A Superhuman Invite

Rapportive founder’s new startup Superhuman is what Gmail would be if built today
Beyond Gmail: The new race to reinvent your inbox
Email Productivity with Superhuman
The Superhuman Change To My Current Email Tools
Superhuman
Rahul Vohra
Gaurav Vohra

founders! here's a step by step guide to get to Product/Market Fit; please send it those who need it —https://t.co/GKrgHn2XnP

— Rahul Vohra (@rahulvohra) November 13, 2018

Props to @SuperhumanCo for no longer making me fear my inbox.

— Jeremie Harris (@jeremiecharris) March 4, 2019

.@SuperhumanCo is to email, what slices are to bread

— Sam Cholera (@sam_cholera) March 5, 2019

I just love read receipt tracking feature in @SuperhumanCo. It is so powerful!

— Mohit Agrawal (@mohitify) March 5, 2019

Inbox

Google continues to delight. But I don't see how this solves the problem for those who get too much email.




Inbox is a total reinvention of email from Google
Google debuts Inbox, a new way to stay on top of email
Google’s Inbox is A New Email App From The Gmail Team Designed Not To Be Gmail

1 TB: Yahoo Mail's Reentry With A Bang

August 2000 Issue of Yahoo! Internet Life (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Of all things Yahoo Mail could have done, 1 TB in free storage tops the charts. It totally grabbed my attention. Already in recent weeks I have been mass labeling a bunch of mail in my Yahoo inbox as spam so as to declutter.

Getting only relevant mail and 1 TB of free storage surely gets me to give Yahoo Mail a second look. There is no way I am walking away from Gmail. But we all can use a good second email address. I know I need one. Heck, I could use three. Let Hotmail compete.

I could use a Yahoo version of Google Drive for free online storage.

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Reading Every Comment

Fred Wilson writes great blog posts. His style of writing is remarkable. He naturally speaks simply and clearly. That is no small feat for someone who deals with some very complex technology for a living. But as impressive as his blog posts are I think where he truly shines is in his dedication to read every comment anyone ever leaves at his blog. Fred Wilson has not been able to read every email in his inbox in years. But he reads every comment left at his blog. Now you know how to get hold of him!

Fred Wilson: Reading Every Comment

I read every comment left on AVC. .... The community here is large and engaged. They can have a great conversation without me. .... I have long made peace with not reading every email that is sent to me. I bet I don't read more than 25% of the emails sent to me these days. I still manage to read every email my wife and kids send to me. And I still manage to read most of the email my colleagues at USV send to me. And I still manage to read most of the email our portfolio companies send to me. Beyond that, it's a crap shoot

Fred Wilson's Blog: A Gift That Keeps Giving

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Character Limits In Email

Image via CrunchBase

Imagine an email service where when someone emails you for the first time their message has a character limit of something like 200. If you never open up their emails, they stay put at 200. And their messages don't count against your inbox space.

But if you open up their email, their limit goes up to 300 or 400 characters. But if you don't reply to their email, they stay there. On the other hand you could simply ban them and their privileged 200 characters are also gone.

But if you read and reply, the character limit goes up to 500 or more. Unless you specifically click on a button that allows them limitless space.

At one end are email concepts like on Facebook where you message me because we are connected. At the other end are regular email services where anyone can send you anything.

The inbox has to be like a cellular membrane. It has to protect the cell, but it also has to selectively allow outside stuff.

Beyond this "membrane" there have to be hard core demarcations. Facebook seems to have nailed social communication. Seems like people you know really well are only so many. And I feel like Asana is cracking the code on work communication. I have been reading up on it.

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The Email Conundrum

Cover of Groundhog Day/Ghostbusters/StripesFred Wilson: The Black Hole Of Email

I don't want to make email work better for me. I don't want to hire an assistant to do email for me. I don't want to try some new magical app that will make email better for me. ...... I give email an hour in the morning, an hour in the evening, and I dive into it throughout the day. The result is probably three hours a day in total. That's all I'm going to give email. And it is not enough to manage the inbound flow.

I don't have this problem. Usually when I am online I treat emails like they were text messages. I read and reply immediately. Saves me time. Short replies are not considered rude since I was polite enough to reply immediately. If I read an email but do not, can not reply immediately I use the Mark It As Unread feature to come to it later. I mean, Gmail is so central to my work, when I am emailing, I am working. My tech consulting team is global and email is absolutely the best way to keep moving. I look forward to the emails.

But then I don't read half the emails I get. You see who or what (usually what) sent it, you read the subject line and you realize they are not even worth deleting. Deleting would cost time. Instead I might mass delete in a few months. Mass deleting emails is fun. It is amazing how emails lose value over time. (Inbox Zero)

But I am nowhere close to Fred Wilson's scale. My question to Fred is, how big is your Inbox? Granted you don't read more than three out of 10 emails you get, but is your Inbox 99% full? Have you paid for a petabyte of Gmail space? Did Zynga go IPO?

That is not to say the Inbox is not a serious innovation territory. But the ultimate barrier there is human. You could end up with the best filters and still end up with too much email. I mean, if you have only three hours a day for email, there are only so many emails you can read. So you better have a great ultimate filter for people whose emails you don't want to miss.

I already have those filters. I use several platforms. If you are a stranger who just wants to say hello, send a tweet. That is the best way. If you know me well, send a Facebook email.

I don't even use the Priority Inbox. I guess I don't have an email problem. Not yet.

Reimagining The Inbox The Simple Way
Adam Smith And The Inbox Space
The Inbox: Like Search Before Google
The Inbox Could See New Life This Year
2010: Location, Random Connections, The Inbox, Frictionless Payments
The Search Results, The Links, The Inbox, The Stream
My Gmail Prayers Heard: Multiple Inboxes

Who you gonna call?

Email: Still A Swell Medium

Whoever says email is yesterday's thing is wrong. GroupOn is 100% dependent on email. Have you noted? Just make sure people willingly gave their emails to you. And even after that make it super easy for them to unsubscribe. Email marketing only works when it is super targeted. And make it pretty.

FoodSpotting API
FoodSpotting Follows Me On Twitter
With Jeremy Frank Of FoodSpotting
FoodSpotting's Dish As Starting Point
Twitter ---> Instagram ---> FoodSpotting
Looks Like FoodSpotting Rocked Austin

"Do You Have An Email Address?"

This had to have been in 2005, 2006. I was doing democracy work for Nepal. My blog was my primary tool. And I had the largest Nepali mailing list in the world. I had managed to penetrate all the key organizations inside the country and out. And I stayed on a constant lookout for new email addresses.

So I am at this event in Queens. It has not started yet. I am working the room, meeting people, blatantly asking for email addresses.

I came across this guy who apparently did not know what an email address was. Every Nepali in the city has a phone, but only a minority even today have email addresses.

"Would you have an email address?" I asked.

"I do, but I forgot it at home," he said and saved face.

The guy apparently thought I was talking about some kind of a physical object. Like, do you have a Vespa?

Facebook Messaging: Awesome

You don't go after Google with search like Bing did. You go after it from an angle. Call it social, call it Facebook. And so I had no idea what Facebook's Gmail killer application would look like. That was the metaphor that had been making the rounds. Facebook is not calling it email. Facebook is calling it messaging.

Facebook Blog: See the Messages that Matter: Between mobile devices and the Internet we can be more connected today than ever before, but there is still a feeling that the technology can also act as a barrier between us. .... the next evolution of Messages ..... You shouldn't have to remember who prefers IM over email or worry about which technology to use. Simply choose their name and type a message. ..... All of your messages with someone will be together in one place, whether they are sent over chat, email or SMS. You can see everything you've discussed with each friend as a single conversation. ..... From "hey nice to meet you" to "do you want to get coffee sometime" to "our kids have soccer practice at 6 pm tonight." .... It seems wrong that an email message from your best friend gets sandwiched between a bill and a bank statement...... Instead of having to worry about your email address getting out, you're now in control of who can actually reach you. ..... Relatively soon, we'll probably all stop using arbitrary ten digit numbers and bizarre sequences of characters to contact each other.

Facebook has not disappointed. The expectations were high. They have been met.

What Gmail Can Learn From Yahoo Mail

Image via CrunchBaseThere is this feature in Yahoo Mail, you click on the Sender column title at the top, and all your emails get organized by who sent you the email. You click on Date and all your emails in the inbox get similarly organized.

This feature comes in very handy when you are out to massacre emails. You want to save that rare email. On the other hand you don't want to have to delete emails one at a time.

Email Solutions

Image via CrunchBase

TechCrunch: Email Overload Fix: 3 Sentence Emails

Email has to be completely scalable. There can not be too much email. Not for nobody. That is the ultimate email solution. I could get 10 emails a day, or 10,000, and I still should not have to feel overwhelmed.

On the other hand, email has to have a holistic communication approach. It has to fit into the larger picture. That solution is multi platform.

One direction is condensing. It is about being able to visualize 10,000 tweets at once. Another direction is when you want to spend a lot of quality time with one or more people. Your communication platform should make that possible.

The inbox today is dreaded. That right there is a huge business opportunity, or two, or three. Gmail's Priority Inbox is a good step in the right direction, but it does not even begin to fathom the inbox of those who get deluged with emails.

Facebook helps. You get emails from people you are already "friends" with, or groups you signed up for. Strangers can email you, but they have to send out one email to one person at a time. Facebook email does cut out a lot of noise.

Twitter is my idea of the email client of tomorrow, but Twitter has been dragging its feet forever on adding features and simplifying its service.

The Gmail free phone is great. The voice feature of Gchat is great. Sometimes you want to dig into a conversation, and you want to zero in on a person, and text does not do it, so you talk. You get your headset going.

And then there is meeting in person. FourSquare can be a swell platform for that. FourSquare's social graph is special. While you are zeroing in on a person, you want to cut out all the noise, you don't want to be taking calls, you don't want to be seeing yet another incoming email.

For me blogging is an essential element of the larger complete communication platform. Being able to reach out to complete strangers who might also be talking about some of the same things you might be talking about is so very key.

But then all communication all the time is not what we could possibly be shooting for. Where is the time for non communication work? The time to get things done? The time to acquire new knowledge? Social is not 100% of the territory. Social is not 10% of the territory. The best communication platform knows when you are thinking, and lets you be: a phone that does not ring, a screen that goes into hibernation.

A good communication platform knows when you are on vacation. When you are off, you are off.
I have been impatient with Twitter. (User Friendly Twitter? Get Out Of Town) And I have been impatient with Gmail.

You should be able to visualize 100,000 tweets right on the Twitter website. And perhaps for Gmail the next big push after the Priority Inbox will be the word cloud. I should be able to say, create a word cloud for all my unread emails for the day. And when I hover over each word, I should see the names of each sender associated with that word, with the option to click and go to that specific email.

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Adam Smith And The Inbox Space

Image via CrunchBase

This guy Adam Smith popped up in my inbox today. Responding to an urge by Fred Wilson a few days ago, I signed up for the Venture Hacks mailing list, and today they sent me Adam Smith. It has been a cool find. Although I remember getting amused by the inbox spelled backwards thing from a few years back, in passing, (I remember watching that Bill Gates video that Adam inserts in his presentation in the video below, and I might be off on the time stamp) I am learning the guy's name for the first time today.

Venture Hacks Daily Newsletter

My interest in Adam Smith is that I have been giving some thought to the inbox space here at my blog recently.

Reimagining The Inbox The Simple Way
2010: Location, Random Connections, The Inbox, Frictionless Payments

I like it how he says no he has not solved the inbox problem, that problem is too big, he has not even attempted to solve the inbox problem. More than humility, it is a matter of fact. There is much work that can be done in the inbox space. Could you make the inbox sexy again?

@asmith
@dharmesh



Adam Smith's blog. (founder of Xobni) "We make email software that makes it easier for people to manage relationships and find information in their email......included in the MIT Technology Review's list of Top 35 Innovators Under 35, and Inc Magazine's Top 30 Entrepreneurs Under 30."

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The Great Q& A Wars of 2009 ~ 2014 The major players are now Quora, StackOverflow, and Hunch..... Aardvark had about 40 bytes of information about me. They knew I was into startups, programming, and San Francisco. ....“everyone on the SO team works remotely from home” ..... dreaming about the company's problems at night, not talking at too many conferences, or doing other fake CEO stuff.
Magic in the software -- what the point and shoot camera industry needs I take pictures on my iphone using the Dropbox app. Pictures I take are immediately copied to all of my computers. .... There are a ton of apps that remain out of reach to point and shoots. ..... The magic is in the software.
Seven Major Websites that Send Passwords Unprotected, and State Sponsored Deep Packet Inspection Seven of the 36 sites I tested sent passwords in the clear, available for an Internet Service Provider to read. .... 50% of the Chinese websites I tested were offenders. .... There are well known, easily implementable techniques for securing passwords sent back to a server.
Technology to circumvent online copyright enforcement “Why it might become civil disobedience to serve up random data.” .... Any given copyrighted work could be expressed across 10 random-looking files.
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Reimagining The Inbox The Simple Way

2010: Location, Random Connections, The Inbox, Frictionless Payments

If You Like Your Inbox, Keep It

Like Obama never tired of saying on the campaign trail for health care reform, if you like your current coverage, you get to keep it. So if you like your current inbox where you get emails from your friends and family and those dictators in Nigeria, you get to keep it. You actively would have to choose to go for the multi inbox option. (Obama's Got Momentum: He Could Defy History In November)

The Inbox As A Spectrum

All human beings are created equal, but that does not apply to emails. All emails are not equal. And the inbox has to reflect that.

Inbox 1

This is the inbox that you see when you log in. These are emails sent by people whose emails you have saved as contacts. These are emails sent only to you and not to a group of people.

Inbox 2

Emails sent by people whose emails you have saved as contacts, but these emails have also been sent to other people at the same time.

Inbox 3

Emails from mailing lists I might have subscribed to.

Inbox 4

Emails from everyone else. This is not the folder for the spam emails. The current spam folder gets to hold ground.

Addendum

An email that should have showed up in inbox 3, if it shows up in inbox 1, you get to tell the system it belonged in inbox 3, and all future emails from that address would end up in inbox 3. You teach the system as you use it.

Also you get to set an expiry date on the various inboxes. All emails in inbox 3 that are more than a month old, please delete them without asking, something like that. Because even Gmail has a space limit.

And there should be an easy way to delete contacts. If you ended up saving an email address you did not mean to save, delete. Free the soul.

I think with this simple change, the inbox could see new life. Inbox 1 could again become something to always look forward to. And this suggestion is not to displace the already in place concept of threaded conversations and the other goodies.

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The Inbox Could See New Life This Year

Fred Wilson: Social Networking Vs. Email

(I was writing this as a comment at his blog, but it became long enough that I decided to make a blog post out of it.)

Social networking has surpassed email, search and is doing great in the news department. Those three were just three of the biggest web activities before these social networks came along. That is really something. (Email, Search, News)

But don't count out the inbox. I'd say location, random connections and the inbox are the three big things to look for this year. There is some interesting stuff going on in the inbox territory, I just have not had the time to figure out who the leader there is.

The inbox will rebound. That is not to say it will take back its lead. China was once the leading country on the planet.

Curiously Twitter might lead the revival of the information graph. But not the Twitter of today. (Twitter Needs To Eat Into Its Ecosystem)

The email inside Facebook is still Facebook. It is not email. Only people in your network can email you, for the most part, and do. And they do so rarely.

I don't mind being on mailing lists as long as they have a one click unsubscribe option at the bottom of each email they send out. If I am going to delete without reading anyway, why bother sending it to me? But then those dictators in Nigeria just seem to need 0.1% to respond, and that keeps them in business. So.

Even in social networking I don't believe Facebook has the final word. I have a feeling we will see a swing from the we to the me in a few years. (The Next Big Thing In Social Networking)

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