I agree with most of what you said, except that the real-time aspect is not real-time enough. If email were actually real-time, then it could completely replace instant messaging as well. Right now it's lacking.
True, which is probably why google put im right next to the message viewer in gmail. I know of many ocassions where a flurry of emails turned into an im session.
I think gmail's "conversations" are really the first try at what I'm talking about, a new front end on email, but I don't think they work well enough personally. And they haven't really expanded well on the concept recently.
1) incredibly poor rollout strategy (imo)
2) what problem did it actually solve again?
forgive any appearance of snark; i just wanted to be concise, and i don't think that "the ideal marriage between email and IM" is something that people were - or are - desperately crying out to have.
I believe it failed in part because of the slow rollout (nobody you cared about had access yet) and lack of interop with email for notifications about changes, etc. I tried using it, and gave up. By the time it became widely available most of the early adopters gave up as well.
Shameless self-promotion: my startup (http://movableink.com) lets you add real-time elements to email. In fact, we have a group messaging company using it to show real-time conversations in status emails.
It doesn't allow interactivity (which is what you're probably thinking of) but it does provide real-time content.
It is real-time, it's just that current email clients aren't designed to be efficient, it's purely UI's fault. Again this is something we've fixed at post.fm, cant wait to show you guys.
Obviously email doesn't support seeing someone type, but SMTP is almost as fast as XMPP - sub 1 second doesn't really make a difference, it's usually IMAP that's the slow bit. Of course it's just as fast as XMPP if both sender and recipient are using post.fm, but the real latency comes from the recipient using eg gmail which has really slow IMAP polling in the web client (plus having to go back to the inbox or clicking show new message in gmail). Post.fm doesn't use IMAP under the hood so its instantaneous (and querying your mail in SQL lets us do amazing stuff).
its a new email platform to rival gmail, but we're stealth still so i cant disclose much. we'll be starting a beta pretty soon and issue an official press release at that stage - make sure you request an invite in the meantime.
