On Friday, I moderated a fun panel at the Future of Web Apps conference in Miami (see photo above). The basic premise was to try to come up with a compelling web app in 40 minutes. There were a lot of good ideas, but the best ones centered around communications and how to use technology to get around the frustrations of e-mail and phone calls. It was clear that the panelists think these communication modes that we rely on every day may very well be in the process of breaking down. (CNet’s Caroline McCarthy, who was covering the conference, notes this as well).
A lot of the ideas were about getting around current communications bottlenecks. Leah Culver of Pownce came up with a white pages service that uses SMS text messages to look up phone numbers. Blaine Cook of Twitter suggested creating a call-back service that would, in effect, allow you call companies and put them on hold until a human answered. In other words, you would specify what department you want to speak with at a company, and the software would call and go through the phone tree, and digitally push all the right buttons until it got to a human operator, at which point it would ring your phone. I thought this was brilliant. Update: A service called Bringo actually does exactly this; we covered it last May.
But the app we ended up spending the most time brainstorming was one that Digg’s Kevin Rose dreamed up to help him manage his e-mail. He can’t keep up with it all, and wanted to come up with a way to stop offending people who he never gets back to by sharing some of his e-mail data with them. The concept was a site that keeps stats on your e-mail usage that your friends can check to see how far behind you are in responding to e-mails in general. (”It’s not you, it’s me”).
The stats would show your friends things like how many e-mails you got today, how many you’ve responded to, average response times, etc. When you look at the site, you’d get a deeper view, including alerts on who you are responding to and who you are not (but should be) based on your past e-mail behavior. The way it would know how to prioritize your e-mail would be to figure out your social network based on who you email a lot (similar to what Xobni does for Outlook). It would create alerts like: “Email Mom!” We ended up calling the app Mail Model, per Matt Mullenweg’s suggestion (other name suggestions were Mailr, which is already taken, Mail Stats, and Don’tBeAnEmailJerk.com).
I am not convinced this would actually be a viable service. If I think you are a jerk for not responding to my emails, getting a notice that I am No. 300 in your queue is not going to make me feel any better about you. But I thought the panel was instructive because it points to a problem that is starting to effect everyone, not just Kevin Rose. It’s not just that people are having a hard time keeping up with email. It is that email is having a hard time keeping up with us and our insatiable need for constant communication. If an e-mail falls below the fold, which in my case on Gmail is the last 50 e-mails, it is pretty much lost. And anything more than 48 hours old is a dead conversation.
Why doesn’t email work anymore, and what can be done to fix it?
(Photo via White African)
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It should be on a mobile phone and it should be Nimbuzz http://www.nimbuzz.com/
and I can’t keep up with TechCrunch..
We’ve built something that may help in term of user feedback — which may in turn help with de-cluttering email. We call is UserVoice.com - it enables any company or community to have a feedback tool like this, creating a market around good ideas using suggestions & voting them up.
You can check out UserVoice and request your own page (we’re in semi-private beta) at http://example.uservoice.com
Pretty cool idea but in reality, as you said, it doesn’t seem to be a viable service.
I think most problem don’t need software to solve their email problems, but proper discipline.
Create filters in gmail that auto read and archive and label common emails that don’t need a response.
Create autoresponders letting people know that you love them, but it may not be possible to return their mail. If you run a business create a link to a FAQ which lists common questions people might have.
For people that are very popular this software might be good. I’m sure Mike Arrington gets flooded and Kevin Rose, but these guys are celebrities and I don’t think they reflect the average population.
What’s with the hats?
I’ve been hearing these complaints a lot lately, and not from the usual geek or business crowd. A few of my college friends have complained about information overload, and even my Mom has problems with deciding what emails to respond to first since she merges her business and personal account into one. I think that’s a first step. Make sure you keep your business and personal email accounts not only in different accounts, but in different programs so you can focus on one at a time. The other method I use is to send a short message back to people to tell them I’ll try to respond later. These two methods only help so much though.
The worst for me is my cell phone as I just don’t have the time to talk to friends for 30+ minutes throughout so I’ve gotten the reputation of always letting my phone go to voicemail.
heh, the hats.
they we’re a gift from Carsonified, the group that runs FOWA, not sure of the full background of the hats story though.
Looks like hats are back in again…
The email idea is brilliant, but as people have said it would be incredibly hard to implement. I still think there is a good idea there
When you’re a startup founder, every problem looks like it should be solved by a new application, but that doesn’t mean it’s the right answer.
No matter what email client people are using, few of them use the tools on hand to help manage their in-box. Doesn’t matter if it’s filters, tags, folders, or rules — find out what your mail client can do to help you and set up some process. If Gmail isn’t cutting it for you, push your mail into a real email client via IMAP and use the tools there.
I get well over 100 emails a day in my work account and anything from 20 to 100 in my personal account, so I’m not quite as overwhelmed as some folks, but it can still be a lot of information to process on busy days. However, between keeping the accounts separate and applying a handful of filters and tags, I find it very easy to manage the flow.
two comments:
1) the twitter guy’s idea seemed much more interesting and useful to everybody. why didn’t you spend more time on it? was it because kevin rose is more of a “celebrity” or is there another reason?
2) i have a crush on leah culver.
How about starting to move the public (or Publicly oriented) conversations away from e-mail and into whatever the various social software tools available out there that may be common to both parties exchanging e-mails? I have been doing that at work for the last three weeks and so far it has been working really well. So much so that I am starting to apply the same principles to my non related work e-mails… and have reduced quite considerably the number of e-mails I receive on a daily basis…
Blaine Cook’s “brilliant” idea is already a product (and I think it has at least one competitor). I don’t remember the name but I used it this past summer after reading about it here on TC. I’m not even sure what it would be tagged, but think it was in May or June
Ok, I found it:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007.....l-service/
Michael specifically stated at the end of the post that they needed a mobile version. Not sure if they’ve done that.
We were all given those hats before we took the stage. Forget why, but I ended up giving mine to Matt Marshall for his talk that came next.
@12, we only had 40 minutes, so we had to pick one idea to go with. We let the audience vote. So maybe Kevin did have an advantage there.
And, yes, I am sure all of these ideas exist already in one form or another. That does not mean the problem has been solved.
Do you really want people to know how far down the list they are in your email entourage? Besides if your like me you’ve got a family blog, a personal blog, a twitter account and multiple business related blogs. Give me an app that would allow me to type a blog post and put check mark to each site that it gets published on. That way I only have to manage one upload to multiple locations, I guess you could do the same for email but if you want to get a hold of me then you’ll text me.
bah… i remember when erick first posted about him doing this, i thought.. eh… and i’m still kinda thinking.. eh…
Xobni. Hot inbox organizer of the hour… why should a panel of innovators and a journalist be talking about an inbox related app? (stress *talking about*)
I don’t know… i guess i’d enjoy if it i saw a vid. of it all the same. But it doesn’t make very exciting reading. Especially considering this whole thing was “theoretical” … i dunno.. steve poland used to whip out ideas 10 times better than any of this on a daily basis.. multiple times a day… hehehe. So i dunno. Just as far from interesting as it can get, I think. (Had y’all been think-tanking for an actual startup then that might be interesting… hehehe)
the excitement should be in the process of how a panel of independently innovative super-personalities co-communicate and achieve off one another’s input… but again, this would come out in video but not so much in a post focused on whatever “app” was evenutally “chosen” to be the “fake app” that everyone blogs about…. bollocks. I want the real story Erick…
p.s. I think some of the “real story” is coming to life in the comments… was Blake honestly more ignored than Kevin because of social status? Does this affect real startups who might have very intelligent team members who are overshadowed by a more “celebrated” figure?
Does anyone else find this somewhat telling of how many big companies miss the mark on things sometimes… (look at the original google docs vs. writely for example… stomped, so they gave up and bought the smaller, better.) You have an “uber” panel and the best they come up with is, at best, a Xonbi plugin.
yes, yes, yes.. i use a mac too… i know… no xonbi. still, we are few.
sor for the triple play…
good point erick, 40 minutes… very true.
All the more reason to write up about the dynamics of the conversatios, how ego’s played… etc. For some reason I see a human story wanting to be told here as opposed to focusing on this application that really was never intended to be built (was it?) … the whole thing was about the people, not the app… i dunno… im jsut baffled… im begging erick for more on this one.
Is it a no-no to write more than one story about an event?
agree that email thing is a load of crap, no real person would be using it. My mom gets like 2 emails in her inbox per day. The rest is spam that gets filtered out.
Sure if you are a business owner, you’ll have a big message box, and this might be a good idea for a business. By then again, I don’t think a business wants to let its customers know that they have 300 messages unanswered.
And the whole digg vs twitter thing I agree completely, the amount of sackriding in this industry is appalling. Oh look Kevin freaking Rose came up with an idea, it must be GENIUS!
I’m confused, why is everyone wearing hats?
Why does the picture look like a college stage production of twelve angy men?
the 1950s called and they want their web apps back?
lmfao @ #22 & 12 angry men…. hahaha. that was funny. (though the hats are explained in comments above)
Here’s a simple and efficient way to prioritize your E-mail, SMS, Phone etc.: make people sending messages or calling you PAY you, i.e. re-introduce stamps — even for intra-office communication. If the cost is in the order of a postal stamp, people will eventually give up sending these useless 1 or 2 liner messages that interrupt your workflow all the time.
Maybe we could go one step further and make senders pay for prioritization in your inbox.
Make senders pay for your attention. We need a market economy for it.
Does anyone know if this FOWA panel was recorded / will be available to watch?
Cheers!
Funny, I was *just* talking about such a service about 4 months ago in the office, complete with the queue stats, reminders and everything. I came to the conclusion that the least offensive way to pull it off would be if the sender could get all of that information upon hovering over the recipient’s name in their email program… thus before they actually sent the email. That way, it wouldn’t really be an autoresponder that was giving you the info. It would be more of a pre-warning. The problem is, this implementation would be pretty tough to pull off, as it would require hooks into the e-mail client. Very tough to imagine being able to do that with Outlook, Apple Mail, Gmail, Hotmail, etc simultaneously.
Will there be any videos online?
I would pay to watch or just listen to it since I didn’t go.
I’m all in favour of applications that can help me keep my inbox organized. I’m also highly in favour of any conference where people dress up like Matt Drudge.
As Rob Poitras: there is any videos?
The photo is very pretty!
Re: “call-back service that would, in effect, allow you call companies” that already exists. I called yesterday the power company to get change my service. You first answer some questions, give your name and number and someone calls you back. They even give you an estimated callback time.
man this must of been a boring conference. Heres what i feel, not everybody is as popular as Kevin Rose. I get well over 1000 emails a week just with my real updates to everything i subscribe to and another 10000 in spam but thats all filtered out. How lazy do you have to be to feel that email and your phone is too much work now. what ever happen to getting a assistant, oh let me think Thats putting too much work on somebody else? Create Jobs and Pay well and all your email problems is over. Convert those friend blaster programs into a real organizing email software to be able to send messages back to a group of fans or friends at one time.
#5 - autoresponders? solving the problem of email overload by sending even more email?
cool hats
It’s good validation for Xobni that a group of smart entrepreneurs came up with basically the same idea. I’ve been VP Marketing at Xobni for just a couple months and I can definitely say there is a massive problem out there among mainstream email users. I was attracted to Xobni because it solves a real problem in a massive addressable market. Matt and Adam are visionaries for spotting it before all the big guys got in. We have an opportunity to engage users and really hone our solution based on their needs and feedback. But the big guys will definitely be jumping on this one too (see this Newsweek article http://www.newsweek.com/id/117050).
Was this recorded in video? I want to see this live..
I wrote about this problem recently. Email volumes are just too high for people to process them one by one the way email clients are currently designed. At ClearContext we’ve been working on ways to add structure around the email, contacts, documents, and other information that flows through the system so people can work at a higher level than the individual email message, which simply doesn’t work anymore. More detail on my “inbox and email thesis” at my blog: http://www.emaildashboard.com/.....nd-in.html
I got rid of my mobile phone, and only use Skype. So I am only available via Voice when I want to be “on”, or pre-agreed appointment. I have doing that since 2 years, and it has greatly reduced my stress levels.
I am quite happy with the email load, as I only get 60 a day. Most internal coporate communication happens via instant messaging. So again one can control when one is available or not. It is surprising how quickly people will adapt if not given a choice. The trade-off is that I loose out on people who communicate via impulse. How ever my productivity has increased, and overall more satisfied with not constantly being “available” to every Tom, Dick and Harry.
Cyber celebrities operate on a different plane wrt email, so I don’t know what would be best for them. But the principals of Getting Things Done have helped me keep my inbox consistently below 10 and often 0. The #1 rule being that your email inbox is just an inbox, not a to-do list. The delete key is your friend.
Erick,
(Disclaimer: maybe I’m being too careful, but I’d like to state upfront that the following covers my company and its approach.)
FWIW, we’ve been working on and around this problem for some time and what we’ve discovered is that there are quite a few layers to this. The feedback we’re getting from our customers is that email remains the center of their users’ daily lives but that there needs to be a way to do more with and through email while still keeping it all manageable. So basically what we’ve developed is a way for tying applications which are typically pitched as “email killers” (i.e. collaboration tools) into email. Here’s a video of the pilot we launched last December:
http://kryptiva.com/kcollab1.html
It’s a pilot, so it’s got lots of rough edges and it doesn’t even closely resemble the final product to be released, but it does give a good idea of the intent: add value to the user’s existing email experience by making modern-day collaboration an integral part of email exchanges. As to “how does this alleviate the email pain?” typically, among other things, this approach allows things such as file-sharing therefore avoiding the back-and-forth file change exchanges — that, in fact, is one of the reasons some of these collaboration tools are put forth in the first place. And because of the technical underpinnings, it works the same for users inside and outside your organization (this is the non-trivial technical achievement — ask anyone deploying modern-day collaboration and they’ll tell you the tools’ main problem is just that: federation.)
Here’s some coverage we got for the pilot:
http://www.enterprise2blog.com/?p=479
http://www.networkworld.com/ne.....tlook.html
If Techcrunch is interested, I could arrange for providing a certain number of invites for the product launch. Drop me an email (I’m assuming you can retrieve the “Mail” field from this post which is marked as “will not be published”.)
Best,
Karim Yaghmour
Founder and CEO
Kryptiva inc.
well I took the idea and had a tech demo up and running in about an hour using an adobe Air App and webbased .net app not sure if I can be arsed to do anything with it because It’s kinda useless :p
There are services that cut significantly on your email inspecific cases. For example http://www.TimeBridge.com helps you schedule meetings with very little emails, even with a large group of people. Or some of the 37signals stuff. The weird named IWantSandyends up doing the opposite - more emails!
Wow those hats are stupid looking.
that pic kind of looks like the last supper of web 2.0
Mike wrote about a phone tree killing service a while back. Although I assume it doesn’t keep you from having to wait on hold once you get through the tree.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007.....l-service/
I think the real question - is what’s up with all those 1950’s hats.
I have to agree with commenter 31.) Uway. The Virtual Assistant industry is booming. There are plenty of qualified, reliable and hard working VAs who can assist you with your information overload. No need for hiring an administrative assistant on staff. VAs are independent contractors. No need for additional office space. VAs work from their site. Come on give us little folks an opportunity. http://www.ivaa.org
Oh wait. This was the Future of Web Apps conference. Virtual Assistants need a web application that puts their email at the top of their client’s email inbox. The subject line must be bold. The client must not be able to open any other email until the Virtual Assistant’s email has been responded to.
Those are Ryan’s signature style hats so we made a few for him and his Carsonified team as a gift. Here is the story about the hats:
http://blog.youdesignit.com/20.....-the-hats/
“The stats would show your friends things like how many e-mails you got today, how many you’ve responded to, average response times, etc.”
This is exactly what Xobni does, if you check out the analytics. What you’re describing sounds like Xobni, Online Edition.
… my previous post seems to be stuck in the “Your comment is awaiting moderation” queue for some time, so here’s a shorter version in case length was an issue:
We’ve taken a stab at taking email to a whole new level by using it (as in namespace, transport and platform) as a launchpad for some modern-day collaboration tools such as file-sharing, application sharing and IM. Here’s s a short video demo of a very rough pilot we released last December:
http://www.kryptiva.com/kcollab1.html
If techcrunch is interested we could arrange for providing limited invites to TC readers on final release.
Keep an eye out for http://visualdial.com, a new startup focused on a few things, among them, solving the problem of navigating through phone trees and, better yet, navigating them before the call is even made! They want to shift the balance of IVR power to the end-user. Exciting stuff!