he says. “Because no one controls e-mail, no one cares enough to push it to the next level. E-mail needs to innovate and move on to the next generation.” He adds, “If e-mail is the way it is now in 100 years, it’ll probably go the way of the telegraph.”
(All of this raises the question of whether social networking sites would even exist if e-mail had been more innovative over the past decade—but that’s a topic for another day. As is the budding war between Facebook and e-mail.)
Meantime, it doesn’t look like anyone’s inbox is going anywhere. “Everyone lives in e-mail,” Thazhmon says. He points out that in 2010, e-mail systems added about 500 million new users (the total user base is around 4 billion). “E-mail added a whole Facebook of new users last year,” he says.
It’s still very early days for PowerInbox, so the company is focusing less on revenues and more on building something that people want to use, Thazhmon says. Its short-term challenges include creating more apps for other kinds of services (besides Twitter, Facebook, and Groupon) and getting lots of feedback from users and potential app developers.
To that end, Thazhmon wanted me to publish a link to his e-mail address so people can contact him with feedback and questions. (Spoken like a man who gets only 100 e-mails a day.) So here you go.
Now let’s all give him another problem to solve—the e-mail volume issue.
