OK, so I exaggerate, but a bunch of well known Web 2.0 luminaries decided to try fixing email inbox and caller-on-hold problems in 40 minutes.

It was supposed to be a fun panel and they came up with some interesting ideas. It just made me wonder how often the ‘tech luminaries’ in telcos sit around trying to fix human problems as opposed to technical ones. This is why I’m calling for a people protocol!

The ideas about dealing with crowded email inboxes were interesting. Been there and done that back in 1998 with the Zingo mobile portal for Lucent/Netscape. Back then we implemented a VIP view of the mailbox. It showed email messages not in chronological order, but in order of the importance of the people sending them. Back then, we only had things like email history to mine in order to determine ‘relevance’ or ‘importance’ based on frequency, content, relative frequency and so on. However, wind forward ten years to 2008 and now we can mine social networks, blogs, Technorati ratings and so on. We can do a much better of job of NOT ignoring unsolicited emails from ‘important’ people.

What really excites me though is coming across a bunch of people looking at old problems, old paradigms and trying to re-invent them or find new solutions. We should never tire of doing this and shouldn’t get so wound up in future stuff - Web 4.0 widgety doo-dats - that we overlook the basics, like how crummy our phone call and email experiences really are. I want a Coverflow view of my inbox, with people’s pictures and little subject-heading bubbles over their heads!

(p.s. if you read this blog often, you can tell that I LOVE Coverflow.)

Technorati Tags: Web 2.0, crowded email, Coverflow