Avatar
I'm Drew Breunig and I obsess about technology, media, language, and culture. I live in New York, studied anthropology, and work in advertising technology.Twitter

These are reactions to things I feel are important.

Where is Premium Email?

Developers: please think twice before building small, niche services atop existing, entrenched, ad-supported platforms and consider creating premium versions of the functions said platforms provide. When users are spooked by successive privacy news stories, ask them how much their privacy and data is worth. Answer with your product.

For example: I’d like to see a start up set out to become the world’s best email service. For $40-$100 a year, customers would have unlimited storage, a powerful (ad free) interface, and rock solid reliability. Such a service would be combine of the best parts of Gmail and ifttt.

Users could write and share plug-ins or scripts for aggregating or filtering in-boxes. This service would also connect to other services (Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, Instapaper, etc) so that users could email links or writing to their inbox with a specific subject line and have it processed into a post, link, or whatever. Email could become one’s own private, flexible API, handling notes, articles, actions, and other events.

Perhaps this service exists and I’m simply unaware (if so, please help me here), but this opportunity isn’t limited to email. Dropbox and SquareSpace are two great examples of companies who took a small, taken for granted component of the internet (shared storage and website) and made it absurdly easy, tailored for actual users (not just the tech adept), and charged for it. What about an RSS manager to replace a creaky Google Reader? Or a photo manager to absorb the jittery population of Flickr and grow it to everyone who would pay to protect their photos, privately? Or let’s just start with email.

10 notesShowHide

  1. imsomafree said: i came up with an idea for a new email service last year. lets discuss.
  2. limkeemin reblogged this from dbreunig
  3. mitologiasvivas said: rrs manager: cappuccino; integrates with google reader. I totally agree with you. please post (repeatedly) if you find it. Sick and tired of entourage, mail, and all the add chock-full mail web services.
  4. jedsundwall reblogged this from dbreunig and added:
    Seconded.
  5. dbreunig posted this