It is nice to see innovation continue in a space where the web spends so much of its collective time, mail and instant messaging. Checking out the review of the latest player in the space, Orgoo, I decided to dive in and look at it in more detail, and there is lots to like about it:

• The seamless integration of mail and IM,
• The nice touches like one-click video messaging,
• A very clean UI with template options,
• The positioning as a simple, Oddpost-like aggregator for email and instant messaging,
• Contextual “popups” for mapping of in-message addresses, etc..

Looking at the product, I was draw back to see the latest plans from Zimbra, who only a year ago was the pretty girl/boy at the dance at all the major conferences. I was especially interested because of the announcement a week ago that Zimbra was going to power Comcast’s own email experience.

A side by side comparison seems to give the edge to Zimbra in further extension of the product into the enterprise solution space (salesforce.com add-ins, Lotus Domino migration tools, etc.), their decision to embrace a partial open source solution, mobile support, etc..

That said, I did like the cleaner UI treatment of Orgoo, the consumer-friendly surfacing of its functionality, and the early lead it has on integrating IM into the overall experience.

The question is: How much room does the market have for players like this (Goowy, Zimbra, Orgoo, Foldera, Glide, etc.), especially given the focus by each of the majors (Google, AOL, Yahoo, Microsoft) on enhancing their own experiences (where owning the email relationship equates to more than double the monthly page views). I guess there is still a play serving the cable and phone companies (beyond the corporate market), but exit strategies for these players get more and more complex each day. That said, as a consumer, I love the functionality war here – worst case, it drives the majors to step up their own efforts.