According to the Radicati Group, the number of email users worldwide will reach 1.6 billion in 2011 from an estimated 1.2 billion users in 2007 (393MM of these accounts are corporate users). According to Internet World Stats, just under 1.5 billion people use the Internet today. According to Nielsen//NetRatings, the digital media universe was approximately 550MM in May 2008. However you cut the data, it’s striking that about as many people use email today as use the entire web.
Despite the fact that email is still the killer app on the internet, it seems like there is very little in the way of new businesses being formed around the space. Sure, social networks are mainly a communications solution (as long as security issues are addressed). And companies like The Mechanical Zoo, Xobni, and Twitter are doing some really interesting things in the communications space. But it just seems like there is so much more to be done…
Here are a few brief thoughts, although I would really like to hear from you if you know of or have an interesting business in the communications space [you can reach me at mspeiser at gmail dot com].
1. Dynamic social networking.
There is much talk about “the social graph” in social media circles. The idea is that we all have relationships that exist in the real world, and firms like Facebook have worked to digitize the graph of those relationships. I love this guiding principle.
However, real world graphs have far greater fidelity than their digital copies. For example, let’s assume that everyone you know is a friend on Facebook. You have a crazy weekend in Las Vegas at a friend’s bachelor party and you want to share the photos with friends. That’s probably not something you want to share with co-workers, which is what happens today when you upload those photos to Facebook. Instead, you discriminate and limit distribution (likely by email) to those who attended the event. Or let’s say that you would like to ask someone for advice on getting a vasectomy? Perhaps it’s the same guys as those from the bachelor party, or perhaps you want to save that one for your doctor? How about advice on negotiating an acquisition? You get the point. Different people help you with different things and your relationships change over time.
It’s not as if I’m the first one to figure this out, of course. But sites that have asked users to proactively decode the real social graph through explicit permissions have failed miserably — the vast majority of consumers will chose not to spend their time programming such a system.
About three years ago, Microsoft Research launched SNARF which aims to user actual communication history to help users organize things. More recently, Xobni has gone much further in helping consumers understand more about their social graph derived from actual usage.
There are so many directions that this can go. One thought — why not use the social graph to build a federated white list for anti-spam purposes? In addition to the current techniques, such an approach could be used to assess the probability that a particular sender is legitimate and then the existing approaches could be modulated accordingly.
2. Data mining.
In addition to the relationship data embedded in email there is, well, everything else. I don’t even bother using desktop search anymore. Email search (at least with Apple Mail) gives me 99% of what I need. Most of what matters to me is either in the text of an email or is an attachment to an email.
Yet, it seems like the only time email is mined is as part of a legal discovery process. Oh, and Gmail’s content indexing for ad targeting. But there is so much more that can be done! If something is really important to me, I share it as an URL or as an attachment through email or IM. Aggregating that data would be immensely valuable for discovery (people who like this URL like that URL) and for search (use this data to separate signal from PageRank noise).
And things will get really exciting when my email data and metadata is mined to help personalize the web just for me. Now that’s behavioral targeting.
3. The consumer service bus (CSB).
According to Wikipedia, “a bus is a subsystem that transfers data between computer components inside a computer or between computers. Unlike a point-to-point connection, a bus can logically connect several peripherals over the same set of wires.” I use the term consumer service bus (CSB) as a play on the enterprise service bus (ESB).
The idea is that, unlike today’s point-to-point email, CSBs “logically” connect entities with entities. The first generation of CSBs follow the publish-subscribe model – Twitter, FriendFeed, Google Reader. These systems pivot around sources to which I have subscribed (a person or an RSS feed) and send me a sequential list of everything these publishers put out. But data volumes will soon grow out of control. Today a very small percentage of the internet population use these services. Once everyone I know is publishing a good chunk of what they do (publishing will need to be made a passive exercise for this to happen), consumers will drown in the noise.
Facebook’s News Feed is already picking the top ~10-15 “articles” for me from a sea of choices. I would love to see a CSB emerge that could do the same thing for everything — summarize my favorite blogs and news sources (e.g., Techmeme-style), find the best video on the web (perhaps by email URL extraction from my social network), find the most important emails from my inbox, and let me know tha traffic on my commute home will be especially bad today (because the system has a feed from my calendar and has done a mashup with Yahoo! Maps).
It’s time for email innovation.
I have seen a huge number of startups in the advertising, search, and Facebook applications segments. Surprisingly, there have been comparatively few in the communications area, despite the obvious opportunity for innovation. I smell opportunity.
8 Comments
August 25, 2008 at 6:50 am
Interesting post. You’re right - email is one (and maybe the only) tool that everyone understands. One billion users is a nice market to go after.
Have you checked out posterous? The convenience of not having to login and use a webform is enough to make it my choice for publishing anything online.
August 25, 2008 at 4:30 pm
I am not so sure I agree with what you are saying about the “sharing” issue of pictures on Facebook.
As is, for almost a year now, we have tested the concept of a Corporate Accounts on the Platform and the privacy features are such at this moment that any album you upload can be targeted to whatever “audience” you specify - one person even.
Same as applications, Posted Items, you name it. Just amazing the “technology” these people are handling. No other platform, public or private competes.
Now as for people knowing how to apply it, that´s another issue…
August 25, 2008 at 7:25 pm
Lina, I think we agree. My point is that people don’t use these features as they are currently implemented. I agree with you that they are trivial to implement by platforms and developers. But who cares if consumers don’t use them (and they don’t based on actual usage of products with which I have been involved)?
August 25, 2008 at 7:26 pm
it’s the killer app and interface for mobile (hence twitter, blackberries, etc.). people literally live in their email. i agree lots more needs to be done here …
August 26, 2008 at 8:51 am
Great post. Email possibly should die, or at least be pushed to the margins of web usage but that will take time. People are addicted to email, it’s easy to use and use badly and that’s how most use it. As we learn that we need more structure in our digital lives we will start to crave other forms of structured communication within our different pods of influence - it’s starting already and applications such as Facebook provide great general-purpose social networking (communication) tools but we are more and more looking to handle our niche communications outside of email.
August 30, 2008 at 12:01 pm
[...] Email is dead. Long live Email. « Laserlike I agree completely, there's so much value in email sitting out there just waiting to be plucked. (tags: startups) [...]
August 30, 2008 at 4:51 pm
absolutely.
email is WAY undervalued / underprioritized by most startups i speak with… this is a clear example of web 2.0 entrepreneurs being too far over the horizon of mainstream user behavior.
while blogging, micro-blogging, RSS, and social media in general is growing leaps & bounds, it’s still the case that email should be THE primary communication & retention vehicle for most websites & services. automated & periodic email should be used as a core retention strategy (and at the same time, deliverability & “unsubscribability” are paramount).
re: using email data mining as social graph, it’s amazing that Microsoft, Yahoo, Google & AOL have not done more with the mountain of data & usage they have in this area. Google appears closest to coming up with something, but Microsoft & Yahoo far surpass them in terms of overall # of users & history. Still, neither has made hardly any use of this data to energize their email platform for use in distribution or monetization (think e-commerce) the way that Facebook or MySpace are planning with their data portability initiatives (Facebook Connect & MySpace Data Availability). Google may be able to integrate Gmail data with Google Friend Connect, but again the pace of development has been glacial.
for more thoughts on this, here are 2 other posts i’ve written about using email data to drive user & platform benefit:
* Memo to Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, & AOL: How to Turn 500M email logins into Facebook Platform & a Crapload of Revenue
* Web 3.0 isn’t the Semantic Web, it’s Hailstorm 2.0. Why it Matters & How Microsoft-Yahoo can beat Google
November 2, 2008 at 1:44 am
I’ve always been a techie and yet I still like email mainly because I can use it while I’m offline. I always have connectivity problems, especially when I travel outside the US.
I disagree with Martin. Email should not die.
So take discussion boards where Q&A is answered. I stream of number of these into my email specifically so I can index them offline. Storage is so cheap I can easily affort to keep them. When I want to find the answer to a technical problem, or an expert, I can search my offline email. Not possible in a web 2.0 system that’s online.
Yes, much more can be done with email, but I like to have know what’s being done with the indexed data.
Personally, I’ve been waiting for more in terms of sync related solutions that are intelligent - using hashing methods to identify content and keep multiple device insync. Frankly,the state of music and media management (from MP3, FLACs, to HDTV) is very weak. Take for example the idea of archived hi-fidelity music. But you want to have copies of that music at different bit rates. Not easy today. Next think about how you share metadata across those different songs. Again, this is not accomplished easily.
Every developer today wants to lock you into platforms which may be fine if you buy into that ecosystem. The closed or limited ecosystem appears to be the only way to ensure predictable revenue.
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