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March 17, 2006

9cays Taking The Pain Out Of Group Email

Nik Cubrilovic

21 comments »

9cays logo

9cays is a group email application developed by the folks at alien camel. 9cays makes it simple to start a conversation between a group of people - the conversation can be viewed and managed via their web application. Think of it as Google Groups light - groups can be created on the fly, and quickly disposed of when done.

If you don’t wish to signup to the service, you can instantly start a conversation with up to 3 participants right from the homepage. If you signup, which is a straight-forward process, you can invite more people into the conversation and expose other features. The aim of 9cays is to organise group communication and to make it much easier to manage than having CC’d addresses in ordinary email. Participants are able to subscribe and view the discussion thread using feeds, and view attachments etc. on the web interface. It is very simple to add a message to the conversation, you send an email to a 9cays.com address that is setup for each group.

In the future 9cays will be adding more functionality and the ability to group these ad hoc message groups under a single account or name. There is also an Outlook plugin being developed. 9cays has been in development for 6 months and they are sticking to their philosophy that there should be an easier way to group ad hoc conversations online.

9cays can fill a gap where temporary mailing lists are required where you would normally have the discussion CC’ing a group of people. This way you can manage the list, view the conversation online and expand the list of participants. The service is currently completely free, for more information visit their blog.

  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Friday, March 17th, 2006 at 5:21 pm and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Trackbacks/Pings (Trackback URL)

  1. Go Flock Yourself » Blog Archive » 9cays? We’ll stick with Campfire.

    March 17th, 2006 at 10:37 pm

  2. Raul Vera » Blog Archive » Creando grupos de correo con 9cays

    April 1st, 2006 at 4:49 pm

  3. GetSpot Now » 9Cays start the wave of Group Email

    April 8th, 2006 at 10:37 pm

Comments

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  1. Bill M

    March 17th, 2006 at 5:59 pm

    “9cays makes it simple to start a conversation between a group of people - the conversation can be viewed and managed via their web application.”

    web based instant messaging? How about a screen shot? Sloppy!

  2. Nik Cubrilovic

    March 17th, 2006 at 6:22 pm

    its not instant messaging - its group email management

  3. Pete Yandell

    March 17th, 2006 at 6:25 pm

    What Nik said. If you want a look at an example conversation web page, have a look at http://9cays.com/conversation/aDUojbjHugsb or http://9cays.com/conversation/DDVbbXIbWonl

  4. Mike Rundle

    March 17th, 2006 at 6:28 pm

    9cays huh :) At least they could have nabbed their own number prefix, like 8, or 7, or 10cays lol. Oh well.

  5. Andy

    March 17th, 2006 at 6:41 pm

    What’s wrong with cc’ing people? This looks like a hard-to-market product for an almost non-existant problem. Outlook and the rest of the mail programs are “good enough”.

    Their site is cute though.

  6. Bill M

    March 17th, 2006 at 6:47 pm

    I like the message-in-a-bottle image - it’s good to associate your brand with a communication method that is 99.9999% likely to fail and takes years/decades to complete.

  7. Pete Yandell

    March 17th, 2006 at 7:27 pm

    Andy:

    The problem with CCing people a lot of the time is this:

    Bill e-mails Fred and Mary. Fred decides Bob should be in on the conversation too, so he replies and CCs Bob.

    Mary replies to the first e-mail and Bob misses out on her reply.

    Then Fred doesn’t want to take part anymore, but still keeps getting everybodys’ replies and can’t opt out.

    Later there’s an argument about who said what and who got it, and people have to trawl through badly formatted quotes at the bottom of old e-mails to work out what actually happened.

    So 9cays is good when a) you want to have a group discussion by e-mail but the group is likely to change, or b) when you want a nice permanent record of your e-mail conversation.

    I’d also add that 9cays will, in the future, do a lot more group communication related things. The current conversations service is the tip of the iceberg.

    Mike: The number is a bit arbitrary, but coming up with unique names these days is really tricky.

    Bill: You’ve got a point about the bottle. Even so, we’re quite fond of the logo.

  8. Michael Arrington

    March 17th, 2006 at 7:32 pm

    Pete - love the logo, regardless of the messaging. :-)

  9. Chrono Cr@cker

    March 17th, 2006 at 8:01 pm

    There seriously is nothing new with 9Cays. Unless it incorporates some new and innovative features, I really have no reason to go there.

  10. Joel M.

    March 17th, 2006 at 8:20 pm

    So… 9cays is much like Google groups?

  11. Pete Yandell

    March 17th, 2006 at 8:28 pm

    Joel:

    A 9cays conversation is much more lightweight than something like a Google or Yahoo group. You can think of a 9cays conversation as a mini-group for a one-off discussion.

    The big difference is in setup. Setting up a Google or Yahoo group requires filling out web forms, making decisions about admin and moderation, etc. To start a 9cays conversation, on the other hand, you just e-mail a group of people and CC go@9cays.com, and we do the rest of the work for you. (You have to have signed up to 9cays first: https://9cays.com/signup)

    What you might want to do later is take your little ad hoc 9cays conversation, and turn it into a formal group with a moderator, etc. That’s one of the pieces of the 9cays puzzle that’s yet to be built.

  12. Kenneth Jr

    March 17th, 2006 at 8:32 pm

    “The aim of 9cays…9cays has been in development for 6 months and they are sticking to their philosophy that there should be an easier way to group ad hoc conversations online…In the future 9cays will be adding more functionality…9cays can fill a gap”
    - sounds like all buzz and no sting -

  13. Blaze

    March 17th, 2006 at 11:05 pm

    I like the idea. I think it could work great for business.

    Bill M, good point about the logo haha, but it is nonetheless good and somewhat original.


  14. March 17th, 2006 at 11:45 pm

    I see it that both campfire and 9cays blur the edges of IM, email and web, but from opposite directions. Each filling different needs in the cross over.

  15. Andy

    March 18th, 2006 at 1:36 am

    I see the problem but it’s rarely had me bashing my head against my desk. Maybe it’s an annoyance every now and then.

    So now rather than just having to search my outlook / gmail box I also have to try and remember what threads went on via your site?

    I don’t believe this will work but on the positive side, I’m another fan of your logo. Very cool logo.

  16. Craig Baker

    March 18th, 2006 at 1:41 am

    I like the concept, it’s super simple and it works. But I just can’t help but think, maybe email, the first killer app of the internet, isn’t the best tool for group based conversations.

  17. Saul Weiner

    March 18th, 2006 at 7:52 am

    How do they handle inbox deliverability?

  18. nanek

    March 18th, 2006 at 9:05 am

    Alot like Conversate, no? Skobee does this too, with nice features specifically for making plans.
    http://conversate.org/
    http://skobee.com/

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