Shifting the emphasis from social networks back to the email inbox

November 14, 2007 Mark O'Neill 215 views

I’ve been reading some interesting posts today on how Yahoo and Gmail are planning to shift people from social networks back to the email inbox by essentially making the inbox the next new social network. Dubbed by some as Inbox 2.0, this could be the next evolutionary stage of the email inbox.

To me, email is the backbone of the internet but to others, it’s “so Web 1.0!”. People who I try to get in contact with will only communicate through their Facebook profiles and won’t give out actual email addresses. I mean, come on! Some of them claim never to check their email or even have email at all (which is a bit of a fib as you need an email address to set up a Facebook account in the first place plus you need an email address for virtually every web service available).

So this attempt to break this “Facebook culture” is welcomed by me as I really don’t see what all the Facebook hype is about. Yes I have a Facebook account but I maybe check it and update it once or twice a week. Not like the guy recently reprimanded at work for spending 4 hours a day on Facebook or the student who declares he can’t be a student without Facebook. As the Techcrunch author points out, only hard drugs has the same kind of loyalty and hold over people.

So how will Yahoo and Gmail get people to come back to the inbox? Well Google, true to form, are keeping their mouths shut and Techcrunch opines that Yahoo’s “plans” are all over the place. In fact Yahoo’s plans remind me of a Japanese Kamikaze pilot - aim for the target and hope for the best.

The plans basically involve news feeds with status messages about your friends (very Twitter-ish), profile pages for you and your friends, and the third one actually made me laugh out loud - email algorithms will decide who your most-emailed contacts are and put them to the top of the inbox list. It made me laugh because Gmail already has a “most contacted” feature and most of my “most contacted” list are people I haven’t contacted in months while people I email every day don’t even make the list. So I hope this new algorithim they are working on is better than the current one.

I am personally very sceptical of anything that Yahoo does as they tend to rush stuff out without thinking long-term. They are also rather obsessed with seeing what Gmail does and then rush out their own version to keep up. Before starting anything new, Yahoo should improve their existing services, such as their email. They claim their email is vastly improved but to me, it is still bloated with “in your face” advertising and clunky page layouts. So how can they start integrating social networks into a product which still needs a lot of tweaks done to it?

I’ve just received an invite in my email inbox for the new invite-only Yahoo social network, Mash. I’ll give it a whirl and report back soon.

Technorati Tags email, Facebook, Gmail, Google, mash, social, techcrunch, Yahoo