Brij’s One More Idea

Arthur Conan Doyle  once said - “it’s a capital mistake to theorize before one has data”. Data supports how widespread email usage is and that’s why email is so interesting

“..there will be 1.4 billion email accounts in active use world-wide at the end of this year, estimates Radicati Group Inc“

In last couple of days I have seen  smart blog posts covering startups innovating around email. First Chris did a comprehensive overview of startups over at Venturebeat. Check out Xobni, Xoopit, Fuser and Orgoo. All look very promising.

Today Kevin Delaney and Vauhini, over at WSJ, have an interesting scoop about Yahoo’s social networking ambition. Apparently Yahoo is about to put a social graph layer on top of it’s half a billion email inboxes. Very interesting possibilities there:

In August, there were 542.9 million users of email that is accessed
primarily via Web browsers. That compared with 483.7 million
social-networking users world-wide, according to comScore Inc.
Including non-Web-based email such as accounts that businesses provide
to their workers, there will be 1.4 billion email accounts in active
use world-wide at the end of this year, estimates Radicati Group Inc.,
a Palo Alto, Calif., research firm.

Yahoo’s Friend Finder sounds very similar to what Xobni offers:

One experimental Yahoo service known internally as “Friend Finder”
analyzes a user’s email traffic and indicates the friends with whom a
user has strong email connections. It bases its findings on the volume
of incoming and outgoing traffic and such factors as the frequency and
speed with which the two parties respond to each other.

Overall it’s good to see new thinking on something as old as email. I am sure re-inventing social graph in and around email will become a pile-on game very soon. That should come as a relief from the current super-wall-super-poked social graph rush.