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Reinventing Email
31–40 of 46 posts
Re: Reinventing Email
#32Paul English (cofounder of Kayak) tackles emails in a similar way to what you're proposing:
"I get about 400 to 500 e-mails a day, and I probably send about 120. At any given moment, I'll have only 10 items in my inbox. When an e-mail comes in, I read it and decide immediately: Delete, reply, or delegate?"
http://www.inc.com/magazine/20100201/the-way-i-work-paul-eng...
Re: Reinventing Email
#33"Email is not a messaging protocol. It's a todo list." Speak for yourself. My primary use case is to send and receive messages with others. If a message includes things to be done, I'll put them in a TODO list, like I'd do with any other messaging protocol. The reason why reinventing email always fails is because email isn't broken.
I'm glad I'm not the only one that got annoyed reading that. If it'd been prefixed with "For me, Email..." then fine, I accept that.
Re: Reinventing Email
#34"Email is not a messaging protocol. It's a todo list." Speak for yourself. My primary use case is to send and receive messages with others. If a message includes things to be done, I'll put them in a TODO list, like I'd do with any other messaging protocol. The reason why reinventing email always fails is because email isn't broken.
FWIW, the context of the quote is #2 of http://paulgraham.com/ambitious.html
(I post this because it took me two searches before I retrieved the URL).
Re: Reinventing Email
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
The thought of making email more like a todo list is terrifying to me. I try to move valuable information and tasks out of email and into trusted systems that are designed specifically for those purposes as fast as possible. Testing out this guys hypothesis couldn't hurt, but I want nothing to do with it. I think the reason why reinventing email always fails is that it is generally skin deep.
"move valuable information and tasks out of email and into trusted systems..." If email is not a todo list, then how/why do tasks even get in there in the first place such that you need to move them out of there?
Because email is a general purpose messaging system. That can be anything from "hi, how are you?" to "can you pick up some eggs on the way home?"
Re: Reinventing Email
#36did someone say Asana? :O
Re: Reinventing Email
#37You either reinvent messaging or reinvent todo-lists. "Reinventing" an implementation such as email is nonsensical thing to say.
Re: Reinventing Email
#38You either reinvent messaging or reinvent todo-lists. "Reinventing" an implementation such as email is nonsensical thing to say.
Email is more than the tools we use. Its the nature of the communications - its permanence, the store-and-forward thing, the fidelity (text/mime/images etc), the namespace.
Messaging differs in one or more of these. Phone calls have lower latency (unless you don't answer) but higher fidelity - you can go back and forth in seconds.
Just like there's a gadget every $50 between a simple phone and a laptop, there's a communications tool from snail mail to phone call/voip filling every ecological niche.
So yes, I believe you can reinvent something that's the size and shape of email, including its latency and permanence but maybe with better fidelity or authenticity or whatnot.
Re: Reinventing Email
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
"move valuable information and tasks out of email and into trusted systems..." If email is not a todo list, then how/why do tasks even get in there in the first place such that you need to move them out of there?
Because email is a general purpose messaging system. That can be anything from "hi, how are you?" to "can you pick up some eggs on the way home?"
Yes, my point is that there must be _some_ people that use email for communicating todos, else your inbox would not have todos in it. Maybe it's not HN readers, but the fact that HN readers actively move todos "out of email" mean that someone put them there in the first place. It's those people to which this product would be targeted.
An email that says "can you pick up some eggs on the way home?" is someone putting "pick up eggs" on your todo list via email. To me, it seems clear that for at least a few people email is a todo system. It's probably so for more people than we imagine.
Re: Reinventing Email
#40Nice work on the UI. But I think what he meant with "to-do list" is that he has no control of what people can put on his inbox, and that he has to waste time reading emails before he knows what that person wants. To solve something like this you'd have to have this problem in the first place, so talking to a lot of powerful people is what I'd do in the beginning (and that's why it's a hard problem to attack IMO).
I'm thinking of taking a stab at this idea too.