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One thing I noticed is that email is a problem for "important" people who receive tons of messages per day. They must read/answer that one vital email right awa

by diego 15y ago

One thing I noticed is that email is a problem for "important" people who receive tons of messages per day. They must read/answer that one vital email right away. Kevin Rose talked about this a few years ago, and I've heard many high-profile investors complaining about this. For the vast majority of the people on the planet, GMail is just good enough. Yahoo Mail and Hotmail are still doing well. Perhaps email is perceived as a problem just because it gets tons of "face time" with us every day. I'd leave it alone and focus on one of the countless unsolved problems in the world.

politician 15y ago
Perhaps, but as Bentley and Gulfstream discovered, there is a tidy profit to be made servicing the niche needs of high-profile individuals.
- dminor 15y ago
  Undoubtedly, but tidy profit and frighteningly ambitious are two different things.
duck 15y ago
GMail is just good enough It is, but only in terms of what we think of email in today's usage. I think the next step will be where you can make the messages dynamic which would basically allow you to receive/deliver an interface to an app. Of course with all that power comes the issue of how to control it, but that would be an interesting problem to solve. Imagine instead of getting a notification email for an update on a Basecamp todo list, you would see the actual todo list and could manage right from your inbox.
- mgkimsal 15y ago
  for some reason, shades of two-way-rss hype just came flooding back from 2006.
  - Agathos 15y ago
    I thought of 2009, when Google Wave was announced.
- icebraining 15y ago
  The only reason you can't do that already is because email clients prohibit it for security reasons, and Hotmail is already experimenting with emails that allow that within a sandbox. Emails can send HTML and JS, there's nothing innovative about it. You only need to convince developers to add JavaScript sandboxes to their email clients.
- miguelos 15y ago
  That's exactly what my future start-up will do! Is anyone interested in making it happen?
stingrae 15y ago
People are like sheep. If you get the "important" people to use it, you have most certainly will have a large user base of "regular" people

by diego 15y ago

politician 15y ago

Perhaps, but as Bentley and Gulfstream discovered, there is a tidy profit to be made servicing the niche needs of high-profile individuals.

dminor 15y ago
Undoubtedly, but tidy profit and frighteningly ambitious are two different things.

duck 15y ago

GMail is just good enough It is, but only in terms of what we think of email in today's usage. I think the next step will be where you can make the messages dynamic which would basically allow you to receive/deliver an interface to an app. Of course with all that power comes the issue of how to control it, but that would be an interesting problem to solve. Imagine instead of getting a notification email for an update on a Basecamp todo list, you would see the actual todo list and could manage right from your inbox.

mgkimsal 15y ago
for some reason, shades of two-way-rss hype just came flooding back from 2006.
- Agathos 15y ago
  I thought of 2009, when Google Wave was announced.
icebraining 15y ago
The only reason you can't do that already is because email clients prohibit it for security reasons, and Hotmail is already experimenting with emails that allow that within a sandbox. Emails can send HTML and JS, there's nothing innovative about it. You only need to convince developers to add JavaScript sandboxes to their email clients.
miguelos 15y ago
That's exactly what my future start-up will do! Is anyone interested in making it happen?

stingrae 15y ago

People are like sheep. If you get the "important" people to use it, you have most certainly will have a large user base of "regular" people