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With great sadness we announce the closing of Fluent.io

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Re: With great sadness we announce the closing of Fluent.io

#21

Post by bobbles »

DigitalSea wrote: post #17
xqyz wrote: post #8

> Email is quite clearly a thing that needs fixing Honestly, I've never seen it that way. Email continues to work fine. It's platform independent and easy to use/setup. It's probably one of the best things on the internet ever.

Ever tried sending an attachment to someone over 4-5mb? One of the most broken aspects of email right there and something that won't be changing any time soon. Sure you can use a service like Mediafire or Rapidshare, but it's just another step that shouldn't exist in this day and age.

Dropbox should allow you to send a shortcut to a file (on dropbox) along with your email so that the recipient can just grab the file when they actually want it instead of clugging up the email systems with useless junk.

Re: With great sadness we announce the closing of Fluent.io

#22

Post by jaysonelliot »

Am I the only one who would have liked a bit more detail behind the reason for Fluent shutting down after just six months?

I watched and waited with anticipation for the launch, and was excited when I got my invite and could start using the service.

It's a great product, with excellent UX and design, and while it still felt technically like a work in progress, I was ready to stick it out as a user and see where everything went.

Now, less than two months after getting my "golden ticket," it's all going away with a vague statement: "We feel that we couldn’t keep running the service as it is, and now’s the time to move on."

Was there not enough runway to survive beyond six months? Did something else happen that they don't feel like discussing? If you're going to make announcements like "The future of email, brought to you by ex-Google people," it seems like you should at least know that you've got the funding to keep the lights on for more than a couple months.

It might seem like I'm being harsh on Fluent, considering that I'm just a user who didn't pay anything and shouldn't have any expectations. I'm not thinking about this as a user, though. I'm thinking about this as a would-be startup entrepreneur. One of the biggest barriers to getting traction early on is convincing users that you're going to stick around, that they can invest their time getting used to your product, even trust their data with you. After all, you're just some startup, maybe they should wait a year and see if you're still there. Meanwhile, you're stuck in a Catch 22, because you need those early adopters in order to still be there in a year.

When a startup makes big claims, then closes their doors mere months later, it puts another brick in the wall that makes it harder for other startups to make the case that it's worth getting on board for early adopters.

I'm sad to see Fluent go. It was a good idea, and seemed to be well executed. I just wish they'd be a bit more transparent about what happened, and why they weren't able to see this coming.

Re: With great sadness we announce the closing of Fluent.io

#23

Post by notatoad »

bobbles wrote: post #21
DigitalSea wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ever tried sending an attachment to someone over 4-5mb? One of the most broken aspects of email right there and something that won't be changing any time soon. Sure you can use a service like Mediafire or Rapidshare, but it's just another step that shouldn't exist in this day and age.

Dropbox should allow you to send a shortcut to a file (on dropbox) along with your email so that the recipient can just grab the file when they actually want it instead of clugging up the email systems with useless junk.

This is my favorite feature of sparrow.

Re: With great sadness we announce the closing of Fluent.io

#24

Post by LiveTheDream »

boyter wrote: post #13

I was not aware of Fluent but it looks fairly similar to about 100 or so other email sites, with a full list here http://blog.bartjellema.com/2012/02/22/email-startups/ Why are there so many of these sites? Is there a low barrier to entry or something? 90% seem to do similar things, so maybe someone should make one that allows people to write plugins for their platform and allow people to extend things that way?

Email itself is just a standard protocol; anyone can implement it. So, yes, there is a very low barrier to entry. Also, there are various problems around current email usage patterns that people want to solve: dealing with enormous inboxes, dealing with long conversation threads, managing contacts, integration with business workflows, etc.

Re: With great sadness we announce the closing of Fluent.io

#25

Post by mceachen »

mmahemoff wrote: post #15
nilsbunger wrote: post #7

Ay chance of open sourcing it? Maybe the community can carry the torch forward?

This request happens for every startup that closes. I don't think it's realistic most of the time, because projects like this are heavily tied to specific infrastructure and the optimum level of technical debt for a startup is much higher than the optimum level for an open source project whose survivorship depends on the community picking it up and taking it over (because it's unlikely the founders will spend much ti…

Firefox was not an open-source version of Navigator. It was a complete rewrite: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Mozilla_Application_...

Re: With great sadness we announce the closing of Fluent.io

#26

Post by lkrubner »

powera wrote: post #20
lkrubner wrote: post #19

I feel that email needs fixing. I will explain my opinion by walking through my history with email, chronologically: 1994-1996 - used AOL. Proprietary format that can not be updated to anything modern. 1996-1998 - got a Geocities account. Geocities was later bought by Yahoo. Yahoo did a terrible job merging geocities usernames into the Yahoo username system, such that I was left with a strange, difficult to spell use…

It sounds to me like you're unhappy with Thunderbird, not email. You seem to refuse to use other email clients (Outlook, Gmail, Mail.app) for various reasons entirely unrelated to sending or receiving email.

Think about what you are doing! Think about how narrowly you are defining this! You write:

"sending or receiving email"

And that's it? That is all we can expect of email clients? Are you arguing that no consideration should be given to concerns like storage, security, privacy, interoperability or any of the other concerns that we normally have when we use software? Can you give one good reason why all of those concerns are invalid?

Re: With great sadness we announce the closing of Fluent.io

#27

Post by benthumb »

lkrubner wrote: post #26
powera wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds to me like you're unhappy with Thunderbird, not email. You seem to refuse to use other email clients (Outlook, Gmail, Mail.app) for various reasons entirely unrelated to sending or receiving email.

Think about what you are doing! Think about how narrowly you are defining this! You write: "sending or receiving email" And that's it? That is all we can expect of email clients? Are you arguing that no consideration should be given to concerns like storage, security, privacy, interoperability or any of the other concerns that we normally have when we use software? Can you give one good reason why all of those concer…

Not to mention message filtering that work as advertised ... I'm looking at you Thunderbird.

Re: With great sadness we announce the closing of Fluent.io

#29

Post by mmahemoff »

mceachen wrote: post #25
mmahemoff wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This request happens for every startup that closes. I don't think it's realistic most of the time, because projects like this are heavily tied to specific infrastructure and the optimum level of technical debt for a startup is much higher than the optimum level for an open source project whose survivorship depends on the community picking it up and taking it over (because it's unlikely the founders will spend much ti…

Firefox was not an open-source version of Navigator. It was a complete rewrite: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Mozilla_Application_...

AOL released Mozilla as an independent project, which morphed into the stripped down version, Phoenix. Anyway, it was already open source by the time it was released, so it's a very different situation to this startup-releasing-open-source wish, but still the closest example I can think of, when considering only successful projects.
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