lists of disconnected emails sorted by arrival time. Clients have no sense of priority, urgency, workflows, or connectedness.
Really? All the mail clients I can think of off the top of my head have at least threading and urgency flags. While I can think of some improvements, I don't think that there's anything significantly better out there for managing large volumes of incoming information.
I disagree. I think that email is still extremely important because of how vastly basic-level it is.
I love Facebook's messaging system. I think Twitter is a waste of time, but I think that for what it is it's done perfectly. Neither holds a candle to email, because it's site-specific.
Texting is huge, of course. That's a messaging system that is quite possibly as big as email. But it relies on the same decentralized system as email. It's vulnerable to the same things. This presentation is just as relevant for texts.
Then there's IM, which isn't decentralized (not the popular types, anyway), and which has the exact same productivity problem but amplified.
Either way, I think that the chart in this slide (urgent/important) is the central problem that any sort of inbox, be it email or texting or feed or IM, needs to prepare itself for. And I think that whoever solves it has a pretty huge userbase ripe for the plucking.
But don't bet against decentralized systems, because they take forever to go away (look at how much Panic is getting for Unison, their UseNet client), and don't bet against email until there's a better existing system in place that doesn't rely on walled information.
Really? All the mail clients I can think of off the top of my head have at least threading and urgency flags. While I can think of some improvements, I don't think that there's anything significantly better out there for managing large volumes of incoming information.