How many times have you received an email that requires you to click a link to a website, perform a few more clicks and perhaps type in some text in order to accomplish a task? Examples could be responding to a twitter notification, a Facebook comment, a dating site email, an apartment hunting list or a business workflow task request. Think about how many billions of unnecessary actions are performed every day just to update a profile, respond to a tweet or a Facebook post?
Have you ever thought about how much easier it would be to perform these actions from directly inside an email? If so, you’ll want to read on about PowerInbox, a startup that has developed technology that allows web applications to run inside of most popular email systems.
Recently I had the pleasure of meeting with PowerInbox founder Matt Thazhmon here in Boston. Matt worked at Electronic Arts then founded PowerInbox with a few others last year. He moved to Boston recently due in part to the fact that he was taking so many meetings here. I love to hear people moving from California to Boston, reversing the ongoing brain-drain Boston has felt as compelling startups get off the ground here and then move to Silicon Valley to be closer to investors and talent.
Matt describes PowerInbox as bringing the app experience to email. Email apps make your emails more useful by letting you perform actions inside the email itself. A Facebook email lets you comment back on a photo, a Groupon email shows a live countdown to expiry or a Twitter email lets you tweet and follow back.
Here’s what got me really interested in PowerInbox: “We’re building more apps for all your favorite services, but would love to hear of any apps that you want us to build for you.”
Of course I began thinking about how the dating industry could leverage PowerInbox, along with real-estate and many other verticals where a user is required to changes modes and context from email client to a website and back again.
How can dating sites and third-parties improve how singles seek and communicate with each other online?
Some dating sites are great about showing photos and messages however the majority force you to click a link in an email, log into the dating site, navigate to the email, click again to look at the person’s complete profile, then click back to get to the email.
Why? Because they want you to come back to the site, which increases their visitor count, page and advertising views. Thats a lot of work on the part of the user, and only the dating site benefits from all those clicks. Imagine being able to do all of that from within Outlook, or gmail?
In the future, as websites continue to evolve into web/mobile services, this “get them back to the mothership” mentality will not be as pervasive as it is today. Much like the Rockmelt web browser enables me to visit Facebook less and less, posting and consuming Facebook feeds directly from the browser, PowerInbox keeps your focus on your inbox, not flittering off to various websites during an email session.
At the very least, dating sites can make weekly member email updates and member-to-member communication more interactive and engaging.
If you ran a dating site, how would you use PowerInbox?
More at Xconomy and Bostinnovation and a video explanation of PowerInbox below.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Bq898YMLQz8#!
