A few of us from Xoopit went to Google I/O this week. Google is wooing developers and doing an excellent job at it. However, one big piece of the puzzle is missing.
Marissa Meyer talked about how to take everyday experiences and turn them from ordinary to extraordinary. For many people, the most everyday experience is plowing through their email inbox. The still open question for Google: how do they take Gmail and turn it into a thriving platform?
We are big believers in building interesting applications on webmail. You can already see this on Gmail with Xoopit, Remember The Milk, GTDInbox, TripIt and others. To properly turn email into a platform you need to consider how to properly grant access to email data (e.g. using OAuth or similar), give access to contacts, expose generic UI (e.g. OpenSocial containers) and finally provide access to the unique parts of webmail (inbox, read message, compose message and search).
At Xoopit we do a lot of heavy lifting to understand what parts of webmail as a platform users will find interesting. We’ll be reporting more of our findings on this on our blog over time. And we’re looking forward to working with all the webmail providers to advance the state of the art. Stay tuned!
Love this post. I've long been an advocate for building functionality on top of email and Xoopit is a perfect example. Beyond getting you to the information in email in an easier and more informative manner, there is a ton of functionality that can be built into that information with tagging, snippet use, etc. that could eliminate many of the applications we use today. Managing and massaging text can result in powerful, yet flexible applications that adapt to the way you use information rather than the other way around. Google gets a tiny step closer to it with new features, but they never quite understand all that they have available.
There was a Java application called Zoe, that got very close to the best use of email data I have ever seen I still have it around, but can't get it to run on the current versions of java and have not been able to go back. It allowed you to pivot your views of information by clicking on domains, email addresses, etc. to see counts and information about your communications you never thought possible. In its day it was called Google for email and its too bad the project died, because if you added tagging and customer field features, you could have had a local and remote webmail platform. It had its own built in mail servers as well as rss capabilities. I miss it.
Guess I better get back to my java installation and get it running again. A lot of great ideas there.
Keep up the great work guys. Your "platform" is getting there.
Brad
Posted by: Brad Nickel | June 20, 2008 at 04:06 PM