The future of email: Fluent

In the article "The greatest creativity is frightening", YC founder Paul Graham talks about 7 of the greatest start-up ideas, including building a new search engine, replacing universities, and replacing emails. In Paul Graham's view, emails are now used in ways that are no longer like the past. E-mail is not a message delivery protocol, it is a to-do list. So just adjusting your inbox is not enough, and e-mail must be replaced with a new protocol. This new protocol should be a to-do list protocol, not a messaging protocol. Fluent may be the way to manage future emails.

We have previously reported on fluent, which was founded by the 3 former Google Wave Project engineer Jochen Bekmann, Cameron Adams and Dhanji R Prasanna. However, unlike Google Wave's confusion, engineer-driven design concepts, fluent concise, streamlined interface is very easy to get started. If you compare fluent with an existing product, it's much like a Web page version of Sparrow. But the fluent team is building a front-end mail client that can work on any platform. Adams explains this way:

Email has not been innovative for 20 years, but the way people communicate has changed dramatically. Communication is becoming more informal and social, as the current facebookmessage and Twitter letters functions are very good for one-to-one communication, but if you want to talk about a lot of topics, the flow of information becomes very confusing. Gmail's introduction of the post (threaded messages) program has been a great help, but when writing and replying to emails, too much switching is still cumbersome.

Fluent writes new messages, replies to messages, reads, archives, deletes, searches, tags, and "to-do" (to-do) messages will be done in one interface without switching.

Fluent is not a substitute for Gmail, it's just a front-end

Currently fluent is a cloud-based mail client whose platform supports Gmail and Google Apps, and will support more mail services in the future. Instead of launching its own mailing address, the team provides a new front-end solution for existing messaging services. Fluent interface to the theme of the form of dialogue, but with other mail systems need to click to open a message and click to reply to the operation is not the same, fluent can be directly in the main Inbox on the reply, forwarding, add to-do list, delete and other operations. This mode of reading emails is like reading news and commenting on Facebook.

Another place that differs from Gmail is that when you want to put an email subject into a to-do to-do item, you can do it with just one click (in Gmail, you first need to click into the email content, click "More" on the right, and then add it to your work list). The various operations that are available in Gmail can be done very simply in fluent. In the attachment, fluent allows you to visually differentiate the attachment form: document, picture, zip compressed file, audio or video.

And in the future, fluent hopes to build itself into a file management system, you can quickly and easily search all of their own files. Fluent is organized through tags, time, people, and file formats, making the search files very fast and accurate.

The most profound place for fluent is its real-time search function, when we search in fluent, it will present the email related to the search keyword directly, and when you have not finished a word, its fast real-time function can present the message you need. Another great experience is in the contact management scenario, when you open a contact, fluent will integrate the timeline (Timeline), history, and communication features, so that you can see a complete information map when you open your contacts, which is a bit like a social media status update or a mailing list.

Fluent is currently in the testing phase, at least a few months to be officially open to use, but now can provide their own mailbox waiting invitation, can also be provided in the demo interface for a simple experience.