Email Dashboard

I was interviewed last week by Rebecca Buckman of the Wall Street Journal for her article, Email’s Friendly Fire.  Becky has covered business technology for a while and is quite a tech savvy journalist, so it was a very interesting discussion and a very good article.  I’m quite happy about the way the article turned out – and especially the fact that ClearContext was featured throughout it.

One nice thing about having many thousands of customers is our ability to provide a wide range of reference customers to speak with reporters.  Thanks to all the ClearContext IMS customers who volunteered to help us out by speaking with Becky, and special thanks to Mukesh Lulla from TeamF1 and Eric Liebeler from Honeywell, who were both featured in the article.

Mukesh spoke about his use of ClearContext inbox management features such as Defer and AutoAssign functionality to quickly process 300-400 messages daily.  Eric spoke about the contact prioritization and message prioritization features that help him identify which messages to focus on first, as well as the topic and filing functions that automatically keep his email organized.

Becky touched on a number of other interesting points. The "colleague spam" she mentions is the type of email thread we had in mind when we created unsubscribe functionality.  Other points such as the increasing volume of incoming email from sites like LinkedIn and Facebook as well as other communications mediums delivering data into the inbox are things I’ve written about in my posts on the future of email.  It’s not just increasing volumes, it’s the very nature of email that continues to change, creating an opportunity for all sorts of innovation.  Becky also mentions IT software policies as a possible obstacle to deployment of new technologies, but we’ve been pleasantly surprised by the freedom users have to install Outlook plug-ins on their machines. 

One of the comments from Microsoft mentions the value of tools like these for users who are completely unorganized pilers as opposed to fairly organized filers.  A large focus of ours when we developed ClearContext IMS v4 was making it useful right out of the box for even the most unorganized of email users.  In addition to introducing a simple 3-step workflow strategy that anyone can get started with immediately to help stay on top of things, we’ve really increased the level of behind-the-scenes automation we provide to users.  For example, appointments can be scheduled and to-do’s can be set up  with a single click, and all of that  information is automatically combined with related tasks, appointments and emails in a project dashboard. That level of automated organization combined with improved Microsoft search and other desktop search products lets any type of user take full advantage of our products.

It’s good to see awareness building around both the challenges and opportunities that exist in the email world, and it’s especially good to be recognized as one of the companies leading the charge to help make email a more valuable and productive tool for both individuals and businesses.  Thanks, Becky!

Having read dozens of blog posts and articles about "Inbox 2.0" the most common reaction I’ve had is "yawn." Now, there are a number of people who get it – I linked to a few of them in yesterday’s post.

However, most of what people are talking about when they talk about next generation email and Inbox 2.0 is really just Address Book 2.0.  Attempts at universal, always up-to-date, web-based address books have been around since I started using the Internet.  Perhaps the best-known of the latest crop of such companies is Plaxo, which has had a few takes at/around the challenge.  I remember using one really hyped one around the time sixdegrees.com was pretty popular.  It worked out so well I can’t even remember its name now.

Things have changed a lot since then, and notions of universal digital identity are becoming more realistic, and definitely more important. People’s digital identity now spans far beyond email, reaching across multiple sites with profiles, various e-commerce sites, blogs and discussion forums – I could go on for a long time.  Site like RapLeaf, Chainn, and ProfileLinker are just a few of dozens of sites trying to pull together consolidated digital identities online.  In fact, that’s actually worth a post of its own that I’ll tackle soon.

And that’s what a lot of the "Inbox 2.0" articles were all about – using email as the basis for the types of things social networking sites are doing and companies like those are doing.  But in reality, most of the people you care about emailing, you already KNOW that information.  OK, great, now I have Joe’s birthday and favorite books linked in my email address book –  value add for sure, but nothing that really drives the email experience forward.  Making the address book better with richer profiles and contact information and other social networking style info is beneficial, but doesn’t really address the main problems with email.

For that to happen, I think it comes down to three important I’s:

Information – This is the most important thing that email brings.  Every email address is surrounded by a wealth of information and context.  Yet all of this information is spread across various message threads from various contacts.  Utilizing (and storing in an easily accessible manner) this information to understand the nature and relationship of emails and contacts is a key first step.  The value of all that information in the email is pretty obvious, so I’ll skip the examples.

Interface – That’s the next big one.  Email clients are, even new web-based ones, fundamentally unchanged from email clients of 10 years ago.  Even something as new as Gmail is basically the same messaging metaphor that has been in place forever.  Yet email has transcended messaging to become something much bigger.  Is it a one-to-one communication medium?  Is it a project management  app?  Is it  a time and status reporting app?  Is it a group collaboration tool?  I could keep going, but the answer is simple.  Yes.  There’s a huge opportunity for  advanced interfaces to better support all of these activities that people do via email, as well as creating better interfaces to deal with specific types of individual messages based on the nature of the information contained in them. 

Integration – Email messages are one silo of information.  Contacts are another.  Appointments, hey over here in my calendar.  Tasks?  Yeah, here’s a to-do list.  That’s information that is often stored close to each other, but still in separate silos.  Intelligently integrating them is an important step forward.  But beyond those, there’s a wealth of external data that begs to be integrated within the context of email discussions.  In some cases that’s simply data from another communication medium – IMs or SMS or feeds.  In other cases, it’s contextually related data like maps to addresses (Zimbra/Yahoo is one company that has started to touch on that).  And this can extend to integration with other applications that interact with email-based data.

And there are plenty of other I’s like interaction, identity, and input that also will come into play in the winning solutions.

This is the opportunity for the next-generation of email applications, not just a souped up address book or email-driven Facebook clone.

Saul Hansell blogs about Brad Garlinghouse from Yahoo calls “Inbox 2.0”.  I’m a little surprised the post is getting so much buzz, since the WSJ wrote about it a month ago.  As I wrote then, “contact priority is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to
information that can be learned from looking at the context and
relationship of information stored within email.”  I’m glad to see all the excitement, though, because this is at the core of what we focus on at ClearContext.

Marshall Kirkpatrick gets it right when he writes that “We’re not talking about the number of times people email you – we’re
talking about the percentage of times you open those emails, the
keywords used in them relative to your personal/work profile, there are
metrics so crazy we can hardly imagine that are available for
determining the importance of people in your life.”

A number of others are talking about the broader opportunity here – leveraging the information and context that exists within email to make interactions more powerful.

Larry Dignan – “Increasingly, social networking is looking like a feature more than a
business. There will be big ramifications to consider as social
networking becomes integrated into your everyday applications.”

Brad Feld – “The real data lives in the gazillions of Microsoft Exchange servers
that are distributed around the world and connected to this magical
thing called the Internet.”

Om Malik – “the relationship buckets (and the level of intimacy) are already predefined and have relevance.”

Don Dodge – “Most people don’t want to leave email and jump into a separate
application to collaborate on projects. Email is where they naturally
communicate and collaborate.”

There’s an incredible amount of stored relationship information within email that is currently not utilized.  That information extends far beyond just the contacts, which is where the initial focus from Yahoo and Google lies, as they along with many others try to emulate the success of the model Facebook has utilized.

However, email is not the same as social networking, and people use it very differently.  In email, prioritization of contacts and messages is important, but all it does is identify what information is most important for you to look at.  To actually build a more powerful system, you need tools to efficiently manage that information, and provide context for your information and interactions.

We’ve been working on prioritizing contacts and messages for a few years at ClearContext.  It’s an interesting problem and we’re glad to see a lot more attention being paid to this area.  What we realized a while back, though, was that the real value lies not in the prioritization itself, but in doing interesting things with that information.  Combining all of that data within the context of email (and paying attention to what people are actually DOING in the client) provides the ability do things with email that are a lot more intelligent than simply displaying a message.  With ClearContext IMS we’ve focused on combining information from a few silos – email, tasks, and appointments.  However, there are a lot more silos to tackle, both inside and outside the email world.

Email is not going to replace or become like Facebook or LinkedIn.  Those sites provide a good platform for certain types of interactions as well as linking together many different chunks of the “social graph.”  However, each individual’s personal “social graph” lives within email.  And not only does the contact information live within email, so does the CONTEXT information.  Intelligently using that information in conjunction with advanced interfaces on the client side will make the entire email experience more powerful and productive for people.  And done right, it will also make people’s experience with any email/contact based site or application more powerful, because it will be driven from a set of rich profiles full of deep context, not just a list of names.  That’s the evolution of email, not just a better Inbox.

Valleywag has a post on the decline of email.  A number of commenters there explain that the numbers actually show an INCREASE in total email usage, even though the percentage of Internet traffic (in the UK) devoted to webmail has dropped.  That’s no surprise, as web usage continues to expand into a greater variety of uses. This blog post links to a few more articles – surprise, surprise, email just keeps "dying" again and again.  Or, wait, is it actually sexy again? The fact of the matter is that for the vast majority of people, email remains their primary medium of online communications. And how do these services that will purportedly supplant email actually notify their users of activity?  Yeah, email.