Online Email

These past recent days, I am starting to discover an interesting pattern on working productivity. We rely extremely heavily on email for most of our communication needs, and stretch it to the max for filling various other things such as:

1. Making it a system of record
2. Reviewing Assets
3. Project Management
4. Gather feedback
5. etc.

Common email systems really do not scale up very well for solving these other activities. However, this is the dominant system used in Business environments today.

I am testing an idea to bridge the gap between offline nature of email and online web world. The trick is to get this going while satisfying the following email benefits:

1. Asynchronous Updates
2. Easy availability of multiple clients
3. Scheduling Meetings
4. Tagging email (in MS Outlook, Gmail etc.)
   

In brief, the idea is to allow users to embed notational tags into the body of the email. These tags are picked up the email server to collate these and present online views of the email conversation.

This small change opens up the door to:

1. Online replies to email (no clients required)
2. Email replies could easily be attached to the online view by the email server
   
3. Provide an easy way to build workspaces (recipients can view these views only after successfully validating their email address)
4. Easy integration into other online groups
5. Spawning various other views from same emails
6. Notify sender, recipients when updates are performed on the online view

The inspiration came from looking and understanding twitter, facebook, outlook etc.