We spend a lot of time with our email.
The web has changed so much in the last decade, but email has hardly changed at all. Today's email might look a bit different, and act a bit different, but while internet users from a decade ago would blink incomprehendingly at tabbed browsing, social networks, file sharing, tagged content, and Web 2.0 apps, they would have no problem recognizing and using today's email apps.
Is email the one piece of the internet that those early pioneers got so completely perfect that there is no room to build on it, to improve it, to make it more useful and relevant? Or are today's internet users so daft as to be incapable of using better tools?
We think the answer to both questions is no.
We think email can change, and should change. While exciting, we see the explosion of websites that help people share and communicate is a symptom of the problem that email, the original killer app, hasn't grown to meet the needs of today's internet users.