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They are advancing the concept of 'conversations' that Gmail introduced in an interesting direction. Basically, the second tab at the top is the Gmail conversat
by Derbasti 15y ago
They are advancing the concept of 'conversations' that Gmail introduced in an interesting direction. Basically, the second tab at the top is the Gmail conversation view. This view collects emails by topic, which makes it behave more like a threaded discussion board in a way.
The interesting part is the first tab though, the 'people' view. They seem to go for an IM-style persistent conversation log between a fixed set of people. That is quite an interesting way of looking at conversations, pushing email further from the original 'digital letter' towards shorter, more transient messages. Basically, it tries to make email behave more like a persistent IM chat.
I find it interesting how the email protocol gets pushed more and more in the background and applications implement their own interfaces on top of it. Email seems to evolve from the definite way of sending stuff over the internet towards just one other communication protocol that is more or less on equal footing with, say, Jabber, or Facebook, or maybe even Twitter.
What with Facebook integrating email into its site and Google dumping IM chat logs in your Gmail inbox, there is even some sort of cross-protocol talk. This gets even more obvious with Facebook or Google+ or Twitter sending you emails whenever you receive messages on their platform. Now if you could reply to these emails and the platform would 'do the right thing', this would actually implement email as a ubiquitous interface to all of these services.
Interesting times!
- jorangreef 15y agoThe concept screenshots have been designed using data that displays well in an IM-style conversation log, but how would it work for traditionally formatted email (e.g. Dear, regards, long signature, messy disclaimer, quoted text, html newsletters)? That is where the sender has one idea of how email should look like, and the receiver has another?
- Derbasti 15y agoI would guess that just like in Gmail, quoted texts get collapsed, signatures get faded. Basically, Gmail works, too, so this is probably a solved problem. And personally, I think the world would be a better place without disclaimers anyway, so they might as well delete them outright. But maybe that is just me.
- a3_nm 15y agoGmail did not introduce 'conversations'. Threaded email clients have been around since forever.
- Derbasti 15y agoTrue, threading precedes conversations. But threading is not the same thing as Gmail-style conversations. If you have a two messages that belong to one thread but that you put in two different folders, a thread-aware email client will still only show one message when you view it. In a conversion-based email program however, there exists no such thing as an individual message. There are only whole conversations. When you view a 'single message', you always see the whole conversation regardless of the 'folder' it resides in. Basically, it always collects all the messages that belong to a thread even if you look at one single lonely message sitting in your inbox. Persona seems to go a step further and not only collect threads into conversations, but also collect all conversations between a set of people into people-streams.
- a3_nm 15y agoOkay. I understand what you meant now. I see this mostly as a consequence of tagging: since all the messages are in the same store, it makes sense to get messages from the same thread no matter the choice of tags you're viewing. I think it's true that Gmail was the first to do that. [By the way, people are still busy porting these features back to native clients for power users. See http://sup.rubyforge.org/ http://sup.rubyforge.org/ and http://notmuchmail.org/. http://notmuchmail.org/.]