It looks like following real problem, that currently can't be tackled with Gmail//email, can be solved with Google Wave.
Tackling management of one-way updates, such as newsletters
The way you can manage a newsletter with GMail is to create a filter, enabling you to make the message skip the inbox. The problem consists of the fact that all the messages are sitting under the filter, as unrelated, atomic items. But because these messages are newsletters from the same organization, it's highly likely that their content will be related.
Let's imagine that you will keep receiving plain email newsletters, once you are using wave. If your wave client allows you to channel all the incoming newsletters in the same wave, you can include a robot or gadget to do certain tasks for you. It could start archiving and processing older newsletters, and present their combined content in a much more accessible way. For example a tag cloud, or a searchable index.
Taking one step further, when newsletters won't get sent out in plain email anymore, but are created as waves, the whole concept of newsletter can be redefined. The wave, sitting in your email client could be a live updated list of top5 newest items on the source site, or 5 most popular items.
In any case, we might be able to get rid of recurring, individual email messages, just because it doesn't require an individual message to update the wave, and bring new content to your attention.
To be continued by how Wave can tackle the Ever Growing Inbox
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6 comments:
Aren't e-mail newsletters already replaced by blogs on which we subscribe with rss, which we read with rss-readers that already have these type of features?
Adion, that is wishful thinking. But Email is a push and reminder, and RSS is passive. People who are marketing still want to push out information - not that they are pushing it onto people - you do have to subscribe.
I blog, and I include blog posts in a semi-regular email to my contacts. Those that want can read in RSS, others get the newsletter and look back to the site when the snippet interests them.
It's all semi-structured, in that the info is tagged, dated, has its formatting separate from its content, etc - so it makes sense that in the future a wave/robot could start to aggregate it in a way that would be superior to Google Reader filtering it into one folder or Gmail under one filter.
Just a thought.
Maybe it is wishful thinking for you, but for me it is exactly what I'm doing and what I'm happy with.
I just wonder what use it would have to have blogs/newsletters categorized using things like tags.
For me, I subscribe to blogs or newsletters because I'm interested in reading them. If I don't read them when they arrive, I probably don't have time to read them later either.
When I actually need information on a certain topic, I don't tend to look in my personal archive of information (which may have made sense when we didn't have internet available 24/7), rather I use a search engine to search for the information I need in all blogs/websites available, rather than the limited number of blogs I am subscribed to.
So personally I think the strength of automatic categorizing is probably more in filtering personal/private email discussions, rather than information that is searchable and publicly available already.
For me personally, I have high and low peaks of interest in particular newsletters. I'm still subscribed on some newsletters, for which my interest has almost zero-ed out.
However, it's striking that I sometimes find a little nudge of information particularly useful in my context ... but I think i miss most of these, because I stopped reading the newsletters.
It might be a killer feature if you could do a search on all your waves, for relevant updates concerning a subject, for which the last update occured within a specific timeframe.
A few of my own usecases:
in the past, I purchased audio equipment, but I only buy audio equipment max 2 times per year. At the moment when I'm ready for another purchase, I want an overview of all recent bargains from websites where I bought in the past (of which some of them I might be subscribed to a newsletter).
Social stuff for newsletters might also create added value: I only want to be notified of a certain newsletter, or nugget of information, if someone I know has recommended it.
I think what you've brought up is quite interesting and something that goes quite beyond just newsletters.
Essentially this would alter the way people think about subscribing to content and publishing content. Basically you're introducing the concept of a Wave that potentially (like in the case of a set of related newsletters) doesn't end. The wave could just refresh, archiving old content somehow instead of just sending a new wave. It would make sense if you would ever want to search back catalogs of newsletters that it would all be in the one place.
You could even integrate Waves and RSS more closely in this way.
Ares, I am looking forward to your follow up post. At the moment my feeling says Wave will actually increase my mailbox content.
The Wave demo seems to suggest the same model as Gmail where you don't clean up your mailbox but just do a search. This works well for me now, but what will happen when Wave is used for everything. Extensions, robots and gadgets can link my inbox to svn, documents, scientific publications, facebook, twitter and what not. You could make the analogy with firefox extensions and call the user responsible for not installing to many. However in that case I think Wave is missing its goal and purpose.
Maybe I missed this in the Wave demo, but how can you (or Wave) bring structure into an even bigger flow to my inbox? Is the search-model good enough? I like the idea of a central place for all information that concerns me, but at the same time I fear the a tsunami instead of structured waves.
So hopefully you can provide me a little piece of comfort in your next post ;-)
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