Ciao!
After spending a few months kicking it hard in our crib (SF Mission District), we're back and will soon be rolling out our early Inbox 2.0 private beta program. If you live in Gmail and want to check out our sweet new Gmail plugin, request an invite here.
In early October, Rob (#9) jumped on the team, rounding out the core set of skills we needed to properly tackle the problem of building the Inbox 2.0. Soon after, we asked about 200 of our friends and family to trial an alpha of our new inbox interface on our Xoopit.com web site. Fueled by Ritual Roasters Coffee, Priya's organic raw food, keyboard synthesizers, and a whole lot of amazing feedback from our fans, we've built Xoopit into three new form factors, including our soon-to-be released Gmail plugin.
During our trials, we gained a few key insights which have influenced our product thinking:
1. People really do create and experience their lives using email as their tool-of-choice. Email also serves as a filter to the web for many.
2. The inbox has become a dark, dreary place of overwork and maintenance, HOWEVER, the inbox does have a soul. Really. In fact, your feedback mails have been chock full of examples guiding us on how to bring back the funk to email. Please keep the feedback coming!!!!!!!
3. Building the Inbox 2.0 requires a tremendous amount of compute power to process all the messages, files, images, people, and links sardined inside mail. Xoopit has invented a novel email and web indexing architecture similar to a web search engine to support our compute, index, data mining, and fetching needs. We're calling our platform a "personal search engine" and it goes further than traditional desktop search engines, webmail search, or your everyday RSS aggregation tool.
Over the coming weeks we will be refining two critical sub-systems to help us scale to demands of a real Inbox 2.0 application:
1. Fast front end technologies.
2. Rapid processing of the inbox and mail archives.
As you may know, the inbox is a whole world unto itself. We don't expect to get the user experience right the first time, so we have set ourselves up to measure activity and rapidly iterate on the Inbox 2.0 interface.
We are committed to making it FUN and FAST to explore your life as it unfolds inside the inbox.
ACHTUNG! If you are a hard core internet systems engineer with experience in email, indexing, data mining, file systems OR a web application developer passionate about designing and building rich media applications, we would love to meet you. (email: team@xoopit.com). Building the Inbox 2.0 touches every aspect of internet life and we are looking for a few stellar team mates to take on weaving Xoopit into the fabric of the Internet.
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