We are in the midst of an important moment of truth – email as we know it is under attack, and the major firms are not moving fast enough to prevent it from becoming more of a niche form of communications in the next 5 years. The email experience of today is being threatened on multiple fronts by a variety of new forms of communication:

Twitter/short-form blogging

Asynchronous messaging in social networks (e.g., the Facebook Wall)

IM experiences now supporting queuing of messages to offline buddies

Away message/Status message utilization in instant messaging

SMS adoption (late to come to the US, but now pervasive)

Wikis and other new collaboration platforms

Comments (MySpace comments, Blog comments, et al)

Casual communication forms (the nudge, the wink)

New sharing experiences (Flickr, et al)

Email aggregators (e.g., I use Gmail to aggregate all of my AOL, Yahoo, and POP3 accounts. These other companies still bear all the cost of hosting my email accounts, but now get none of the pageviews.)

Email and IM integration into social networks (the new entrant risk).

People have more compelling, more contextual, more effective, and more convenient options to share and interact than ever before, and incumbent forms of communications will be the losers here.

The risk is as follows: the major internet incumbents rely tremendously on having a robust base of consumer email account relationships to feed their ad/search businesses. Having that email inbox relationship can yield 2x the monthly page views, when compared with non-email-account consumers. In a world where just protecting your pageview base has become a challenge, some firms view email a bit like they do search: “We can’t risk material changes to the email experience – the downside could be huge!” To me, that kind of thinking is a huge mistake. The email franchises of the majors have been already under attack for several years, and major demographic segments (segments very attractive to advertisers) view it as an increasing arcane/niche form of communication.

A re-think of the email experience is long overdue. Think about how dated the email metaphor is. I remember (in the coal-fired world of my past), using MSG on the ARPANET as a kid almost three decades ago, and while the look and feel of email certainly has advanced since then, the limited metadata we had available back then to dream up new capabilities is, with little exception (tags and folders) the same as what we are operating with today (Date, time, sender, attachment data, routing data, etc.). In addition, the UI of email has effectively settled into the Outlook-derivative 3 pane design.

Is there innovation? Yes. I do see some interesting nuances between each experience out there (e.g., Yahoo’s seamless melding of mail and IM in their new beta, Google’s still-unique threads and tags, etc.), but to me, it is all incrementalism. No one will break out of the pack without bolder gameplans.

Let’s look at Yahoo and their own journey of change, which I give them lots of credit for accelerating over the last 18 months. Earlier this year, they launched their Mail APIs, and encouraged people to develop applications that took advantage of them. I think that was a great step, but there are a number of challenges to the implementation:

New applications are only available to the premium mail users, which means, for me as a developer, I am fishing in a smaller pond

The core UI of the mail experience is basically untouched and non-extensible

The amount of data exposed is certainly enhanced, but nothing major was done to add value derived from the contents of the message itself

It seems to be focused only on asynchronous communication – the new melded IM capabilities exposed in the beta are not yet reflected/accessible in their API.

Good, but not nearly enough. Facebook has shown the world the exponential value of an innovation program done right (e.g., supporting a more flexible UI construct, implementing some great API thinking (FQL, etc.), offering developers access to their entire customer base, etc.). But, as successful as their developer strategy has been, their AOL-analogous walled garden approach created its own imperfect consumer experiences (Two nagging examples: 1. Surfacing contact data as images, instead of text (a competitive move to prevent web scraping) prevents any cut and paste operation. 2. Their new-mail notification alerts always forcing me back into the very limited native Facebook email experience). We need to learn and mimic winning elements of the Facebook playbook, but go well beyond it as we craft our mail gameplans. As always, in situations like this, you want to remember to offer the consumer choice – there are lots of folk quite comfortable in their three pane world. That said, change here is long overdue.

Let’s take the best of email innovation (e.g., Gmail’s free aggregation of accounts, Yahoo’s melding of email and instant messaging, Plaxo 3.0’s “softswitch” for calendar and contact data), combine it with the relevant elements of Facebook’s thinking, figure out the right interop with the emerging forms of communication I highlighted above, and create a step function shift in email.

Are there real innovators in the email space to watch? Yes. One of them is Xoopit, which the world will start to know more about soon (full disclosure:  I am an advisor).

30+ years later, the latent potential of email and the inbox is still huge. I still LOVE the metaphor of the inbox – it was the first real attention-based information architecture, in my opinion. It’s just grown dated in its implementation. Read Lifehacker and see all the interesting things people have done to use Gmail as a broader organization/life management tool, and you get a glimpse of its potential. The challenge will be who, of the majors, is willing to step up and lead consumers to a new and better place: Inbox 2.0.