Robert Chien's Blog

It's becoming clear and present that a re-architecture of Email is overdue.

Last week, a few aspiring folks got together in New York City to discuss this very topic. In attendance were Tom Evslin, Fred Wilson, Matt Blumberg, Brad Feld, Jeff Pulver and Phil Hollows (click on the names to read thoughts and summaries of the event on their respective blogs).

It appears the goals are pretty well-defined over 3 years ago by the Internet Mail Consortium. There's also consensus on ingredients that will make next generation of messaging a successful one:

• Social graph enabled
• Give control to users, not spammers
• Accessible through an open API
• Must be secure and trustworthy
• One interface to manage your online communications

When these elements are put together into a solution, we'll have a reliable, productive and fun way to communicate again.

p.s. Does anyone in the San Francisco Bay Area want to meet up and talk about messaging 2.0? Drop me a note in the comments, Email, IM, Twitter or Facebook (now see why a single interface is attractive?)

One of the clever things that Facebook does is how it gives users an option to initialize their social graphs from their address book data on Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail and Gmail to see which of their friends are already on Facebook. I didn't bite, in fear of giving my credentials to Facebook (even though they promise to discard them after data is pulled), but a thought struck: isn't social graph basically a more fashionable way of saying address book 2.0?

Then yesterday I read this blog on NYTimes that Yahoo! is working to turn existing user profiles and address books into a social network and they're calling it INBOX 2.0. Google is allegedly doing something similar. Makes sense.

I have been thinking for years that address book should be consulted during spam detection to minimize false positives, and the only systems which have your address book in their possession and also handle your Email are webmail providers. Extending it to create social graphs seems like the logical next step.

After years of being on Friendster and LinkedIn, I finally got on Facebook. Within two weeks, I was able to reconnect with many old friends. I was really impressed, not only by the size of Facebook's network (30,000,000+ active users) but also with the rate at which it is growing. Most people that I reconnected with, have only become Facebook users in the last month or so.

The biggest problem with Facebook (or Friendster, LinkedIn, MySpace, for that matter) that I see is that it's a closed network. Facebook allows third party developers to build applications on its platform but it's still closed in that you have to first become a Facebook user in order to connect with other Facebook users.

As a consumer, I'd rather not have to create and maintain a profile on multiple social networks. Why can't I add an Orkut user to my Facebook circle of friends? Or transfer my list of buddies from one network to another?

In contrast, from a single Email account, I can send and receive Email to and from any domain. I don't need to sign up with Gmail to keep in touch with my Gmail-using friends and family. Despite being a 25-year old technology, Email is still the only standardized open form of people networking.