In between responding to hundreds of emails, I’m covering the Inbox Love event down in Silicon Valley.
I’m not sure whether it should be love or hate. A lot of the discussion here at this conference on the future of email is about information overload and the most entertaining talk of the day was entitled “Fear and Loathing in Las Inbox”.
That was from Jeff Lawson of Twilio, whose stand-up routine on the problem of too much information in our inboxes cannot be summed up in words, so please enjoy the audio below. He caused hilarity as he talked about how a tweet on eating grapefruit for breakfast could cause Inbox mayhem.
Jeff did have some helpful suggestions, such as three ways of prioritising and filtering emails – by To: if they are to you directly, by CC: for when you are included but do not have to respond and all the rest being classified as “broadcast” emails – newsletters and offers – that would be grouped as the lowest priority.
All of the speakers were against the notion that email was a dying technology, next to more social and instant interactions such as Facebook and instant messaging.
Jeff Bonforte of Xobni argued email should get bigger – as a platform it was almost completely untapped, with outside services only now appearing in the inbox (Yahoo showed off how third-party developers were able to add their own apps to their inbox’s options, such as YouSendIt’s integration to send large files and a font software company adding a new look to emails)
Mr Bonforte argued the inbox was a personal wikipedia that knows you better than yourself, knows who your friends are and your real interests.
“We should learn to love our inboxes”, he said, he could find 27,000 people in his inbox and the key to solving problems of overload was not reducing the number of emails but improving the tools used to manage it.
Victoria Bellotti of Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) said its researchers had studied the inbox as a habitat and found that it was doing a lot of things it wasn’t designed for – to-do lists, project tracking, document archiving and batch processing.
It was a Grand Central Station for knowledge work, where people were still doing most of their communication. Overload was a real problem, where people could be handling 30 different threads of conversations at the same time as well as their regular work.
Jonathan Spira of the Basex consultancy said email also meant constant interruptions – it took users five minutes to become properly focused on tasks again after reading an email for 20 seconds, and sometimes they would not return to the task at hand at all.
Pierre Khawand of People-OnTheGo said email was still ahead of social media usage by a factor of three-to-one and a survey of users showed they were handling email for 3.27 hours of an eight-hour day. But a graph showing their constant checking demonstrated they were really on email the whole eight hours.
Josh Baer of OtherInbox pushed for new steps to be taken to allow emails to expire and disappear after a set period to lighten the inbox load. This could mean new “header” information in emails to make this happen, but much cooperation would be needed for widespread adoption. He also had no answer to one question about businesses needing to ensure compliance with regulations on conserving all their emails.
In the afternoon session, Microsoft, Google and Yahoo! demonstrated the latest features in Windows Live, Gmail and Yahoo Mail and the conference ended with presentations on some next-generation email apps:
- Baydin’s the emailga.me, turns email into a game – setting time limits on decisions about emails.
- AwayFind, which notifies you via SMS, voice call, iPhone push or IM about urgent emails, showed a new feature that alerts users to changes in their calendar – when someone sends an email to cancel a meeting for example.
- Crocodoc allows better rendering of documents in a browser and enables easy collaboration on a document. It’s a free service compared to Adobe Acrobat Pro, which can cost $400.
- Connected merges your contacts from various social networking services and puts emails, messages, tweets and status updates all in one place.
- Jexy is an under-the-hood abstraction API for productivity data, which is of no interest at all to you if, like me, you don’t know what that means.
- ToneCheck from Lymbix is like spellcheck on emails, but instead it checks the tone of your message, alerts you if you’re sounding too negative and suggests corrections. Good for customer relations perhaps, not so good for when you really want to blast someone.
- Meshin offers a souped-up address book on smartphones that shows all interactions with a contact when they call. It also seems to offer an Outlook sidebar.
- OtherInbox, a free service that helps organise people’s inbox, showed a commercial tool called SubjectLin.es that will alert companies to the most effective subject lines for emails, showing in percentage terms how much the emails are read based on their subject lines.
- Performable helps professional marketers send targeted emails to users based on their behaviour across multiple channels, such as email, web and social networking sites.
- Rapportive is a tool I use in Gmail which shows rich contact profiles, including photos, social networking profiles and latest tweets of people who email me. It usually lets me put a face to a name as the Rapportive sidebar shows up in each email.
- Finally, Shortmail is like Twitter for email and in fact your Twitter handle gives you your @shortmail.com address. Emails are limited to 500 characters. Hooray for that!
