April 27, 2009, 7:07 am
Email is no longer about channeling conversations between people, as Alistair Croll suggests. Instead it has become a record of what we do online and, as such, our inbox must fundamentally change or face extinction.
It’s a provocative argument. I suspect it’s also true.
Croll writes:
Today, I have to visit dozens of other sites and services to make sense of my online life. This is a waste: I already have a record of all these transactions in my inbox. I just need a better way to look at them.
Gmail offered a tantalizing glimpse of what inboxes could be, but stopped short of recognizing this shift from conversations to a digital record of our online lives. The inbox of the future looks more like logfile analysis and aggregation and less like an email platform.
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