There's been quite a lot written recently about how the whole concept of e-mail has a foot in the grave already. Facebook's announcement recently about its own e-mail system is only added a little fuel to the fire. E-mail certainly is changing; to have to check your e-mail with an inbox with thousands of pieces of e-mail and to have to sort through everything, is clearly a nonviable system to have around for long. While e-mail isn't going anywhere soon, the format that it uses today may soon be a thing of the past. In a world where apps have been bringing convenience in every area where we interact with technology, programmers are bring the magic of apps to bear on the problems we have with our e-mail.
There are apps being planned now that help you something about the hundreds of notifications that you get from Facebook, Twitter or any other social networking site. It's not that what you get from these services is spam; you do value what they send you. But it does need to take a backseat to real e-mail from real people that you need to actually respond to. While it would be a good idea to set up a filter to put these away in a folder, the idea that all of these could be hidden from you completely doesn't sit well with many people. Is there a way to have two inboxes - one for the e-mails that you get from real people, and one for all the notifications from the social networking websites that you belong to? The apps that are planned now have a way of plugging into your inbox and displaying all the notifications as a sidebar right next to the inbox. You get a live and running list of notifications from all the social networking websites, while you can easily take a look at your inbox and really attend to business that needs your attention.
There are apps being planned or already on the market that try to turn your inbox into a kind of interface or an app platform to run other services through. TweetyMail for instance turns your e-mail account into an interface for your Twitter account. Hashable lets you post connections to Twitter, and let's see keep track of your popularity through Ccs and BCcs. Ever check your e-mail and put off replying to something important for later? FollowUp Cc allows you to set it up to remind you when you need to reply to something.
People don't often think of it as such, but your e-mail happens to be a text editor that's always on your phone and always with you. There's even a blogging service, Posterous, that allows you to post your blogs from your e-mail account. Before long, your e-mail account is going to be where you edit your spreadsheets, make your PowerPoint files and do everything you need to work on-the-fly. Now there's something people never thought possible with their e-mail accounts: turning them into office suites.
To check your e-mail never can be the same again before long. It's surprising how overlooked the possibilities in the inbox are. Before long, your e-mail account could be a whole platform.
Source: ezinearticles.com