<a href="http://www.gaborcselle.com/blog/2008/07/new-company.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.gaborcselle.com/blog/2008/07/new-company.html</a><p>"I am leaving Xobni in late August and starting a new company."<p>"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."<p>;)
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.
These posts on email are fascinating.<p>I see 2 major divergences in email usage (or 3, actually).<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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)
RE Number 4:<p>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.<p>However...<p>RE: Number 3<p>Search is <i>nowhere near</i> 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.
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.<p>If all the mailing lists I read were on Usenet, I don't think I would even need e-mail. An interesting thought.
If you want to revolutionise email merge it with a task list since my inbox is basically a big todo list.<p>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.
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.
Why do I have a feeling that these 5 areas are not on Xobni's radar? That would explain a lot.<p>In the startup world, everything moves faster, even evolution.