On The Rebooting Show, Brian Morrisey and his guests wondered what will replace email.
They made a few salient observations.
- Email was never meant to be a content delivery platform.
- Using it that way is a bit of a hack.
- You can’t embed a video player in an email.
- You can’t even control fonts very well.
I’d add to that …
- People can clog your inbox without your consent.
- Content you want and value is sitting there next to the latest nonsense.
- It’s not always easy to find things.
So what comes next?
But before I get into that, I’d like to acknowledge that people have been proclaiming the death of email for a long time, and it continues to defy expectations. I’m not going to argue that email is dead or dying. But I do believe there is a better solution for content delivery.
And that’s a generic reader app.
By “generic” I mean that it’s not tied to a brand or to a walled garden, like Facebook.
By “reader app” I mean that it would be where you’d go for everything you want to read.
Here are some of the key ideas.
- If you see an article on the web that you want to read later, a browser plugin would allow you to send the article to your app. Somewhat like Evernote.
- Your app would have an email address, and all your free e-newsletters would be delivered to the app.
- All your subscription content – newsletters and magazines – would also be delivered to the app.
- Ideally, you could also read books through the app.
- The only content in your app would be stuff you want to be there.
- You can take notes in the app.
- You can comment on things you read in the app, and make them public or keep them private.
- You can organize things in folders, or by keywords, however you want to organize it.
How would the app owner make any money off this?
I can see two ways.
First, users pay a monthly fee for the app.
Second, all paid content delivered through the app would pay a surcharge – some percentage of the price of the content.
I pitched an idea like this to an exec at Evernote a few years ago, and he loved it, but he didn’t follow up because he thought it would have ruined his relationship with Apple.
This app has to be premised on a disdain for all walled gardens. There are no exclusive deals. No content is prohibited. This app is designed for the reader first.
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