[ Reader Warning: If truth be told, I am not a big fan of corporate blogs. They tend to start off deathly dull and gradually get worse from there. What I am going to do here is just talk about what we've built, because I find it interesting, and then see what happens next. For all official news and, let's be honest, better information, then please go to the website proper ]Bob writes an email. He sends it to Alice, but CC's Eve.
Alice writes something in reply, then hits 'Reply All'. Encouraged by already seeing Eve on the CC list, she also adds Frank and Joe to the CC.
This is now what we would call a 'Hunking Great Dirty CC Snowball(*)', and they rarely end well. At the very least we have more people not really wanting or needing to see the message, and now all having to go do some work by scan reading it and hitting delete or filing. It's a big part of the reason people get so much email at work.
So what to do?
For Taglocity 2.0 we provide two significant tweaks to this very common email scenario.
(1) We allow Bob to CC a 'Taglocity Group', that people who he works with all belong to, rather than CC'ing them directly.
(2) Bob tags the message before he sends it, i.e. put the tags 'Tags: Project Acme, Customer Issue, Support' on the message as a simple text line.
This now allows for some very interesting things to happen:
- Eve, Frank and Joe can now *choose* if they want to see this message or not, in that they don't necessarily have to have it in their inbox's. They can choose to 'pull' this information based on (a) when they want to see it and (b) how they want to be told about it.
- The tags on the message provide 'context'. This allows the message to be easily found again, even by people not originally on the to/cc list.
- Bob only tagged the message originally because it helped him, in that he knows any replies on the thread that come back will already be tagged for him. I know Bob and he's naturally very selfish, often forgetting birthdays and anniversaries. Despite all that, those three tags have helped at least four people so far.
We did these two things in Taglocity 2.0 because we wanted to 'tweak' the email scenario rather than go make Bob (and Alice, and Eve etc) move the information out of email completely and learn something new. While there are many new great places to put collaborative information, the facts of business life today is that a lot of good stuff resides in email. We are trying to evolve corporate email rather than replace it.
So, how does that sound? Are Bob, Alice and crew happier?
- David
Out of time for today, and I haven't talked about the other new stuff: the Semantic Tags, the Subscriptions, the Invite process and security, the new Machine Learning stuff, the Daily Digest View, the Shared Group Tags, the RSS/ATOM feeds on Searches, the way our on-line service works, and all that other stuff. But I will try to soon.
(*) Actually, we don't, but we could if you like the phrase.