personal experiences working on a project that was designed to 'kill email' (rather, a subset of email, not group chat like this). The same thing happened: primary interaction mechanism with the platform was ... email. That project failed.

They know everyone can't be convinced to give up email, so email users are appeased in order to allow others to use the app as intended.

We have a lot of companies using Inc to share links which are more for inspiration and not as urgent so Inc is the place to store them. It's more like a bridge between email and wikis; both communication but also a repository of useful information

When I think email tools I remember a company called Xoopt which Yahoo acquired and shut down. They managed all the files you shared with others and gave you better search + visualization within gmail. That was the best photo tool I ever used.

I think there is data out there that confirms email sharing outweighs sharing on FB + TWTTR + everything else online combined.

Definitely. For Everpix, sharing to email is 25x as popular as sharing to Facebook.

That's just WOW.

You should signup for our beta ;)

https://www.inboxapp.com/

tried to but couldn't find the email form. wayyyy too much clutter on that page.

I laughed way too hard at that :D

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