Email is (still) the killer app

I’ve always loved email and messaging. Its power comes from it’s simplicity, ubiquity and fluidity. I’ve been passionate about messaging’s long term potential, and over the course of my career I funded OneList/eGroups, eCircles, Visto, Critical Path, Plaxo, Meebo, SocialCast, and Urban Airship. Messaging is a shared passion at True: My Partner Toni Schneider was CEO of Oddpost, and my other Partners Tony Conrad and Phil Black were investors. Om’s been a believer, if not a fan, for awhile too.

Consider how despite all recent messaging innovations, e-mail remains just about the perfect narrow and mid-cast communication platform. It’s how we communicate today in life, especially when we want to narrow-cast (1-5 recipients) or mid-cast (5-15 recipients) some info. Facebook and Twitter have changed the way we broadcast information and status updates, but we now have pretty large social graphs. Large social graphs are good for broadcast, but we rely on email when we want to send a photo around (or invitation, or burst of news) to a smaller group.

Business runs on email. It’s smooth for commerce. Groupon and others distribute via the email channel, and basic email newsletters drive a staggaring amount of commerce for Amazon and other e-tailers. Most products in the True portfolio couldn’t operate without email and messaging. Email is an enterprise system of record.

Email serves as the connective tissue to today’s social web. Social networking’s real killer apps are fluid account signup/verification/invitation, and they all run on e-mail. So, too do the other killer apps of status notifications and media sharing. Today’s social networks are fundamentally changing how we communicate and share, but what is remarkable to me is how these new mediums make basic email more valuable and important, not less. The social web gets a lot of it’s social via email, and Twitter and Facebook couldn’t exist without the connective tissue of email.

Email is identity. Very few services bridge the physical and digital web as seemlesly as email. For most of today’s web services. Your email address is on your business card, your signature file. It’s a standard for login web-wide. You are who your address says you are. Domains mean a lot, both to companies as brands and to people as identities. As we think about the next generation of identity and networking apps, email as a backbone is a key part of any strategy for growth and verification.

Simple, big, powerful.

Much as we love where it’s been, we think where it’s going is even more exciting.

Usage patterns are changing and demanding new interface requirements. Ironically, because it is such a killer app, we now require new and better ways to control mail and messaging. The backbone itself needs an overhaul to keep up with how important it is to the new web.

No surprise that mobile changes everything. But odd how it does in this way: for some reason, when we hold our phones we make really different messaging mode choices depending on the context of the conversation or nature of the relationship. We call or text our strongest ties (or most urgent), choose to email others, while BBM’ing business partners. One mode doesn’t fit all in the mobile environment, and over time this trend will likely break the hegemony of the inbox. . Instinctively on our phones we blend messaging into a multi-modal activity, and we do it on the fly. Services that tap into these preferences automatically are the future.

Apps make messaging decentralized, and apps allow activity-based, interest and community based threading. Notifications and in-app messaging are now standards on all mobile apps, and we’re still trying to understand (as users) how all of these new channels work. Different channels will be great for different things, but it’s not yet clear which works best for what. Witness the growth of new pure play mobile messaging services such as GroupMe, Beluga, Enflick, Mbuzzy to see how quickly we’re changing.

Interface design needs lots of work, as does the intelligence both in the apps and in the stack. More fine grained permissioning and routing for different types of messages and different usage scenarios are on the way, as are powerful analytics to provide visibility and control into messaging platforms. Messaging services operate at enormous scale, and so the cloud unlocks tremendous potential for smarter backbones and richer services.

We’re pretty bullish about the future of the mail and messaging platforms, and we’d love to talk with you about these trends. We plan significant investment in this space in the months and years ahead.