
Five Open Questions in Email - demandred
http://www.gaborcselle.com/blog/2008/07/five-open-questions-in-email.html
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knarf
<http://www.gaborcselle.com/blog/2008/07/new-company.html>

"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."

;)

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greyman
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.

~~~
bmj
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.

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redorb
the average person still uses email, not facebook. i think sometimes we think
we are the average person and that is a huge mistake.

~~~
jgrahamc
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.

~~~
redorb
that email wasn't web based was it? thats changed. (unless it was ;)

good point though

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jgrahamc
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 :-)

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Spyckie
These posts on email are fascinating.

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)

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sspencer
RE Number 4:

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.

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jrockway
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.

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lupin_sansei
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.

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izaidi
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.

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tlrobinson
Does this mean Gabor is leaving Xobni to start another email related startup?

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gaborcselle
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.

~~~
dhotson
I hope you're more successful than these guys were:
<http://chandlerproject.org/>

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! :)

~~~
rams
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.

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edw519
Why do I have a feeling that these 5 areas are not on Xobni's radar? That
would explain a lot.

In the startup world, everything moves faster, even evolution.

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rokhayakebe
Sounds like someone did not sign a "Non-Compete" :)

~~~
bigbang
Non-compete is not enforcable in California. :)

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raganwald
And furthermore, Non-Compete is Un-American.

~~~
akd
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.

~~~
raganwald
"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.

