Web Services Over Email
"There's an overload of social networks, and information in general on the web."
I'm sure you've heard this before, and depending on how good or bad your web filters are, you might agree or disagree with this.
A new entrant in the web space has a really huge upfront challenge -- to convince a person on the web to visit one more site. Regularly.
That's a huge barrier, one that a web site creator would (if ever) be able to get rid of very slowly, over a long period of time.
Mobile apps are an alternative way of connecting services and users, and one that seems to be working better than websites. A large reason behind that is, once an app has been discovered and downloaded from an application store, the competition is way way less than that on the web. An average phone, I'm guessing, won't have more than 300 apps, as compared to the open web comprising of millions (?) of sites. So the extra effort required to download a new app as compared to visiting a new website, in a way, works in favor of services that have already found a place on a user's device.
But I've been thinking about an additional path of connecting a service with a user. Email.
Competition for new services over email would be somewhere in between the web and apps, depending on how full your inbox is.
I know, I know, email sucks, and people hate email, but you know what -- despite people hating email, most of them access it daily. Hell, people have a Gmail tab open in their browser throughout their time on it.
And this isn't an original thought either. Mailing lists were, and still are an important part of the web, FeedBurner RSS emails still have a huge number of subscribers, bulk mails sent by e-commerce sites, although generally filed under the spam category, help users know the latest offers, mass emailing solutions like MailChimp are growing and so on...
But excluding mailing lists, most of these types of mails still have webpages as their endpoints. There aren't many services that do all their interaction with a user via mail. And there's a good reason for that -- the email protocol hasn't developed much over the years, largely due to the involvement of a large number of parties. (Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, Hotmail, Thunderbird, Outlook, Apple Mail and a lot more.)
A lot of these email providers have tried to augment email with various addons. Gmail for example lets you view Google documents and YouTube videos right in your email body. Hotmail added a number of features like inline photo previews and Facebook chat to their web based client recently. But all these features are email provider specific and are half baked to avoid breaking compatibility with other email clients.
It's worth mentioning that Google tried to innovate and develop the modern version of email, but it failed miserably.
The best examples of services that I think can be "consumed" without looking at their web interfaces at all are News.me and Google groups. Of course, Google groups is essentially a mailing list, but it does illustrate the ideal way a service should work over email, that is, the dependence on a website for daily tasks should be minimal, or none. The other example, News.me, is a service that looks at my Twitter feed and algorithmically finds links I should read. These links are sent to me daily, via an email. Although it requires me to click on links, which in turn open in a new browser tab, but at its essence News.me is a collection of links found for me, and it perfectly serves this purpose via email.
What would it take for more services to be more email friendly? A better and improved version of email of course. One that could embed interactive elements like forms, videos, charts and the likes right within the email body. Think of your email client as the OS and the emails you receive as apps. I know this would make those scumbag sites that send out bulk mails to promote their products very, very happy, but I'm sure that with a little bit of curation this problem can be dealt with.
What's most appealing (to me at least) about this concept is that everything would finally be at a single place. Think about it, that's why RSS took off, it finally let people read stuff on various websites in a single place. The same concept of "many things dispersed all over the web in a single place" is the reason why aggregators like Digg, Reddit, Techmeme etc. took off, and I want the same sort of concept to be included in email in the future. (With a lot of added functionality to help achieve this.)
Sadly, email right now seems very "static" with a few provider specific implementations to make a half assed attempt at adding "dynamism." I hope whatever body regulates email rises up to the occasion and makes email better, or that a large email provider steps up and develops a propriety protocol on top of email to add the much needed dynamism to email.
A lazy implementation of this would be to allow the entire HTML, Javascript and CSS technology stack within email, but that would obviously introduce a lot of security concerns. A better option would be to create some sort of API that exposes the required functionality, while at the same time taking care that security and data privacy is maintained.
While many people call for the death of email, I want my favourite services to deliver good (not to forget, interactive) content to me via email, since I spend a lot of time on it.
Maybe this seems like a huge step back for you, but email is the only website I access daily, with great consistency.
(This was a chain of thought, and after reading this through, I see that I've gone from talking about an email based service to the pathetic state of email development.)
