Email, Super-hero tool, underrated to build Mobile/Web Apps!

Posted on | February 4, 2010 | View Comments

The email was invented in the 1970s and till date it is one of the most commonly used tool on the Internet. 92% of people read or send emails on the Internet, followed closely by using a search engine (89%) source. Email has the advantage of being platform independent i.e. you can send an email from your mobile, web, desktop etc. Blackberry, a mobile telephone aimed at business people, till date promotes it’s email functionality as one the most important feature for users.

Rise of smart phones

Rise of smart phones with multimedia make email even more important. Smart phones like iPhone, HTC (using Google Android - Google’s mobile Operating System), Blackberry etc means that developers need to build applications for each phone. It’s really frustrating for a company to launch their offering first on the web and then provide it’s users with the functionality on individual mobile phones. This implies that many applications are limited to the iPhone or Google Android enabled devices. Hence many major applications are missing out potentially on a huge opportunity, whether it’s targeting business  users on Blackberry or the general public on Samsung, Nokia, Palm or other major phone providers.

Email provides us with the opportunity to solve this increasingly inconvenient experience by having a unified approach. Email allows users to send in their data: images, texts, music and videos in an easy to consume format. Given that all major email providers follow a standard, it means that sending and receiving data is easier, faster and relatively problem free.

Email is the universal App

In essence my suggestion is that email is the platform independent universal application, which any developer can be confident to build and appeal to any mobile, desktop or laptop user. Email provides a great opportunity to not only send (output) information but also receive information in a easy to understand format.

To understand how this works best to look at the non-technical version of the email, Snail Mail. Till recently (and to some extent even now), mail was the way we communicated for most formal engagements: work related, housing, invitations etc. For instance request was sent in the form of letters for a brochure of houses available in the area. Now there is an app for finding houses! Clearly this was how we use our email today and will do till applications like Google Wave, real-time un-interpretive form of communication are widely adopted.

When does Email work as an app

Unfortunately though, email doesn’t always make the ultimate app. Email is good for responding and submitting but rubbish at receiving, let me explain. Email is good at responding because you know what you are reacting to, usually the response is simple and you can easily address it to a person. Similarly when you are submitting information, it’s targeted, user understands the limitation and send appropriate material across.

Two applications for example are:

1. Facebook respond to comment via email. Facebook allows users to respond to comments on profiles via email. It formats the response and removes elements of the email which are not constitute as a response.
2. WordPress, blog via email. WordPress, popular blogging platform, allows users to post a blog via a secret email address. User’s can send their posts including images via email, WordPress then works out the content and translates them into a blog.

Innovation in email applications

Facebook and WordPress are just tip of the iceberg when it comes to using email as an application or an interface. My favourite examples are TripIt and Posterous:

TripIt allows you to manage everything related to your travel like airline bookings, hotel reservations, maps etc in one place. The unique selling point is that TripIt unlike other travel sites allows users to enter information by just forwarding the confirmation email to the TripIt system. User’s don’t have to manually enter data, how fantastic it that?

Posterous is a Y Combinator startup that was founded in mid 2008. It’s a simple web publishing platform via email. Text and files can be uploaded to the site via email. Users can send multimedia and text, which is automatically processed and is added to the user’s profile.

Conclusion

Email is a fantastic, a true super-hero tool for users. Developers should use more of it to build a unified approach to building applications. One which would save them time, money and most importantly provide users a great user experience and satisfaction.

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