
No email at AngelList - swohns
http://venturehacks.com/articles/no-email-at-angellist?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+venturehacks+%28Venture+Hacks%29
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azov
I'd really like to see more things built _on top_ of email instead of using
their own separate protocols (falling back graciously to email when possible).

Anyway, at this point it looks inevitable that I'll end up using 50 different
apps/tools to do basically the same thing because everyone I talk to will use
a different one...

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pbreit
I always thought SMTP would have been an interesting approach for sending out
the equivalent of Web Hooks. Just email out XML or JSON, let it sit in email
accounts and use POP/IMAP libraries to read.

~~~
daigoba66
It some ways it is superior to how web hooks are normally implemented. E.g.
Most SMTP relays have queues for both inbound and outbound delivery. Plus
there are semantics for failed or bounced delivery.

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jonathanjaeger
Why am I the only person it seems that loves email? It's like business
texting. You can do it asynchronously and it's ubiquitous. Sure it has its
negatives and it doesn't replace Skype/GChat or face-to-face, and we can use
other apps that are better for certain cases, but I can't imagine myself
taking a hard no email stance.

~~~
jfb
I love it. It is far more important to me than Facebook/Jabber/&c., all of
which are problematic for a variety of reasons. Perhaps it's my age, but I've
been emailing for ~25 years now, and it's unlikely that new channels will
displace email for me.

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jkubicek
> Yammer has nested conversations, search, inline images and likes. It is also
> our company directory. And they have a mobile app.

Minus the likes, that's email.

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JayNeely
To clarify, the author is listing features that differentiate Yammer from
twitter, which it started out as being most similar to (but a private, company
/ organization internal usage version of).

Unlike email, Yammer or other twitter-like platforms are ambient, one-to-many
without demanding each person's attention, and length-limited. It's easy to
put a message out without being interruptive, and get attention to it /
responses from whoever's available. I find it pretty valuable.

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nomadlogic
i reckon this is clearly intended for non-technical business/sales people.
from an software/systems engineering perspective i feel that one of the
primary benefits of email is its async behaviour.

unlike IRC/IM/video/telephone/face-to-face interactions, which happen in
realtime, email provides an opportunity for reflecting on conversations and
responses, while also allowing people in diverse geographic areas to take part
in the natural flow of a conversation.

couple this with the fact that pretty much anyone can run a mail server and
communicate with any other person on the internet - i am not sure how
abandoning email communication for closed systems like yammer/facebook for
near-time communication would be a net positive.

having said that - adding these tools to your suite of communication formats
is clearly a good thing.

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23david
Found it odd that you call 'Pivotal Tracker' just 'Tracker'.I recognized the
mobile app screenshot, but didn't understand what the 'Tracker' app was until
I clicked the link. :-)

~~~
waleedka
Same here, at first I thought it was a new app. We use it too, and usually
call it Pivotal, for short.

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apalmer
Why is this a good thing? Not being snarky, just seems i am missing something.
Whats the big win about 'no email'? seems like they use plenty of electronic
communication.

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kyt
We looked into switching to HipChat, but we're sticking with Skype. We really
liked HipChat's interface and API, but there were a few negatives.

1) HipChat doesn't support audio only calls and conference calls. This was a
dealbreaker for us. 2) Skype has a much larger user base overall and we can
use it with other non-company members. 3) One of our developers wrote a plugin
to inline images into Skype, which is a nice feature of HipChat. 4) Skype is
free. 5) Skype's messaging is P2P and works in our office when our internet
goes down. (Thanks Time Warner)

~~~
cbhl
FWIW, we use Google Hangouts for conference calls.

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niceguyjames
That's great guys.

You still email me almost every day, though.

~~~
joshuaxls
Which emails are those? Besides our weekly digest I only see two emails sent
from startups interested in you.

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mark-apps
I can identify with having too many places to check to see what's going on -
we ended up building something to solve the problem. We wanted to bring info
from source control, support tickets, servers/monitoring/PaaS, continuous
integration and a bunch of other things into one place so we could see what's
going on (and also we wanted a really simple red/orange/green status view of
everything in the context of the apps we are writing and deploying).

We put out a Beta version recently and are keen for people to have a look and
provide feedback - check it out at appsecute.com

We're thinking we should also be outputting info to tools like HipChat, IRC
and maybe even Skype, for those who are already heavily invested in a chat
system. Again we're keen to see what people think...

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juskrey
The Lindy Effect is on the side of e-mail.

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gbiggers
What you y'all use for lightweight project/task management? Genomera investor
Nat Turner recommends Asana
<[http://www.natsturner.com/post/40173294607>](http://www.natsturner.com/post/40173294607>).
Surely you guys tried Asana. How was the fit?

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inthewoods
Interesting post - but I'm not sure that it is any better. What I see is 3 or
4 place I now have to check to figure out what is going on. What I like about
email is one place to communicate and search.

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philippos
You can do all that with only one application. It is an all-in-one app, email
centric app for business. Matches exactly AngelList requirements Check
mailquatro.com

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anonfunction
Relieved to see this was about internal communication. Email marketing and
announcements are still highly effective and ubiquitous amongst users.

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hkmurakami
can't I do most if not all of this through various Google services without
having to branch out between multiple tools&apps?

