We talked about this a while ago and I am proud to announce PHASE 1 of Supermail. Here’s the scoop and the highlights!

This is NOT an new email client!

It is an intelligent messaging service designed for sharing.

Supermail handles a lot of internal messaging (event updates and other notifications) but the good stuff is build on the following:

1) Tracking and Reporting. Let’s face it, spam has made email unreliable. We have a notion of “active sharing” based around messaging and believe that it is only truly rewarding when you “know” that the recipient got what you sent them.

If you send a message with one or more links in it. Supermail lets you know when the person you sent it to clicks on those links.

If you send a message with no links, we let you know when the message is viewed.

No more wondering about bulk mail folders.

2) UI and Style. This application is supper snappy and to the point. It incorporates avatars and dispenses with as much non-essential stuff to make it super easy to use. For instance, we have done away with a separate “Subject” field altogether.

3) Sharing Inside ™. First, we have made all outbound communication social by default. Messages you send include links to your aggregated shared media as well as a prominent RSS feed to all of the things that you do online.

Second, Supermail keeps a history of the links you have sent to others and with one click you can publish that stream to your public Buddy Page. It is a twist on del.icio.us and we think an important one because it captures the mainstream behavior of emailing links (instead of bookmarking them).

4) Smarts. In addition to the tracking and reporting, Supermail will spruce up certain types of links (like flickr, youtube, and webshots) by including a thumbnail in the outbound message.

We highly recommend you try out our “bookmarklet” which lets you share the web page you are currently visiting. It works like a charm!

Next, we’ve slipped in an Address Book that saves all of the email addresses that you have sent messages to and lets you create a broader group of Contacts beyond your close connections of Buddies.

5) Open. This is a good segue into a discussion of how Supermail will evolve.

It isn’t finished. This is phase 1 of 3 and we have a bunch of work we need to get done.

We plan to capture non-email based communication like comments from flickr, myspace, or your blog. We will be spinning out your communication stream via rss. And finally, similar to our initiatives like 30Boxed, we will make Supermail available to non-registered members because we think it is a killer way to share stuff that you find online and want blog owners and the like to allow their users to easily share web pages AND BE NOTIFIED AND TRACK WHAT THEY SHARE!

If you want to give it a try. Why not start with our new Tell My Friends option from the Share menu. Nothing like using your new code for something useful within the existing application :-)

Tags: 30boxes, supermail, socialbookmarks, flickr, youtube, photosharing, sharinginside

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This entry was posted on Thursday, January 25th, 2007 at 7:53 pm and is filed under Product News, Announcements, Cutting Edge. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.