Tripit: Email is the new interface!
Written on 24th April 2008
8 COMMENTS 
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
Andy Denmark is one of the founders of TripIt and their VP Engineering. Tripit, The online travel assistant that received $5.1M in funding earlier this week, is a service that helps you manage your trips. The main interface for getting information into their service is email. Instead of copy/pasting and submitting to a webbased form you simply forward all your confirmation messages to plans@tripit.com. Their software then analyzes the content of the message and extracts all important information and plots in on an easy to read itinerary.
During his presentation today Andy challenged us to come up with more email centric interfaces like this. The benefits are clear. Almost everyone who uses the web has email. In fact, probably more people have access to email than access to the web.
Right now I use TwitterMail.com to send and receive messages for Twitter. I use email to send most of the photos I make to Flickr and I use email (in the background) to sync appointments with my partners via iCal. I also use email to post blogs now and then and instead of using a notebook I send my notes to an emailaccounts I reserve for just that purpose.
Some people even use email to browse the web:
Tripit.com makes it clear that email is a great interface for services and it is inspiring to hear their ideas about this. I can imagine that email is a great way to work with social networking sites. Instead of manually entering someone’s name and emailaddress into a website why not simply cc connect@linkedin.com when I email them? LinkedIn could parse this message, connect the sender (from address) and receiver (to address) and send us a confirmation after that. The first message could be archived with the account as an easy reminder of how you met. Simply, easy and scalable.
Any other ideas for using email as an interface?
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By Bob Boynton on Apr 24, 2008
Tripit is a very good travel site, but there is a ‘caveat’ on their claims about receiving confirmation emails, analyzing them, then inserting them into your trip plan. The caveat is that their ability to analyze is limited to the corporations they know about. They know about American Airlines, but they do not know about American Eagle. So a single confirmation that contained both would have some information inserted into the trip plan and some not. Hotels, restaurants, etc. suffer the same problem.
What they do is better than sites that cannot do as much as they do. But we all hope for no work on our part.
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By Berco on Apr 25, 2008
And again a technology that has proven itself takes the lead. It may not be optimal, but it gets the job done in a simple way. Skeptics probably laughed at the idea, but like the ’sub-optimal’ ethernet protocol, the end of email as a communication protocol is nowhere in sight.
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By Ontario Emperor on Apr 25, 2008
Email is an appropriate interface in certain situations, such as blog posts from a mobile phone and certain information subscriptions. The usefulness of email for application a or application b will vary from person to person, but it’s an important option to keep in your arsenal.
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By Geoff on Apr 25, 2008
Email is the middleware of the Internet. It’s not only the email client, but the email address that can be used so well for sharing content in Web 2.0. I blogged about this the other day: http://tinyurl.com/4xb5gc
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By Bob Boynton on Apr 25, 2008
Geoff
I followed your ‘trail’ to messagedance. I had not seen that, and it looks like it could be a very handy program. Oosah lets you do something like this but only for multi-media. And there was a review on this blog for a ‘future’ service that would sent and then check on comments. But I do not seem to be able to put my hands on the bookmark.
Thanks for the trail to messagedance.
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By Geoff on Apr 25, 2008
Thanks Bob. Yes, I sometimes sprinkle a lot of breadcrumbs. Necessary evil in startup world! Let me know if you have any questions or feedback on MessageDance. Drop me a direct message on Twitter if you want an invite. @geoffwolfe
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By Bob Boynton on Apr 25, 2008
Geoff
I do not twitter. I cannot cope with the information I am processing now much less add to it. I would like to try messagedance, and I promise to communicate suggestions if I have any. I will go over to your website and sign up, and you can let me in if you want to.
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By Glen Campbell on Sep 29, 2008
Posterous http://posterous.com also has a cool email interface.
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