Today we are proud to announce a couple of new features to Inbox2 Web. As always we look forward to your feedback.
Public pages
Inbox2 becomes the first email application making it possible to share anything directly from your Inbox straight to Twitter, Facebook or your public page.
If you have for instance a picture or a presentation in your mailbox, you can share it with your friends or with anyone on the web (making it findable by search engines such as Google) with just one click. Want to show somebody a picture on Skype without having to send them an email with all the extra hassle involved? Just click actions->share and Inbox2 will provide you a publicly accessible url for that picture.
All these urls will point to your public page. The url for your public page is based on your username, for example waseem.inbox2.com (replace waseem with your own username). Facebook users are recomended to go to inbox2.com while logged in to Inbox2 for Facebook to choose a username.
We have taken good case of your privacy: only the items you explicitly share are available on your public page, all other items are not visible.
A Public Page
The realtime web
So far we have limited the Inbox to email and Facebook messages and Twitter DMs and mentions, these messages are still supported in the stream; The inbox stream will remain the place for communication specifically directed at you.
Next to this we have introduced support for the realtime stream. You can view all the realtime status updates from any Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin or Yammer accounts that you have configured. You can also create Twitter searches and save these. As a bonus you can also do a multichannel status update.
Realtime in Inbox2
We have introduced a lot of great features in the last few months. But more importantly we are looking at the future where we will be introducing even more great stuff next to performance and stability improvements. We hope you enjoy your Inbox2 experience and provide us valuable feedback to make things even better.
We have new stuff to share with you. Namely our Facebook application has now gone live and is available for use. With the superb growth of Facebook and users increasingly spending more time in the application, Inbox2 is going to bring great value to this large community.
Inbox2 has already introduced the concept of the email activity stream several months back. Now we have implemented the stream also in Facebook, tightly integrated.
Once you perform a few small configurations steps, Facebook will notify you once you recieve a new email message, Twitter DMs & @replies or Yammer updates.
With one click you are able to view the email messages and perform all other actions which you would normally perform with your email.
This is a great convenience for Facebook users as they dont have to leave their favourite platform for checking email anymore.
You can start by using your facebook account (no Inbox2 account required if you don’t have one yet). All you need to do is the following:
1. Go to http://apps.facebook.com/emailfeed/
2. Log in if you already have an Inbox2 account.
3. Otherwise start by configuring the services that you would like to use. Inbox2 will couple these with your Facebook account so that next time you login to Facebook, all you need to do is navigate to the Inbox2 application on Facebook.
We are really excited to be nominated for the Dutch innovation awards 2009. From the 123 submissions in the category “best web concept” we have been short listed to the last five. This is great news for our users and team. Inbox2 is an innovative product which simplifies the email experience. The nomination for the Dutch innovation awards is an acknowledgement of this.
You can also help us by voting for the additional public prize. Use this link to vote. For those of you who do not speak Dutch, see the screenshot below: choose Inbox2, fill in your First & Last name and e-mail address and click on “Stem”.
The next version of the activity stream has just gone into production. Here is a quick tour of what has been added:
- There are now filters in the activity stream which allow you to view messages and attachments from several perspectives. You can filter on Read, Unread, Starred and also on the type of content such as messages, documents, images etc.
- You can update your status on Facebook, Twitter and Yammer directly from Inbox2. No more logging into Twitter just to update your status.
- If Inbox2 knows that one of your friends is also on Twitter/Facebook or Yammer, it shows the status updates from that friend directly beneath his emails in the stream.
Another major feature which has gone live is the addition of labels. It is now possible to add labels to your messages, documents and notes. From now on Inbox2 is going to be a great help in organising your Inbox because you can use labeling across all the accounts that you configure in Inbox2. Want to add labels to your Facebook or Hotmail messages? No problem.
For those of you who don’t actively work with labels we introduced starring about two weeks ago. Now you can star documents as well and easily highlight these out with the new filtering options.
We are really looking for your feedback on these features and improvements. So let us know by commenting on this blog, through Facebook, Twitter, Friendfeed or our feedback form in the application.
Many thanks to the people that tried Inbox2 and gave as valuable feedback to work with.
Have you ever thought about why you always have to create an email before you can add an attachment to that, even when the only thing you wanted to do was just send an attachment?
In our opinion this is a time waste, and time wasting needs to be eliminated. That is why Inbox2 now allows you to select one or more documents from your documents column and just hit the forward button.
After choosing the recipients and pressing send the documents will have been sent out without forcing you to take any extra and unnessecary steps.
So how does this work?
If the user at the receiving end is using Inbox2 he will see the documents arrive in his documents column. There will be no (empty) email message in the messages column. This is all the magic of a new and intelligent email protocol we have been cooking called ???i2mp???, which stands for Inbox2 Messaging Protocol.
If on the other hand the receiving user is using some other email application like Gmail or Outlook. He will see the familiar (but unfortunatly pointless) empty email with your documents attached to it.
The whole process of sending and sharing documents is going to be a lot easier now. No more attachments buried in messages!
We have just pushed release 0.4 of the Inbox2 web application. For us this is a major milestone and allows us to open up the beta to more users.
With the current release we have laid the foundation for the email experience of the future.Here are some of the highlights:
-Activity View – All the channels that you configure are brought together into an activity stream. The stream can be viewed from several perspectives and customized to hide/unhide people.
-Actions – Inbox2 allows you to immediately action the messages and content in the stream.In this way the stream comprises of only the messages & content which still requires your attention.
-Inbox – The Inbox contains all the messages, attachments and links extracted in column overview of Inbox2. Here easily switch channels on and off to see content from various Inboxes that you configure within Inbox2.
-Twitter DMs have now been implemented and also you will see @replies come into the stream.
-Full-redesign complete – A few weeks ago the re-design of Inbox2 was implemented we still had open items and changes from user feedback. This is now complete elevating the user experience even further.
It is now also possible to easily share with your friends on Facebook and Twitter that you are using Inbox2. In subsequent posts we will talk more about the road map for the next major releases of Inbox2.
We are really looking forward to your feedback and support.Enjoy Inbox2 and share the experience with others .
Release 48 of Inbox2 has just been pushed to production. This means we are approaching almost 50 incremental inmprovements of the web version since its first launch a few months ago. Altough each release has had countless improvements we haven’t really blogged much about these because this would result in a list of quite technical stuff such as “updated workers for better async handling of processes”, etc… you get the point.
In this release I would like to take the opportunity to point one specific improvement out since this will affect your user experience quite a bit.
In the desktop client (not yet available for the general public) we have always had synchronized scrolling. This means that every time you drag the scrollbar on the right-hand side of the applications all the columns in the inbox will scroll along synchronized.
So if you were to pull the scrollbar all the way down you see the bottom of all the 4 columns, if you scroll to the middle, you see the middle of all 4 columns, etc. In our customer tests we have found that users like this feature very much.
To achive the same effect in a web application is quite hard and simply does not provide the same experience. So instead of hacking together a solution, Dinesh (one of our talented UI engineers) came up with an alternative approach in which you as a user get to scroll each column individually with its own scrollbar instead of one scrollbar for the whole page.
The following screenshot shows this in action:
We are very curious about your thoughts on this change and whether you like it or not. You can let us know by using the feedback form inside the application or sending us an email at support@inbox2.com.
We at Inbox2 were quite excited with winning the third prize with our pitch. A number of companies presented in front of 4 member jury which consisted of:
The session was moderated by Saad Khan - CMEA Capital.
Receiving this prize was an acknowledgement of our product, team and potential. We will continue to move ahead with the same focus and energy towards our vision of improving email.
We are all really excited at Inbox2 headquarters because we will be in the valley from 30th May until 13th June. Starting off we will be exhibiting at the Silcom Summit. We are hoping to meet many of the people that have been supporting us in the last months. The list of speakers is quite impressive.
Timing is great as Inbox2 is ready to scale it’s closed beta. The new design has just gone live and many cool features are available. This is not email as you know it anymore. We have been cooking for the last few months and realized that we had already nailed the phenomenon that is gaining quite some traction lately: namely the activity stream. In a subsequent post we will go into the details about what this means for you as an inbox2 user (this feature is allready available for the current beta users).
If you live around the valley and have the moments to spare, we would really like to show you the new and cool stuff we are doing to help you manage your information overload. If you can’t make it to the summit then please send us an email to get in touch at info@inbox2.com so we can meet up.
Inbox2 has launched its latest user interface design early this week! If you were familiar with the old design,you probably find the new design quite different and needs a little time to get adapt to. Instead of the traditional four-column view (Messages, Documents, Links and Contacts), the concept of Tab has been implemented into the new design. Just like any web browser, you can find different tabs at the top of the page (Overview, Inbox, Messages, Contacts). More tabs are currently being built. The default tab page is Overview, where you can quickly send a message and view your new messages for today, last 3 days or this month, depending on your preferences. Inbox2 also offers you the option to customize your Overview tab by adding or deleting functional unit on the left and right column of the page, such as Notes, Documents, Calendar. When you want to have a detail view of your messages, you can always to go the Inbox tab.
On the top of the page, the main function buttons are still remained in place. You can write an Email with rich media by clicking “New Message”. To make a note or upload a document can also be done with one click. In the upper right corner, it is the user administration section. Whereas, Feedback Form and Invite a Friend have been added next to it.
We are still working on some finalizing work for the new design. More invite codes will sent out by the end of the week. We hope you will like the new design!
