Whoever knew that sorting email would turn out to be such a major strategic innovation?
Yahoo just introduced an enhancement to their email system that does just that and it’s getting a great deal of press. Including from us, of course.
Why is it getting all this publicity? The concept they say they’re introducing includes a means of sorting your email automatically based on key people and organization connections in your profiles. It uses Yahoo Mail’s Welcome Page to display this sorting, all with the goal of enhancing connections and suggesting new relationships to consider, all the while making it easier and faster to clear through the clutter of stuff we all receive every day.
Sorting itself isn’t all that new, of course. Spam filters themselves, from the simplest to the most elaborate, already help remove significant parts of daily mailbox clutter to make it easier to see what’s important. Smart mailboxes, such as are already provided in Apple Mail, and affinity-sensing plug-ins such as Xobni for Microsoft Outlook also provide other great features for sorting and making other use of the content embedded within received emails.
But Yahoo’s solution to all this is nicely executed, at least according to the video of the enhanced mail application video Yahoo posted on December 15 at: http://www.ymailblog.com/blog/2008/12/take-a-tour-of-yahoo-mails-new-smarter-inbox/. It should draw new customers just for these features alone.
Beyond “just mail sorting”, however, the enhanced mail application will also will provide easier linking and connecting to networking applications like Flickr, Flixter, and Xoopit, among others. All of which makes this more efficient and fun for all, especially for those of us used to digging through often hundreds of emails a day, even with the spam filters switched on high.
For Yahoo, the strategic advantage this offers is that it may move new potential Yahoo mail users to their platform. It may also bring at least some of those that already ported their logins for Yahoo mail into Outlook, Entourage, Eudora, Thunderbird, and Apple Mail, among others, back to Yahoo’s web-based client. All of which means the potential for website stickiness on Yahoo, still one of the top website draws even with their recent tactical challenges.
But even that isn’t why this is such an important strategic move from my perspective. What is far more interesting to me is about how this may yet bring about the first major stage in dissolving the barriers between the major (currently proprietary) social networks.
The first step to “bringing down the walls” in this arena is Yahoo’s easy approach to giving proprietary visibility to communications from those most important to each of its users. The second step, far more insidious (in a good way), is the automatic linkage (via embedded APIs the user will never need to see) to social networking services such as Flickr (an early “linker” who is, not surprisingly, part of the Yahoo business structure). In part because using email is the initiating step and because email is truly the biggest “killer app” on the internet, this could enable social networking to grow in a big way — very fast.
As this approach takes off, customers with an interest in social networking will likely demand other APIs be made available, to connections such as Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn, among others. And then the walls will begin to break down. Slowly perhaps at first, but I predict we’ll begin to see the dissolution of proprietary walls between such services over the next few years. There will be a “tipping point” none of us will be able to precisely identify, but it will come.
And for those doubters out there, remember when all email was only readable via each system’s proprietary interfaces? That has gone by the way of the “Digital Dodo”, and so too will the walls between the proprietary networks. It may not happen by companies like Facebook and MySpace agreeing to lower their own walls; history shows us that the more successful companies become the less likely they are to take on their own “creative destruction” when perhaps it is exactly the right thing to do. But somebody, perhaps building on what Yahoo has just created in concept, will find the way around this, and perhaps even as a major open source initiative from somewhere.
Was that Google chuckling in the background?
You should also check out Gist (www.gist.com). It works with Outlook as well as Gmail and any other web-based information source (LinkedIn, etc.) combining your contacts with news about them.
Robert
Gist, Inc.