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E-mail didn't really evolve since Gmail. Why is it so hard to innovate?

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Re: E-mail didn't really evolve since Gmail. Why is it so hard to innovate?

#31

Post by 7952 »

onli wrote: post #3

I don't think the premise is right. From the beginning to now, Gmail evolved quite a bit. For one, they used their analytical knowledge to prioritize emails, which I found to be very helpful. Two, they started filtering newsletters and advertisements automatically. Third, the UI got revamped quite a bit. Add to that all the basics Gmail does right (spamfiltering, tag+-syntax, …), and you see why it is hard to compete…

To a lot of corporations email is more like version control. The attachments are the source code, and the text of the message is like comments in code. The stream of information is a fundamental output of the business, and is definitely not just a communication medium. Managing that stream is not something that can be fully automated; it just needs better tools (like Github achieves for Version control).

Re: E-mail didn't really evolve since Gmail. Why is it so hard to innovate?

#32

Post by Hurdy »

Angostura wrote: post #24
mathouc wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gmail introduced conversation threading, gigabyte storage, speed, powerful search, and lots more no?

Actually - when was conversation threading introduced in GMail? I know the Apple's Mail.app had it in 2011.

It was part of the initial launch in 2004.

Re: E-mail didn't really evolve since Gmail. Why is it so hard to innovate?

#33

Post by p4bl0 »

enobrev wrote: post #20
onli wrote: post #3

I don't think the premise is right. From the beginning to now, Gmail evolved quite a bit. For one, they used their analytical knowledge to prioritize emails, which I found to be very helpful. Two, they started filtering newsletters and advertisements automatically. Third, the UI got revamped quite a bit. Add to that all the basics Gmail does right (spamfiltering, tag+-syntax, …), and you see why it is hard to compete…

I agree with you almost entirely. Although I do have one specific minor off-topic feature I'd love to have in email that I haven't seen anywhere. I want the ability to "like" an email, and have the sender know that I "liked" it. I don't want to write "yes, I agree", or even worse, a terse response of "like" as I feel that's a waste of my time, the sender's time, an unnecessary "+1" in their inbox. I just want a way t…

What about an UI which mimic a social network in the Facebook style but which uses email as backend? It would be decentralized for free, and entirely interoperable with people using plain email (those who uses this UI would see that you liked there message, others would see a reply that says "I liked your email", for instance). Comments would be responses to email (using the In-reply-to header). The interface could easily creates groups of contact or post to all of them (equivalent to posting on your "wall"), etc. The action of "friending" someone on this UI could optionally be mutual GPG key signing behind the scene which would enable encryption of messages between friends.

I think there is a lot to do with this idea.

Re: E-mail didn't really evolve since Gmail. Why is it so hard to innovate?

#34

Post by mattmanser »

kijin wrote: post #2

The #1 difficulty with email startups is that they have to invent a market that doesn't exist and doesn't want to exist. Few people even know that they can access Gmail anywhere other than at mail.google.com or via the Gmail app. Ditto for hotmail/outlook.com and pretty much every other freemail service out there. And of course ad-supported freemail providers have no incentive to let their users access email with a t…

You're ignoring enterprise, there is a huge industry around business email hosting which more often than not uses an email client (and more often than not that client is outlook or the iphone mail app).

Google Apps was certainly taking a huge chunk out of enterprise, but I don't know if that's still happening now that you have to pay for it from employee #1.

Outlook usage is so embedded and big enough that Google built a sync app, but moderately funnily, the 'how to integrate google apps with Outlook' video on this page is missing, not sure if that's a reflection of how few people use it?

https://support.google.com/a/answer/33322?hl=en

Re: E-mail didn't really evolve since Gmail. Why is it so hard to innovate?

#35

Post by enscr »

This thread is one discussion where I hardly see any coherence or modality in opinions (not that it's bad). To me, this indicates that email innovation has a lot of latent potential. For example, email could have evolved to encompass messaging as a first class citizen rather than an add-on widget.

Re: E-mail didn't really evolve since Gmail. Why is it so hard to innovate?

#36

Post by aleem »

Here is an idea for something that has been in my head for some time.

All that would be required to jumpstart the innovation process is a developer-friendly API and standardised events for extending email:

  onReceive(headers, body);
  onOpen(...);
  onTagged(...);
  ...
That would allow developers to do creative things with email. It may even give way to niceties such as:

  npm install email-itinerary-parser
These events could be standardised across the board. A plugin ecosystem would allow emails to operate much like blogging platforms do today. You could have a self-hosted email platform with a plugin dashboard where you would pick and choose your plugins. The UI would be the hard part but is a tractable problem given the state of client-side MVC libraries that didn't exist until a few years ago.

A service like Akismet would provide SPAM filtering and other services could be built around it. The trust factor would be an issue but it might be even possible to send these services only extrapolated data instead of the entire contents of the email.

It would even be possible to build atypical interfaces around your email. You could for example build a blogs UI that shows all emails sent to myname+blogs@mydomain.com. The blogs Controller could automatically reply to that email with the published status.

In general, things could move in a progressive direction much faster in the hands of the developer community.

Re: E-mail didn't really evolve since Gmail. Why is it so hard to innovate?

#37

Post by lelandbatey »

enobrev wrote: post #20
onli wrote: post #3

I don't think the premise is right. From the beginning to now, Gmail evolved quite a bit. For one, they used their analytical knowledge to prioritize emails, which I found to be very helpful. Two, they started filtering newsletters and advertisements automatically. Third, the UI got revamped quite a bit. Add to that all the basics Gmail does right (spamfiltering, tag+-syntax, …), and you see why it is hard to compete…

I agree with you almost entirely. Although I do have one specific minor off-topic feature I'd love to have in email that I haven't seen anywhere. I want the ability to "like" an email, and have the sender know that I "liked" it. I don't want to write "yes, I agree", or even worse, a terse response of "like" as I feel that's a waste of my time, the sender's time, an unnecessary "+1" in their inbox. I just want a way t…

This in general is one of those things that I thing's been growing in the background of the internet: the utility of fake Internet points as social feedback. This includes karma, likes, +1's, retweets and more.

It's the ability to give pure positive reinforcement without actually using words, and it's one of the most powerful ideas to come out of the Web.

Re: E-mail didn't really evolve since Gmail. Why is it so hard to innovate?

#40

Post by 1stop »

qwerta wrote: post #26

Interactive email Web UI is around since 1997 when Microsoft introduced Outlook Web Access. GMail is not really that special. I think largest email innovation is right now happening at KDE with integration of KMail into rest of the desktop.

I love it when the Microsoft apologists come out :)

Outlook Web Access... yeah that changed the world, gmail was but a shadow in its glory.

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