In ten years, an internet eternity, web-based email has only made token improvements, moving from Hotmail to Gmail. Meanwhile, instant messaging and social networks have rapidly developed.
Four new startups, all of which came out of secrecy this year, point toward a bright new future for email. These oddly-named saviors — Fuser, Orgoo, Xobni and Xoopit — have a simple goal. They want to centralize communication, and they want to give it structure and meaning.
Power users feel the pain of having to repeatedly switch between email and the address book, having to close one email before writing another, or losing track of instant messages as the write a new email. For lighter email users, only once email begins to stack up and conversations become lost or forgotten do their cries for help begin. The least committed email users may have dropped it entirely in favor of messaging on a platform like Facebook, which seems to offer many of the same basic features.
The individual aims of these companies differ. Fuser and Orgoo (previous coverage) both centralize communication, whether from email, instant messaging, a social network or even mobile SMS and video, in one simple interface. Xobni (previous coverage) is an overlay for Outlook that helps organize high-volume communications with a multi-functional sidebar. Xoopit organizes all those thousands of pages of archived email, pulling out meaningful content long since lost by the user.
While each is different, they recognize the same disease, and offer the same cures. To use the wording of Sean Rad, co-founder of Orgoo, the aim is to first aggregate all communication; next, integrate the separate streams into a single work flow; and finally, organize, to increase the efficiency and usefulness of email.
We’ll give a summary of each startup, followed by some thoughts from their top executives as to what’s in the future.
Fuser
Fuser pulls together its user’s communications, both from all of their email accounts as well as the social networks Facebook and MySpace. It then places the message-centers of each service in a single web based interface, providing a central place to catch up on what’s been happening everywhere.
According to the company’s president, Jeff Herman, “The problem is that most people today have multiple email, social networking accounts and so forth. You have to log in to five or six places to find out what’s going on. What we’re really going for is a virtual command center to pull together everything a person has.”
Orgoo
Orgoo, like Fuser, aggregates communication, but with an interface that more closely resembles traditional email. And while both Fuser and Orgoo can access any type of email account, Orgoo adds in instant messaging accounts rather than social networks, and also has a video chat option.
“As things stand, you have different accounts on all these services. If I email you, we continue our conversation by IM or phone. But I don’t have one single view of that conversation. We’ve taken the first step of integrating and allowing you to organize in one central location,” says Rad.
Both Fuser and Orgoo plan to add, as quickly as possible, features that the other has — Fuser will add instant messaging, while Orgoo will add social networking. Where the two companies differ is in their interface (see screenshots) and their target markets; Herman says that Fuser is aiming for the “middle American” market, while Orgoo seems to appeal to a more tech-savvy crowd.
Xobni
Xobni attempts to help information-overloaded business people keep track of their contacts within Microsoft Outlook. A sidebar view shows the relationship of a message’s sender to the user, as well as a correspondence history, their contact information, and files exchanged — all without ever opening a single email, much less tracking through endless folders and conversational threads.
Despite some initial problems with the software’s implementation, with users complaining of excessive memory usage, co-founder Matt Brezina says demand has been strong from heckled Outlook users. “We decided to stick to Outlook because there’s a lot of pain there, and a lot of value that can be created for those users,”Brezina says.
Xoopit
To Xoopit, the email inbox is a library in lack of the Dewey Decimal System. While co-founder Bijan Marashi is guarded in his statements about the company, which will come out of stealth mode later this year, he told us that the purpose of Xoopit is simply to organize email.
For example, Xoopit can search through every email ever sent to a user and pull out and compile a photo gallery from the attachments. Other content in emails can also be separated out. The idea is to make even old emails and content available without requiring hours of digging, much like separating a single towering stack of documents into organized filing cabinets.
The future
The question is, just how painful is existing consumer email? The majority of us are lazy, and we’ll put up with a lot before learning a new system. Sure, our Yahoo Mail may be clunky at times, but it’s “good enough,” right? If they only appeal to a tiny sub-set of users, all four startups are doomed to failure.
However, there are examples of innovation in email paying off. When Zimbra, an enterprise email client, launched in 2005, we admit to doubting that it could challenge Outlook. It took two years, but the Ajax-based software took off, gaining enough momentum among users excited about its extensible features and add-ons to convince Yahoo to acquire it for $350 million, earlier this year. However, Zimbra isn’t (yet) for general consumer use, nor is it a standard web mail client like Yahoo or Google offers.
The lesson is that to have a chance, new email startups must be easy to use, and address multiple needs effectively. To become the command center for any internet user, email should go further, pulling together communication and making them more intuitive, and more useful.
Rad says that Orgoo’s goal is to make a user’s past communications reveal deeper patterns about them. If all your messages are aggregated in one place, the inbox can be the target of an automatic analysis to “allow people to explose the hidden social networks and the hidden information,” Rad says. “We want to create new ways for you to visualize email, easier ways to navigate through and see things in messages and relationships in a larger context. For example, if you look at Gmail, it groups your emails by subject line. That’s good, but there are a lot of other ways to group, whether by sender, topic or something else. You want to create a user interface that allows you to re-thread conversations and put them in context.”
Likewise, Fuser wants to dig into the wealth of information flowing through user’s accounts. While the site already features a “leaderboard” showing who users communicate with most on their social networks, it could gather more information, for instance keeping track of a friend even when she has different accounts as well. More such features are planned, but Herman also points to another important area for his company. “We’re aimed at middle America, where people are not technologists,” he says. “If you don’t make it very easy for people to set up accounts, you’ll lose them. To really win we have to focus on an interface that can be useful to mass America.”
Xobni’s co-founder Brezina says his company doesn’t plan on resting on its Outlook laurels, and may branch out to a high-powered web mail or a client that can, like Zimbra, act as a platform for developers, for example being able to automatically look up real estate prices and connect them information in an agent’s email. And like the other companies, Brezina thinks that email is a rich information resource about a person’s life. While Xobni already pulls out some information like phone numbers from email, there’s much more information waiting for someone to find an innovative way to highlight. “There’s a structure that just hasn’t been broken apart and exposed,” he says.
And when will a Google or Yahoo decide to change their own platforms? Xoopit founder Bijan Marashi compares the challenge of changing email to upgrading an operation system: “That’s a major overhaul of stuff consumers use every day, and the [OS] companies pull it off. If someone can really make this stuff simple, the majors might be able to take a lot of it away.”
Adoption or acquisition by a big company may be the best way for any of the four to succeed, providing them with the money and backing to spread their word.
We’ll follow these startups as they evolve. More this week, on related projects coming out of the Web 2.0 conference.
22 Comments
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Brij Singh said:
Chris,
Great post. Its great to see wonderful line-up of innovative startups tackling email problem (and in some cases new opportunity).
At MessageDance, we are also addressing big problem related to email. Would be happy to share more about MessageDance when we are ready with the launch. For now folks can sign up for the private beta.
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Janice Friedman said:
Zimbra’s not webmail? That’s news to me. I actually started using it about a month ago, having signed up for a personal account (01.com) with the idea of forwarding mail from my gmail account to my zimbra account, so that I could sync outlook. For a few bucks a month, this was a pretty good solution to having my cake and eating it too… online Google, offline Outlook… the punch line here is that the Zimbra web interface searches about as well as Google, at least to a non-expert like myself, and is faster than Outlook for me on my admitedly tired old PC, so, now I’m pretty much in the Zimbra webmail all the time. I’m reluctant to dump gmail cause everyone has my gmail address, so I haven’t gone all the way. Given that my Zimbra provider has reachable support, I’m feeling pretty smug, though.
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Chris Morrison said:
Good point, Janice. The browser-based AJAX client is what Zimbra has been pushing. I should have said it’s not your standard web mail; it’s certainly a lot different from what I was referring to, Gmail. Updating to be a bit more clear, thanks.
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Bill Barlow said:
Good article.
I question this line tho:
“However, Zimbra isn’t (yet) for general consumer use”The author doesn’t cite any reasons.
They obviously haven’t used Zimbra or read up on their blog. The developed a GMail skin. . .
But that aside, I don’t want another Yahoo or GMail client.
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Fred Pohl said:
Ads, what about ads, animations, bright colors and annoyances?
Is any of these new email clients ADD (attention deficit disorder) aware? -
DV Henkel-Wallace said:
Chris, I’m glad to see a post with depth and analysis. Most VB (and other blog) posts aren’t much more than the press release with maybe a sentence or two. It’s hard to do more when you want to stay current with a stream of new companies. Frankly most of those are ephemeral, so not so interesting. This kind of segment-focused piece, thankfully less than a magazine article, is just what I would prefer to see on VB.
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Chris Morrison said:
Bill: Simple reason. The average person who decides they might want a Zimbra account won’t know where to go. It’s not terribly difficult, but it’s not entirely straightforward, either. Take a look at the Zimbra homepage to see what I mean.
Fred: Fuser and Orgoo both have a couple ads, but they’re not very intense. Both companies say they don’t intend to load up on ads. I’d tend to trust them, but could be wrong. Not sure what you mean about ADD aware.
DV: Thanks for the feedback. We’re hoping to do this sort of post more often, now.
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John said:
“If you don’t make it very easy for people to set up accounts, you’ll lose them. To really win we have to focus on an interface that can be useful to mass America.”
Why focus on a subset of America? This is email, it’s not like you are limited to retail outlets. What about the rest of the entire world? How narrow-minded!
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Chris Morrison said:
John: You slipped in right after my last reply — that subject did come up with Fuser. The simple answer for them (and any small company) is that they’ve got a limited budget, and it behooves them to focus on the most obvious and familiar market.
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Ray Grieselhuber said:
I see a lot of value in these sorts of services.
The ability to have all of my email accounts in one place on the web is the primary reason I use GMail, but it’s not perfect and I don’t always have a warm and fuzzy feeling about giving Google so much data.
Best wishes to all involved - I’m sure I’ll be trying one or two out in the near future.
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Mike J said:
While as a CS i find it important that innovation is kept chugging forward, i have to say that what i gathered from the above article, there are already programs that do exactly what these innovations intend. the catch is that i find that these existing programs allow for these concepts to be handled more, at least i think, intuitively than organizing everything into a single communal catchall.
take Pidgin, for example. this is an open source program that is developed for people, by people, for absolutely free, and none of the ad or spyware that folks expect. (if you have the knowhow, you can search through its sourcecode yourself, its free to download. but i think that if you have the know how, you might know what im talking about)Pidgin takes many of the major Instant Messaging services (Aim, Yahoo, ICQ, MSN) and sticks them into a single program, with few, if any, errors. the program trillian does this as well. but, my preference, while not that of everyone, is for pidgin.
it also contains the ability to log every letter you ever sent or recieved using it. and there are many plugins that allow for decently secure messaging, and the like.
and also, FireFox/Thunderbird, or SeaMonkey allow for the unification of internet use, and electronic mail into a single client. additionally, the pidgin program has a web based cousin that works identically (in function, perhaps not appearence) to pidgin. what i find myself doing is that i currently have SeaMonkey set to capture both my school email, and my personal gmail and aol email accounts. i have SeaMonkeys web browsing interface set to automatically display both my facebook account, the pidgin programs web based cousin, “meebo”, and also the news site “digg” and my schools homepage, at start up.
while those programs might not be as flashy as the very useful and business applicable programs // implementations mentioned above, i find that at the least they can fulfill the needs of the average jane/joe user. also, once a person gets more comfortable, they would be able to highly customize this suite using user submitted (and peer reviewed) modifications that can be added into the mozilla seamonkey browser with a pretty handy options menu.
but, if the startups do a particularly nice job in their flagship offerings, i may even switch.
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Srini Srinivasan said:
If you look at the core organizational metaphors behind eMail they are still based on folders or tags. For those suffering from communications overload adding a people-centric view of information is a good step. But the fundamental reason why people use social networks stems primarily from the need to express one’s identity. Unless you can organize a person’s life around their sense of identity in all its facets, you will not be able to leverage the benefits of social networking in the world of productivity workers. On the flip side, unless you provide a shared environment that has the privacy controls inherent in one’s InBox, you will not find productivity workers even comfortable with social networking, let alone leveraging the power of group intelligence it can bring to organizing one’s life.
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Hamish MacDonald said:
For me, the most useful next iteration of e-mail will not be something that integrates instant messaging or social networking — both of which are non-essential Web hobby/time-killer/toy applications in my experience.
What I want is a new protocol for e-mail like correspondence that includes some kind of universally-accepted standard for eliminating unsolicited communication. Outlook’s filtering has stopped working for me, even set to its most exclusive rating, rules don’t ever run, and its proprietary message approval systems are no good to me because my main client is Mac-based, and many of my friends don’t use Outlook.
So, no, I don’t want MySpace in my in-box. I want usable e-mail, because the present system is becoming increasingly unusable because it’s so vulnerable to abuse.
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Jonathan Robin said:
Consolidation of personal communications - although useful for those who have difficulty following through on threads - seems essentially beneficial for wiretappers, potential phishers, and hacking by data marketing.
IMHO
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Kevin said:
I gave Fuser a try about a week ago and I wasn’t impressed. The interface was too barren and sparse and it didn’t work well in Firefox (on my mac or my linux box). I’m going to give Orgoo a try today and see how that goes.
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Russ @ bombay potatoes said:
I’m not overly impressed with web mail offerings but the outlook addon looks really-really interesting.
Thanks for the summary and the pointer.
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Tom Collins said:
I received an invite to use Xobni beta and it really has transformed my work environment in general; no more holding clients on the phone while I wait for Outlook search to chug away finding emails or related contacts.
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Yoni said:
You forgot one - another great startup, attacking another side of e-mail, an e-mail enhancer. Once you start you cant stop - these guys thought about everything. http://www.slimail.com
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perbear said:
Good to see efforts in making the e-mail better, but as you have commented, hey I am happy with g-mail.
What I miss is the aggregation of contacts.
I have started a blog to see if we can together write the perfect business plan for contacts aggregation and unification, please let me know your opinions.
Per
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Stephen Barnes said:
See our one minute movie. The fact that you get an email is irrelevant. It’s what you DO as a result of having received it that counts.
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thinkfeeldo said:
Yawn….ho hum….they’re all light years behind a project ya’ll b hearin’ bout in 08.
WATCH THIS SPACE!
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xwnza tpcnh said:
kvbutjncx nroahub wnskr czqdabioj ukoi gaquxe pjevmkyfl http://www.xpbm.przbcomwv.com
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