Ask HN: Inbox for everything? • Hacker News Board

Half the value of all these platforms is they each provide a different experience and thus are good for different things. SMS is urgent, Facebook messages are not, email for important thoughtful things, tweets for helping get attention of busy people with the viral factor. UX is critical to shape your users behavior.

Re: Ask HN: Inbox for everything?

#16

Post by dkuntz2 » Thu, Oct 10, 2013, 5:55 PM UTC

pepijndevos wrote: post #14

Mozilla Raindrop, now inactive used to do that. https://mozillalabs.com/en-US/raindrop/

Raindrop looked so cool. It's a shame they stopped working on it.

Re: Ask HN: Inbox for everything?

#17

Post by volaski » Thu, Oct 10, 2013, 6:02 PM UTC

First thought you were talking about Inbox for everything as in literally everything, including physical mails

Re: Ask HN: Inbox for everything?

#18

Post by olegp » Thu, Oct 10, 2013, 6:05 PM UTC

Do you need a unified inbox where you can read all the messages, or do you actually want to be able to search across all your inboxes (like you could with Greplin) or aggregate notifications that you received a new message (Chime)?

Re: Ask HN: Inbox for everything?

#19

Post by neovive » Thu, Oct 10, 2013, 6:06 PM UTC

Once the volume surpasses decent threshold, the UX would be quite difficult to build without some sort of complex grouping or intelligence. The key to a successful unified inbox would be learning what is "important" to each user and customizing the experience accordingly. Otherwise, people would start ignoring busy twitter feeds and focusing on individual emails, IM's, etc, which they could achieve by simply opening each service in a separate browser tab.

Re: Ask HN: Inbox for everything?

#20

Post by nathan_f77 » Thu, Oct 10, 2013, 6:07 PM UTC

It's a great idea. I had the idea for a unified messaging service, where you would have one client that connected to Google Chat, Facebook Chat, Skype, IM and SMS. When you wanted to talk to someone, it would communicate using the best service.

But then I bought a MacBook, and Apple's 'Messages' app does everything I need it to. It's IM when both parties are online, and SMS otherwise.

I would also love to see something that tries to unify Reddit, Hacker News, and Google News, although I'm not sure how it could be done.