What kind of openness you want?

Brij Singh (brijsingh) — Tue, 20 May 2008 00:55:18 GMT

Something has to be said about the flurry of blog posts coming out with words like "revolution", "data portability", "freedom" , "It's your data" and "open" etc. Suddenly I started seeing parallel to this in something I read long time back. What was that? Animal Farm? Or was it 1984? Or maybe Brave New World? In any case the story of Utopian quest is just that: been-there-done-that. Two legged still an enemy. I really respect Umair's strategic insights on digital media and related topics but on his recent post he got me confused. I am hearing lot about openness but nobody is defining the real nature of openness we are debating. What kind of openness really matters? We are dealing with three kinds of openness - Openness of intent (which is what search history is all about - Google is a natural monopoly). Nobody is demanding openness for that yet, since the value of that data is not widely appreciated. Just wait for few more years. As search gets increasingly perform...

Read the complete blog post here

Email still has plenty of juice left.

Rajesh Shetty (rshetty) — Sun, 11 May 2008 03:31:14 GMT

"Oh! I have so much data, I want to protect every bit of it and I want users to come to me everyday" said Social network sites when they gathered millions of users. For well known reasons social media world is keeping the tremendous amount of valuable data trapped within its arena. This is no secret to savvy users of all these different services. So we see initiatives like DataPortability and OpenSocial picking up good traction. Facebook, MySpace are doing this but taking careful steps as they have a lot tied with their data which they want to protect as much as they want. Users want their data to be portable and they want it quick. On the other end we have "email" which is loved my billions from its inception thru today and it is still not used very well in the context of social communication and messaging except basic notification service within every major social media sites.

There is a huge gap between email world and social media world as far as data distribution is concerned. Email should go beyond "Notify me when I have a new message or comment" notion. Wouldn't it be helpful to get all that email power close to social media community in terms of outreach, sharing and connection.

As per About.com

183 billion messages per day means more than 2 million emails are sent every second. About 70% to 72% (or between 128 and 132 billion) of them might be spam and viruses. The genuine emails are sent by around 1.2 billion email users.

Recently as per Techcrunch on the other topic very interesting numbers came around usage/how much time users spend on different desktop applications. If you relate these numbers with email.

In top 10 , users spend more time on 4 email applications (Outlook, Gmail, mail, Thunderbird)
In Top 3, users spend time on 2 email applications.

So we love email here at MessageDance and believe that there are enough innovative and intriguing things can be built around it using users current attention span and exposing them to the interesting content sharing model across social media. To facilitate this, in last few weeks we have released nice little features like

Sharing and blog right from Amazon, Google Reader, Digg, YouTube, Facebook and iPhone
Tag messages as you write them and make your messages more social.
Multi email support : Add multiple email addresses to the account. With this you can blog right from your blackberry when you are on road and go back to office and blog from your outlook.
User's entourage : you can see what your friends and your friend's friends are talking about.

We are working on lot more in coming weeks.

As we let the time and great ideas build the gap between, so called "legacy email" and emerging social media, we will run into creative ways of using our daily life which is trapped in the wonderful world of email.

MessageStream with Tags : dataportability

What kind of openness you want?

Email still has plenty of juice left.