I based my estimates on the best numbers I could find. That said, my spam numbers were in fact incorrect (spam is small and gets deleted). Accounting for that, people save an average of a year's worth of email.
If you look at the growth in email users over time (~6%/year), most accounts are probably > 1 year old. I'd assume the disparity comes from people deleting messages.
Hi. This is Ian, Threadable cofounder. Thanks for your questions!
We're sustaining Threadable by charging business users for business-specific features. Those features will actually be rolling out soon, and have to do with internal access control and integration with certain external services. We don't talk about that stuff on the site yet because it's still in beta, but expect to see it soon.
I definitely see Facebook groups growing in popularity, but we're a long way from getting rid of email. I think the reason Facebook Groups has been able to gain so much ground is because email-based products haven't really changed in a long time, and Facebook Groups provides a much better user experience. However, email is still the only place you can be sure to find everyone, and that's unlikely to change anytime soon, especially in business. Group communication products have a bunch of tiny network effects, one per group, and they succeed or fail on how well they can reach every team member.
So yours is a product competing for business market?
I am not a business user but I look at these things as an average Internet user (and I am just generally interested). I believe Yahoogroups and Googlegroups are serving a specific purpose and need of average user. That is, to provide them with group-communication mechanism.
The reason why email is still popular and will remains so, is because email fills the basic and primary human need of direct (one to one) communication. The listserv on the other hand, also serve the basic and primary human need of group (one to many) communication.
I think the fundamental reason why email and listserv have stayed the way they have, is because they don't necessarily need much tinkering. So ultimately, it all comes down to where users get used to. We have adopted emails, listserv and now Facebook, as part of our communication platform evolution.
Facebook is an oddball because it supposedly does so much more (and there is lot of smokes and mirror on what exactly it does). The reason why I see people adopting Facebook Group (over Yahoo and Google) is because Yahoo and Google are probably unconsciously letting go of their hold on listserv needs of people.
But all of these companies are too big. A small or new company may come along attempting to disrupt the status quo. The problem as is I see it, is that chicken/egg thing. How can you raise yourself above Yahoo/Google/Facebook hold without disrupting the price model and still able to maintain yourself? That to me is a difficult question. You ultimately can't really win by having few users, even if they are dedicated. You need a whole lot of users.
I'm an early beta user, and have been really happy with it. It saves me a bunch of time, but I think the real value is in what it teaches me about where to focus our efforts. Way easier to predict which initiatives (features, hires, etc) are going to make us money, and when we'd see returns.
Good question! At the moment, getting at your archives is about as easy as with Google Groups (which is to say, not very). Right now, you could use our webhooks to funnel all email into an archiver, so you have it. That's not a good solution for most people, though.
Going forward, we're very committed to data portability. Your data is yours. We want to keep your business by regularly delighting you, rather than controlling your content. The plan is to make it possible to export your list in a couple formats, probably JSON and mbox to start. This is down the roadmap a bit, probably June or so. However, if anyone needs their archive in the meantime, they can contact me and I'll make it happen.
In the slightly longer term, I want to build a feature that automatically syncs your list archive to your dropbox, so you can search it using tools like spotlight, and easily read it offline.
I agree completely! We're really excited about email transparency. Supporting it well has been one of our goals from the beginning. We have a few users who practice it (including us!) with whom we're working very closely to make sure we meet their needs.
For that matter, if anyone reading this is working with an organization that implements this philosophy, I would love to talk to you!
One of the key changes between how Threadable works and previous mailing lists is that we can actually customize fairly deeply each message to each user, rather than simply reflecting the same thing out to the whole list. This trickles out into a bunch of interesting use cases and features, which we've only just started to implement.
I agree, email is sort of a morass of old, incompatible clients and aging protocols. They need work, but the installed base is huge, so it's a hard problem. The solution is probably to build a layer on top of all that to simplify it, much like jQuery did with incompatible DOM implementations.
So far, a number of companies are doing well with abstracting the protocol layer away to make focusing on building good apps easier (see mailgun.com for SMTP, context.io for IMAP, etc).
As to Threadable's long-term strategy, it goes further. :) Right now, we're building a great mailing list. As it gets further along, we plan to make it into a platform so that other app developers can use us to do all the difficult parts of managing threaded discussions, client compatibility, etc. The idea is to turn every app and website's isolated comment stream into a threaded email discussion, so people can engage using the tools they're already used to.
There's already millions upon millions of mailing lists out there, but nobody's made major changes in this space in a decade or more. We think we can add enough value that people will be happy to pay for it, and make group email collaboration more popular at the same time.
Our overall goal is the engagement and inclusivity that comes from making key information available in the way that people expect. Team collaboration tools only work well when the whole team uses them. The mailing list is just the best way to get there.
Thanks, neilk. People say they hate email, but we see that as an indicator of its utility: "I hate this but use it everyday" sounds like an opportunity for improvement. As Elie Wiesel said, "the opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference."
If you look at the growth in email users over time (~6%/year), most accounts are probably > 1 year old. I'd assume the disparity comes from people deleting messages.