8 ms·

Don't fix email. Fix communication. Why, on my iPhone, do I have: 1. An email app (which required a major update to unite mail boxes) 2. A "messages" app (wh

Don't fix email. Fix communication. Why, on my iPhone, do I have: 1. An email app (which required a major update to unite mail boxes) 2. A "messages" app (which abstracts out two different message systems) 3. A phone app 4. A contacts app 5. Twitter 6. Facebook 7. Skype What I want to do is (a) send messages to people (I don't care how), (b) check messages I've received (from anyone, using any method), (c) manage my messages (both incoming and outgoing), and -- as the writer of the article points out -- (d) manage my attachments. On the iPhone (which is by no means the worst case) I might end up doing something stupid like looking up a contact, phone them, get sent to voicemail. Go back to the contact. Use a slightly different path to send an SMS. Discover it doesn't get sent. Switch to mail, and send a message. Meanwhile the recipient gets a missed call, an empty voicemail, eventually gets the SMS, and then receives an email -- in three different apps on their iPhone. Tiny incremental improvements to email will only nibble at the edges of the larger problem. Let me communicate with a unified UI and unified contacts.

ineedtosleep 14y ago
> Tiny incremental improvements to email will only nibble at the edges of the larger problem. Let me communicate with a unified UI and unified contacts. Isn't that Google's main intent with integrating Google Voice onto phones? The recipient use case seems to work well under the Google apps where Google Voice shows your SMS and voicemails, a quick click would bring you to Gmail. The only issue I see here, is that I that I don't believe there is a cross-app indicator of new email (excluding extensions and external apps).
- simantel 14y ago
  I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "a cross-app indicator of new email," but you can actually have voicemails and SMS forwarded to your email from Google Voice, creating a sort of "universal inbox."
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
jyou 14y ago
this is great point!
untog 14y ago
I realise that this may sound like I'm descending into fanboyism, but this is actually something that annoys me about iOS- it's far, far too app-centric. Take Windows Phone for example: tap a contact in WP and you see their tweets, Facebook messages, your SMS and e-mail history with them. The messages app integrates SMS and Live chat seamlessly. Ideally this system would open up to allow any third party to plug into these hubs (and from the early signs of WP8, it will), but it's still already lightyears ahead of Apple's offering. Even Android, with it's system of intents and actions, provides more integration than iOS. I'm baffled as to why they've not tried to do anything about this.
- smacktoward 14y ago
  Yeah, even webOS made a creditable stab in this direction. And that was what, three years ago?
  - Zash 14y ago
    Maemo on the N900 is pretty great too.
    - dave1010uk 14y ago
      To expand on this, Maemo had a "Conversations" application that you could add accounts to. Out of the box I believe it did SMS, Skype and Google Talk. There were plugins available for third party services like Twitter, Facebook, MSN, Jabber, etc.
- nagnatron 14y ago
  I love this feature and is one of the main reasons I use a windows phone.
- r00fus 14y ago
  As someone who has dealt with integrating and synchronizing data and accounts nearly my entire career, I can tell you this whole area is still in "there be dragons here" territory. Here's a recent example of stuff Google did - merged my G+ circles into my contacts - ok, I can see how that'd be useful... but old or invalid email address for my mom and wife were substituted as first hits on the search when I entered the contacts in Gmail. Consequently, I've sent quite a few emails in the past few days where I'm getting bounces. That's assuming you don't have to deal with improperly overwritten data, or time-sensitive data (ie, temporary details). Any degree of asynchronicity can create intolerable delays for example. Abstractions can only get so far, especially for distributed synchronization across potentially adversarial vendors/systems.
kristiandupont 14y ago
I don't think I would want that. It sounds great in theory but in practice, there is a reason why I am on all those different channels. They reason is that they are different, even if that difference is subtle.
dmlorenzetti 14y ago
How will initiating a phone call through the same interface as writing an e-mail solve these problems? You phone somebody and don't leave a message, so they get an empty voicemail. How can the interface on your device possibly solve that problem? (By the way, I have a $30 answering machine at home that's smart enough to not record empty messages, and for day-to-day use its interface is a button for "play" and a button for "delete". The interface is not the problem.) Then you send an SMS and immediately turn around and send an e-mail as well. How will a user interface prevent the person from getting both the message and the e-mail?
blhack 14y ago
<snark> In my kitchen I have: 1. A fridge 2. A coffee machine 3. A stove 4. A microwave 5. A blender 6. Mixing bowls 7. Measuring cups All I want to do is feed myself. Why on earth do I need to have so many different things to do it? </snark> To...most people, having a separate "app" for things that do wildly different things is a good. Skype and email fill completely different roles to me, and I suspect they fill completely different roles to other people as well. You might want to send a message to somebody and not care how, but I do care how. If it's late, I might send my friend an email instead of an SMS because I know that the SMS will probably wake her up, and the email won't. Being able to control this is a good thing. Did you notice the descention of immediacy in your example of phone->sms->email? You went from the most demanding contact method "stop what you are doing and talk to me!" to the middle "stop what you are doing and read these 160 characters!" to the least "eventually look at this piece of text". If you didn't care as much about your message, you probably would have done this in a different order. If something major in my life happened (I'm having a baby! I'm going back to school! I got into YC! Somebody is buying one of my projects!), I would call my best friends to tell them, I wouldn't SMS them. So would you. And this is good.
- koenigdavidmj 14y ago
  > If it's late, I might send my friend an email instead of an SMS because I know that the SMS will probably wake her up, and the email won't. That should be up to the other end to determine. I should not need to say `SMS wakes me up, email doesn't' when they are fundamentally the same thing. That's an implementation detail. The right way to do this is for the other person to be able to tell the phone what they want, regardless of protocol: messages from my Nagios system at work, or family members, should awaken me. Anything else should be ignored until morning.
  - blhack 14y ago
    Sometimes I do want my friends to wake me up in the middle of the night: "I'm drunk, I need a ride home." "Can I stay at your house." "$emergency" "Hey, I really just need somebody to talk to..." etc. etc. I don't want to have to go through my entire contact list, individually setting people who can and can't wake me up at night. There is already a mechanism for this, it's called "human interaction". My friends know who can and can't wake me up; they know this because they're my friends. By giving them my phone number, I'm trusting them to respect that, and only wake me up if they need to.
darklajid 14y ago
I don't want to turn this into a (mobile) OS war. And my favorite is dead anyway.. That said, did you ever see the way WebOS handle[sd] this cases? The 'synergy' thingy was solving a lot of the friction points you're complaining about - and yet it obviously wasn't good enough to save the platform.
- msie 14y ago
  Some ideas: - Sometimes we come up with solutions for problems that people don't have. - Not well-marketed enough. - Too complicated for people to grok. The abstractions get in the way of people trying to understand a feature. A new paradigm for communication would be hard to understand for most people and provide little benefit.
Timothee 14y ago
"2. A "messages" app (which abstracts out two different message systems)" Is the abstraction a plus or a minus in your opinion? I'm asking because on one hand you're asking for a unified communication app, but on the other, the way you wrote that part, it sounds like a bad thing. Taking this specific example, I think it shows that aggregating communication media is difficult and maybe not a good thing. In Messages, SMS and what is pretty much IM is mixed and I don't know which is which anymore. I do find the idea of a unified inbox interesting and worthy of being explored but the thing is that each of these have different expectations from the users. If I send an SMS, it's typically because I expect a response fairly quickly: pretty similar to IM, except that I want to reach the person right now wherever they are. An email has a longer reply timeframe: if I don't hear back for a few days, it's usually fine. A tweet or Facebook status doesn't have the expectation to be read by everyone. (because it's one-to-many) And I think the expectations go both ways: when someone receives an SMS vs. an email, they know the time to reply is different. There are also different expectations in terms of half-life of the content. SMSs are sent and forgotten for the most part, while emails are archived for years. (though it's probably true that these archives are most likely not as useful/consulted as we'd think) So I do care how I send my messages to people.
- pvidler 14y ago
  Even the messages app is almost too confusing, let alone combining everything else as well. As far as I understand it, if I send an SMS then anyone with a signal can get it; if I send an iMessage, then they need an internet connection or it won't go through -- is that right? If so, it's a pain to mix them up, as many areas do not get good 3G coverage (especially indoors) but excellent phone signal. Surprisingly few of the people I text have iPhones (or smartphones at all), so I can't easily verify this.
  - cdcarter 14y ago
    Messages will send as an SMS if the iMessage isn't delivered in a reasonably short amount of time.
    - 14y ago
tammer 14y ago
You must have felt the same way I did about the original Google Wave announcement. So much potential squandered by a poor design team. I've always hoped some developers would turn the code into what it was meant to be.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
deveac 14y ago
The problem is that you are trying to corral a massive set of different technologies and platforms into a unified 'god UI'. This already exists to a large extent on my iPhone as far as sending outbound messages. I don't know about you, but when I want to email/call/sms/mms/videochat etc say, my father, I don't goto those apps. I just hit the 'home' button on my phone to bring up unified search, type 'dad' and get his contact page allowing me to instantly choose any one of those options to message him. Email, short message, video, phone call, -it's all right there. If you wanted to take it to the next level, you'd want to be able to open up the API so you could toss in Fb, Twitter, or whatever other services you want on that page to choose from. The unified UI is basically there already though. It gets harder when we talk about incoming messages though, because we've got different senders pushing different types of messages to us on a vast array of different platforms and technologies. But isn't this what 'notification centers' are? A single point that unifies and corrals your collection of different incoming messages? And now Apple is merging their iOS notifications with OSX, syncing through the cloud. I agree it's not pretty yet, but we are getting closer, -like I said, I strictly use a unified message UI for sending outbound messages for most of my day. I think this merging of central messaging UIs that are synced across operating systems will become more refined (so much room for improvement), but will definitely get there. But at the end of the day we're still funneling data from a wide range of different apps in order to present it as best we can keeping both form and function in mind.
toyg 14y ago
That's actually what Maemo5/Harmattan had on my N900: all contacts and conversations across different media were nicely integrated through the Telepathy framework. It was probably the best app on the platform, although it took ages to develop and wasn't very easy to extend.
justauser 14y ago
As a business owner, I can't think of anything worse than trying to maintain an archival system for a bloated platform that would combine all of that together. I do however think that interoperability needs to be improved. Sounds like this would be a great time for a rewrite of the UNIX Finger tool to solve a problem like this. Real-time client/address lookup and can be protected with some kind of pub/private key.
- podperson 14y ago
  Right now, all of it is ending up in email anyway, except for SMS (maybe -- googlevoice can route your SMS to email). So you get the disadvantages of archiving all that crap (which actually turns out not to be that bad -- my gmail acct is only half full, and it even has wordpress database backups routed into it) without the advantages. (Surely writing a rule to automatically throw away old voicemails, say, is pretty easy.)
drivingmenuts 14y ago
The One Big App To Solve All Problems is the wrong way to go, in my opinion. From a coding standpoint, it's a maintenance nightmare. From a UI standpoint, it's nearly impossible to create something that is both easy to use and comprehensively granular. From a user standpoint, it's confusing as hell when that "one thing" doesn't work like it's supposed to. Yeah, you're right in the sense of why do we need all this stuff? The answer is: because no one uses just one thing to communicate. On a slightly different note: if someone messages you and is expecting a response, do you really need to try three or four different methods to send that response? Shouldn't the expectation be that you would send a response back by the method that they made the request?
mikeleeorg 14y ago
Threadsy might have solved much of what you're looking for; unfortunately, they shut down. http://news.cnet.com/8301-33200_3-57354466-290/threadsys-gone-but-im-still-searching-for-a-universal-in-box/ http://news.cnet.com/8301-33200_3-57354466-290/threadsys-gon... I would love to see someone else try to build this. Filtering options would need to be robust and flexible to combat potential noise and info overload. I could see marketers being an easy initial niche customer. General consumers, not so much. But I'd sure pay for something like this.
Aloisius 14y ago
Context matters in communication. Each of those platforms has vastly different expectations of the speed of the response. By unifying it all, what you've essentially done is made me wade through every message as if they actually had the same importance and priority to me. They don't. Now certainly some things can be unified, but let's not pretend like every form of communication is equal just because in the end, a message is delivered to the intended recipient.
cheez 14y ago
Windows phone does this. It collects everything into one place.
drzaiusapelord 14y ago
So in other words lets go back to big monolithic software suites controlled by one entity. I can't imagine a faster way to kill innovation and go back to the bad old days of things like the Mozilla Seamonkey Suite (its a browser, its an email program, its a html editor, and it sucks at all 3). Firefox stole that crown for a reason. Seperate apps all competing for your attention/dollars is a feature not a bug.
mst 14y ago
The unification of all my different messaging types (well, SMS, IM, twitter, skype etc.) is precisely why I'm still using an N900 - there's lots of other things it doesn't do brilliantly, but it does this specific thing way nicr than anything else I've used on a phone.
Shorel 14y ago
Google Wave tried to do all that and failed.
fgd 14y ago
What if I told you that a few smart people at http://vox.io http://vox.io are already on your case? :)

ineedtosleep 14y ago

> Tiny incremental improvements to email will only nibble at the edges of the larger problem. Let me communicate with a unified UI and unified contacts. Isn't that Google's main intent with integrating Google Voice onto phones? The recipient use case seems to work well under the Google apps where Google Voice shows your SMS and voicemails, a quick click would bring you to Gmail. The only issue I see here, is that I that I don't believe there is a cross-app indicator of new email (excluding extensions and external apps).

simantel 14y ago
I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "a cross-app indicator of new email," but you can actually have voicemails and SMS forwarded to your email from Google Voice, creating a sort of "universal inbox."

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

jyou 14y ago

this is great point!

untog 14y ago

I realise that this may sound like I'm descending into fanboyism, but this is actually something that annoys me about iOS- it's far, far too app-centric. Take Windows Phone for example: tap a contact in WP and you see their tweets, Facebook messages, your SMS and e-mail history with them. The messages app integrates SMS and Live chat seamlessly. Ideally this system would open up to allow any third party to plug into these hubs (and from the early signs of WP8, it will), but it's still already lightyears ahead of Apple's offering. Even Android, with it's system of intents and actions, provides more integration than iOS. I'm baffled as to why they've not tried to do anything about this.

smacktoward 14y ago
Yeah, even webOS made a creditable stab in this direction. And that was what, three years ago?
- Zash 14y ago
  Maemo on the N900 is pretty great too.
  - dave1010uk 14y ago
    To expand on this, Maemo had a "Conversations" application that you could add accounts to. Out of the box I believe it did SMS, Skype and Google Talk. There were plugins available for third party services like Twitter, Facebook, MSN, Jabber, etc.
nagnatron 14y ago
I love this feature and is one of the main reasons I use a windows phone.
r00fus 14y ago
As someone who has dealt with integrating and synchronizing data and accounts nearly my entire career, I can tell you this whole area is still in "there be dragons here" territory. Here's a recent example of stuff Google did - merged my G+ circles into my contacts - ok, I can see how that'd be useful... but old or invalid email address for my mom and wife were substituted as first hits on the search when I entered the contacts in Gmail. Consequently, I've sent quite a few emails in the past few days where I'm getting bounces. That's assuming you don't have to deal with improperly overwritten data, or time-sensitive data (ie, temporary details). Any degree of asynchronicity can create intolerable delays for example. Abstractions can only get so far, especially for distributed synchronization across potentially adversarial vendors/systems.

kristiandupont 14y ago

I don't think I would want that. It sounds great in theory but in practice, there is a reason why I am on all those different channels. They reason is that they are different, even if that difference is subtle.

dmlorenzetti 14y ago

How will initiating a phone call through the same interface as writing an e-mail solve these problems? You phone somebody and don't leave a message, so they get an empty voicemail. How can the interface on your device possibly solve that problem? (By the way, I have a $30 answering machine at home that's smart enough to not record empty messages, and for day-to-day use its interface is a button for "play" and a button for "delete". The interface is not the problem.) Then you send an SMS and immediately turn around and send an e-mail as well. How will a user interface prevent the person from getting both the message and the e-mail?

blhack 14y ago

<snark> In my kitchen I have: 1. A fridge 2. A coffee machine 3. A stove 4. A microwave 5. A blender 6. Mixing bowls 7. Measuring cups All I want to do is feed myself. Why on earth do I need to have so many different things to do it? </snark> To...most people, having a separate "app" for things that do wildly different things is a good. Skype and email fill completely different roles to me, and I suspect they fill completely different roles to other people as well. You might want to send a message to somebody and not care how, but I do care how. If it's late, I might send my friend an email instead of an SMS because I know that the SMS will probably wake her up, and the email won't. Being able to control this is a good thing. Did you notice the descention of immediacy in your example of phone->sms->email? You went from the most demanding contact method "stop what you are doing and talk to me!" to the middle "stop what you are doing and read these 160 characters!" to the least "eventually look at this piece of text". If you didn't care as much about your message, you probably would have done this in a different order. If something major in my life happened (I'm having a baby! I'm going back to school! I got into YC! Somebody is buying one of my projects!), I would call my best friends to tell them, I wouldn't SMS them. So would you. And this is good.

koenigdavidmj 14y ago
> If it's late, I might send my friend an email instead of an SMS because I know that the SMS will probably wake her up, and the email won't. That should be up to the other end to determine. I should not need to say `SMS wakes me up, email doesn't' when they are fundamentally the same thing. That's an implementation detail. The right way to do this is for the other person to be able to tell the phone what they want, regardless of protocol: messages from my Nagios system at work, or family members, should awaken me. Anything else should be ignored until morning.
- blhack 14y ago
  Sometimes I do want my friends to wake me up in the middle of the night: "I'm drunk, I need a ride home." "Can I stay at your house." "$emergency" "Hey, I really just need somebody to talk to..." etc. etc. I don't want to have to go through my entire contact list, individually setting people who can and can't wake me up at night. There is already a mechanism for this, it's called "human interaction". My friends know who can and can't wake me up; they know this because they're my friends. By giving them my phone number, I'm trusting them to respect that, and only wake me up if they need to.

darklajid 14y ago

I don't want to turn this into a (mobile) OS war. And my favorite is dead anyway.. That said, did you ever see the way WebOS handle[sd] this cases? The 'synergy' thingy was solving a lot of the friction points you're complaining about - and yet it obviously wasn't good enough to save the platform.

msie 14y ago
Some ideas: - Sometimes we come up with solutions for problems that people don't have. - Not well-marketed enough. - Too complicated for people to grok. The abstractions get in the way of people trying to understand a feature. A new paradigm for communication would be hard to understand for most people and provide little benefit.

Timothee 14y ago

"2. A "messages" app (which abstracts out two different message systems)" Is the abstraction a plus or a minus in your opinion? I'm asking because on one hand you're asking for a unified communication app, but on the other, the way you wrote that part, it sounds like a bad thing. Taking this specific example, I think it shows that aggregating communication media is difficult and maybe not a good thing. In Messages, SMS and what is pretty much IM is mixed and I don't know which is which anymore. I do find the idea of a unified inbox interesting and worthy of being explored but the thing is that each of these have different expectations from the users. If I send an SMS, it's typically because I expect a response fairly quickly: pretty similar to IM, except that I want to reach the person right now wherever they are. An email has a longer reply timeframe: if I don't hear back for a few days, it's usually fine. A tweet or Facebook status doesn't have the expectation to be read by everyone. (because it's one-to-many) And I think the expectations go both ways: when someone receives an SMS vs. an email, they know the time to reply is different. There are also different expectations in terms of half-life of the content. SMSs are sent and forgotten for the most part, while emails are archived for years. (though it's probably true that these archives are most likely not as useful/consulted as we'd think) So I do care how I send my messages to people.

pvidler 14y ago
Even the messages app is almost too confusing, let alone combining everything else as well. As far as I understand it, if I send an SMS then anyone with a signal can get it; if I send an iMessage, then they need an internet connection or it won't go through -- is that right? If so, it's a pain to mix them up, as many areas do not get good 3G coverage (especially indoors) but excellent phone signal. Surprisingly few of the people I text have iPhones (or smartphones at all), so I can't easily verify this.
- cdcarter 14y ago
  Messages will send as an SMS if the iMessage isn't delivered in a reasonably short amount of time.
  - 14y ago

tammer 14y ago

You must have felt the same way I did about the original Google Wave announcement. So much potential squandered by a poor design team. I've always hoped some developers would turn the code into what it was meant to be.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

deveac 14y ago

The problem is that you are trying to corral a massive set of different technologies and platforms into a unified 'god UI'. This already exists to a large extent on my iPhone as far as sending outbound messages. I don't know about you, but when I want to email/call/sms/mms/videochat etc say, my father, I don't goto those apps. I just hit the 'home' button on my phone to bring up unified search, type 'dad' and get his contact page allowing me to instantly choose any one of those options to message him. Email, short message, video, phone call, -it's all right there. If you wanted to take it to the next level, you'd want to be able to open up the API so you could toss in Fb, Twitter, or whatever other services you want on that page to choose from. The unified UI is basically there already though. It gets harder when we talk about incoming messages though, because we've got different senders pushing different types of messages to us on a vast array of different platforms and technologies. But isn't this what 'notification centers' are? A single point that unifies and corrals your collection of different incoming messages? And now Apple is merging their iOS notifications with OSX, syncing through the cloud. I agree it's not pretty yet, but we are getting closer, -like I said, I strictly use a unified message UI for sending outbound messages for most of my day. I think this merging of central messaging UIs that are synced across operating systems will become more refined (so much room for improvement), but will definitely get there. But at the end of the day we're still funneling data from a wide range of different apps in order to present it as best we can keeping both form and function in mind.

toyg 14y ago

That's actually what Maemo5/Harmattan had on my N900: all contacts and conversations across different media were nicely integrated through the Telepathy framework. It was probably the best app on the platform, although it took ages to develop and wasn't very easy to extend.

justauser 14y ago

As a business owner, I can't think of anything worse than trying to maintain an archival system for a bloated platform that would combine all of that together. I do however think that interoperability needs to be improved. Sounds like this would be a great time for a rewrite of the UNIX Finger tool to solve a problem like this. Real-time client/address lookup and can be protected with some kind of pub/private key.

podperson 14y ago
Right now, all of it is ending up in email anyway, except for SMS (maybe -- googlevoice can route your SMS to email). So you get the disadvantages of archiving all that crap (which actually turns out not to be that bad -- my gmail acct is only half full, and it even has wordpress database backups routed into it) without the advantages. (Surely writing a rule to automatically throw away old voicemails, say, is pretty easy.)

drivingmenuts 14y ago

The One Big App To Solve All Problems is the wrong way to go, in my opinion. From a coding standpoint, it's a maintenance nightmare. From a UI standpoint, it's nearly impossible to create something that is both easy to use and comprehensively granular. From a user standpoint, it's confusing as hell when that "one thing" doesn't work like it's supposed to. Yeah, you're right in the sense of why do we need all this stuff? The answer is: because no one uses just one thing to communicate. On a slightly different note: if someone messages you and is expecting a response, do you really need to try three or four different methods to send that response? Shouldn't the expectation be that you would send a response back by the method that they made the request?

mikeleeorg 14y ago

Threadsy might have solved much of what you're looking for; unfortunately, they shut down. http://news.cnet.com/8301-33200_3-57354466-290/threadsys-gone-but-im-still-searching-for-a-universal-in-box/ http://news.cnet.com/8301-33200_3-57354466-290/threadsys-gon... I would love to see someone else try to build this. Filtering options would need to be robust and flexible to combat potential noise and info overload. I could see marketers being an easy initial niche customer. General consumers, not so much. But I'd sure pay for something like this.

Aloisius 14y ago

Context matters in communication. Each of those platforms has vastly different expectations of the speed of the response. By unifying it all, what you've essentially done is made me wade through every message as if they actually had the same importance and priority to me. They don't. Now certainly some things can be unified, but let's not pretend like every form of communication is equal just because in the end, a message is delivered to the intended recipient.

cheez 14y ago

Windows phone does this. It collects everything into one place.

drzaiusapelord 14y ago

So in other words lets go back to big monolithic software suites controlled by one entity. I can't imagine a faster way to kill innovation and go back to the bad old days of things like the Mozilla Seamonkey Suite (its a browser, its an email program, its a html editor, and it sucks at all 3). Firefox stole that crown for a reason. Seperate apps all competing for your attention/dollars is a feature not a bug.

mst 14y ago

The unification of all my different messaging types (well, SMS, IM, twitter, skype etc.) is precisely why I'm still using an N900 - there's lots of other things it doesn't do brilliantly, but it does this specific thing way nicr than anything else I've used on a phone.

Shorel 14y ago

Google Wave tried to do all that and failed.

fgd 14y ago

What if I told you that a few smart people at http://vox.io http://vox.io are already on your case? :)