The Next Web

Tripit: Email is the new interface!

Written on April 24, 2008 – 8:58 pm
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten,

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Andy Denmark is one of the founders of TripIt and their VP Engineering. Tripit, The online travel assistant that received $5.1M in funding earlier this week, is a service that helps you manage your trips. The main interface for getting information into their service is email. Instead of copy/pasting and submitting to a webbased form you simply forward all your confirmation messages to plans@tripit.com. Their software then analyzes the content of the message and extracts all important information and plots in on an easy to read itinerary.

During his presentation today Andy challenged us to come up with more email centric interfaces like this. The benefits are clear. Almost everyone who uses the web has email. In fact, probably more people have access to email than access to the web.

Right now I use TwitterMail.com to send and receive messages for Twitter. I use email to send most of the photos I make to Flickr and I use email (in the background) to sync appointments with my partners via iCal. I also use email to post blogs now and then and instead of using a notebook I send my notes to an emailaccounts I reserve for just that purpose.

Some people even use email to browse the web:

Tripit.com makes it clear that email is a great interface for services and it is inspiring to hear their ideas about this. I can imagine that email is a great way to work with social networking sites. Instead of manually entering someone’s name and emailaddress into a website why not simply cc connect@linkedin.com when I email them? LinkedIn could parse this message, connect the sender (from address) and receiver (to address) and send us a confirmation after that. The first message could be archived with the account as an easy reminder of how you met. Simply, easy and scalable.

Any other ideas for using email as an interface?

email, facebook, flickr, innovation, interface, linkedin, tripit, twitter, web20expo

7 Comments »

Time Machiner: I will never forget a birthday anymore

Written on March 29, 2008 – 1:41 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

Yeah! From now on I’ll never forget a birthday of any of my friends and relatives. You know the awkward feeling after you’ve just discovered you have been with somebody in the room for 30 minutes without congratulating him with yet another year. Say goodbye to it, because now you can just paste your birthday calender in the Time Machiner:

Moreover, you can also send reminders to yourself. Our promise things to you future self: “Hi, two years ago you promised me that by now, you would date Kate Moss”.

Of course there were some other ways to do this as well, yet the amazing thing about this mini app is that it’s build in just 4 hours for only 50 dollars. This seems to be some sort of new trend, building tools and apps in a ridiculously short time. See Tweetburner for example. Michiel Sikkes and Bob Jansen have build this improved Linkblip imitation in just 24 hours.

See the video blog of Jon Wheatly who explains the whole process. He had the idea and Paul Fraser developed it.

developing, email, time machiner, trend

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