| ZD Net Asia offers an interesting look at the idea of integrated inboxes. In her article, Integrated inboxes wave of the future?, Victoria Ho looks at how companies like, Google, Mozilla, and others are recognizing that users are facing a new type of inbox overload.  For a long time, people have struggled with inbox overload in the sense that it is difficult keeping up with the volume of messages arriving in one’s email inbox. But in recent years, the problem has multiplied to include keeping up with the volume of message traffic—not just email messages—in multiple different “inboxes”. Many users have multiple email accounts plus accounts on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Google Wave, blog commenting systems, news groups, etc.
Several fundamental problems—time to awareness, finding stuff, and responding efficiently—are not only growing in size, but are also growing in scope. On top of growing traffic volume, add the need to monitor multiple distinct traffic sources and to manage workflows in multiple disparate environments and the situation quickly becomes untenable. Forward looking companies are recognizing the need for an entirely new class of communication platform—the integrated inbox. An integrated inbox is a centralized inbox that aggregates and unifies multiple disparate message sources such as email, Twitter, Facebook, Google Wave, instant messaging, etc. The goal of an integrated inbox is to provide a single touch point for staying on top of one’s daily message tsunami. While the idea of integrated inboxes makes tremendous sense for enterprise knowledge workers, look for early incarnations to surface in consumer offerings. Quoting from the ZD Net Asia article, David Ascher, CEO of Mozilla Messaging, observes: "I think the consumer market is leading the charge here, because people are communicating in a huge variety of new ways, and enterprises tend to be slower to adopt new technologies," he said, noting that worker demand will help move the way enterprises choose their IT products, "even if [these] were not on the CIO's plan" initially. Think about your own daily activities. How many “inboxes” to you monitor? How much easier would it be if you had a single, integrated inbox? |
Contact
