I call it ‘ inbox fear.’ It’s the feeling I have every morning right before I open my email inbox, the dread of how many hundreds of new, irrelevant emails will be awaiting for my undivided attention.
Lets face it: email sucks, it’s an ancient part of Internet communication that desperately needs innovation. It’s not just startups who are trying to solve the inbox problem, Google tried and failed with Wave. No one has quite managed to succeed yet, but that hasn’t stopped entrepreneurs from trying. Que San Francisco based Jared Goralnick, founder of Awayfind.com, the browser plugin allows you set up alerts based on email importance.
If you were waiting on some very important news but you were in a meeting and didn’t want to keep checking your email again and again to see if the mail had arrived, Awayfind lets you set up alerts for a specific email so you can get notifications as soon as it arrives. I talk to Jared about how the app works and my main concern: the time it takes to set up versus the overall time it can save you.
I don’t know if anyone is having as much problems as I have with E-mail, but E-mail is defenitatly a collossal dinosaur that needs many features to thrive. For starters:
1. If any single character is wrong in the E-mail address, or in any of the addresses you send them too, the mail won’t send. This is bad if you wrote a really long E-mail and forget to save. To add to the suckage, the mail will come back as a mess of letters while the true letter will get lost in cyberspace.
2. No autosave or ability for the letter to be archived. Most video games have autosave; E-mail posts should as well.
3. If your E-mail is being monitored by administrators, it will either shut down after a short time or interrupt your writing with a message asking you if you want to remain logged in, and you might accidentally press keys in a certain way to confirm you want it logged off.
And job searching is entirely based on this dinosaur. No, e-mail is practically only good if you are trying to send some else a short message. If features are available that make E-mail easier, I’d love to hear them. I don’t see how Awayfind can do much in solving these problems.