John Calacanis (ceo omahalo) recently gave up on blogging and is moving back to email http://www.calacanis.com/2008/07/11/official-announcement-regarding-my-retirement-from-blogging/. He is writing more of a newsletter with a limited distribution (I'm fortunate to have signed on before he capped the distribution list). Not sure if that is a good move but it got me thinking.

Email is still very central to my activities. I have my email with me at all times and tie it in to my social activities. For example, I use it to register to blogs so that I get updates in my email (easier than rss reader). I get key facebook info, some twitter activities and so on. Email is still a radically untapped social utility and for many of us includes a huge number of contacts and most of our communications. You could easily build a social graph out of email by mapping out interactions and then organizing emails by importance rather than time. For example, an email from someone I interact with often is more important than newsletter I signed up to.

I am imagining a new breed of communication tools anchored around email but that aggregate all your activities both outbound and inbound. On the outbound side, you pick who and what receives your message. That could include emailing friends, facebook status, twitter, friendfeed and so on. On the inbound side, you get messagaes regarding all major social activities but they come in automatically segmented and organized so that you don't end up with a ridiculous stream of emails.My business stuff here, my social stuff there, my blogs stuff over there.

I could even interact with the originating service by replying to an email. For example, I get an email telling me a friend left me a facebook message. If I want to reply, I have to go to facebook, log in and punch in the reply. This a major annoyance, especially if you're on a mobile device. It would be much easier if I could just reply to the email and the new email S/W automatically generates a facebook reply message for me. Another example: you the loyal reader get one of my inspiring blogs in your email because you registered (if you haven't, look to the right and register your email). You want to leave a comment but would have to go to the actual blog, go to comments and so on. Why can't you just leave a comment by replying to the email? Very simple! What if all of you could blog your thoughts without having to register to an actual blog service and go through the learning curve. Someone could easily build an email based blogging system.

I'm not going to build this ... Got enough cool things on my plate ... But I sure hope someone does. I suspect google is doing this or will eventually. They have all the right pieces (gmail, blogger, igoogle, google reader, orkut, opensocial and android to deal with mobile aspect). They have figured out how to make money from free email by including relevant sponsored links in gmail. Plus, their mission is to organize the world's information ... It would be great if they could start with mine.

Cheers,

Allan