Making email more like Twitter
Jinfo Blog

By James Mullan

Abstract

We all understand how important email is in our working and personal lives. Yet at the same time we're presented with more and more ways with which to communicate and collaborate with colleagues and friends. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ all offer alternative ways to communicate with friends and colleagues, so are we seeing the end of email?

Item

We all understand how important email is in our working and personal lives. Yet at the same time we're presented with more and more ways with which to communicate and collaborate with colleagues and friends. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ all offer alternative ways to communicate with friends and colleagues, so are we seeing the end of email?

The answer is an almost definite no, but what we might be about to see is the transformation of email from its current solid, siloed form into something that is more closely integrated with the social platforms many of us use. One of the latest products to look at improving individuals’ experiences with email is Fluent.

Fluent, which is currently in beta testing, is an application that integrates with Gmail and transforms the user experience from a list of emails presented in grid form to something more akin to a Twitter stream or a Facebook news feed. With Fluent an email account becomes a "stream" allowing users to take immediate action by seeing all emails at once rather than having to click into each individual email. Actions include deleting the email, replying to, archiving it or making it important. Fluent also provides inline replies, which makes responding to and seeing email conversations easier. Users can also see attachments inline, which makes browsing these much easier than having to click on a link, waiting for it to download or open and then returning to the original email.

Fluent also allows users to connect other email accounts, so they can quickly see if they've received emails outside of Gmail and reply to those using Fluent. Another interesting feature is the ability to drag and drop items using Fluent into an email message, simplifying the process of adding an attachment to an email. However, the most interesting feature of Fluent is how emails appear in a stream, making the process of opening, viewing and ultimately responding to emails much more intuitive, at least for those individuals who are used to using Twitter and similar social networking tools.

Fluent certainly looks interesting but as this post discusses"people don’t want more social email. They want less noise. Tools like this already exist and they don’t take off because people hate change". Based on this, email is certainly safe for a while, but it will be interesting to see how much take-up there is of Fluent.

Other resources;

• Fluent
• Aussies' fix for “stagnated” email
• Is email dead?

« Blog