A more contextual alternative to email

Inspired by Shrikant Joshi’s comment at TechCrunch I decided to put some thought to how email can be “more contextual”.

When I think of “contextual”, I imagine a local, distributed, on-the-spot sort of thing. I imagine embedded.

So my idea of “more contextual”, on these few minutes I put myself thinking about it, is a web application that would allow me to centralize all my text communication into one place.

To date, we have Gmail + Gtalk. You bind together two forms of textual communication into one place, go through your chat history as you would through your regular email, that sort of thing (plus google/yahoo groups).

Now throw into that your blog comments, your flickr comments and mostly any kind of text stuff you drop around on the web everyday. Imagine those being entered through an embedded “drop box” that, besides leaving your text on the website you are, direct it back to your email, saving information about the website, allowing replies to come in and go back as if you were responding to a normal email (coComment generalized and integrated to email).

This idea of a embedded drop box for entering text throughout the web allows for an extension of the Gmail+Gtalk concept in which, instead of centralizing the applications into one place before integrating them, centralizes the incoming and responding, while pulverizing the outgoing.

That would be “contextual” to me.

Mainstream and viral marketing incompatible?

Just a thought that occured me when putting that last post against the link in it: if viral marketing is for niche targeting, how come Gmail, a mainstream web application (everyone uses email), got to make such a good use of it?

Viral marketing

I had my first experience with Viral Marketing in early April, 2004, when Google came out with its new email solution, Gmail. Lucky me, I was one of the first happy people in the circunference of my social circle to get an invite to try out the service.

I hadn’t done any of the very recent reading I’ve lately been doing on Web 2.0, and had never heard of the term “viral marketing” itself. What I had, though, was a lot of curiosity, a lot of information scavenged around on the new product, and three invitations to share.

The hype at that time was so high, especially among my Computer Engineering colleagues, that I instantly became the blessed holder and provider of this very rare commodity (remember the absurd things people were exchanging it for?).

Having crunched through all the documentation I could find, I became a very well informed and enthusiastic user. I was especially impressed by the explanations on how labels were so much greater than folders (it made so much sense! why hadn’t I thought of that before?) and the keyboard shortcuts. Those were amazing indeed.

So being the user-in-love I was and having those at first few tickets to this widely unknown email paradise, I quickly started telling everyone all about it, advocating that the very cool, unique and innovative features were in fact what made it so awesome, not only the “oh, ok, now I can store more emails” thing I used to hear about the 1Gb.

After a while, and a considerable number of people I brought in, helped around the interface, gave some tips, even translated the help to pt_BR for,I started thinking “damn, this invitation thing really works”. I was the one doing all the advertising for them, user-level, dedicating a whole lot more time to each “customer” than they could ever dream of paying for, and with a granted openness they could never buy.

When I realized that, I started believing that there would be no actual “sign up” way to get your Gmail account after the Beta – like I what I expected -, since this viral method proved a lot more effective. Or at least not until most everyone who had some minimum social contact had gotten their account through this word-of-mouth way. [I wonder, now: did they end up opening Gmail for direct sign-up after all?]
I wanted to make a bigger point out of his, but as a short sum-up (have to leave now), I just wrote this to share that great feeling you get when you learn a formal concept and you realize you had seen it at work, been part of it and made yourself conscious of it. I also saw its value which, nonetheless, is not absolute and does not apply to the advertising strategies of every single product, as this post at HorsePigCow (!!) points out. Worth the read.