Jeremiah Owyang - Email Consumes Us

One of the savviest new media/Web 2.0/social media/etc blogger/analyst/commentators out there, Jeremiah Owyang, just wrote a great post on how Email Consumes Us.   This comes on the heels of Michael Arrington's post on email troubles that I just wrote about.

As I've been writing about for a while, the very nature of email itself is changing.  Two major things have changed about email in the past few years.  The volume (duh, more!) and the nature (it's no longer just individual messages, it's projects and tasks and collaboration).

Yet email clients are still fundamentally designed to process messages one by one and treat them as independent units of data.  That approach just doesn't scale and doesn't reflect the type of connected and context-rich information contained within email.

Somewhat ironically, web-based solutions are by and large using email as the standard notification hub, actually increasing the requirement for more intelligent and sophisticated email processing.  Next generation solutions for email are going to have to be much smarter about handling email intelligently and in much bigger chunks than just one message at a time.

Email is out of control.  We hear you, and we're working on it very hard!  Many thousands of business email users are already using ClearContext to stay on top of their email and actually get their work done, but we're just getting started.  I expect you'll see a lot of other players entering the space as well, because this problem isn't going away anytime soon.  The level of pain people feel with email is opening the door to a whole new generation of solutions, and we intend to be right at the forefront of this email revolution.