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

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Google release a new home page design for Japan

Written on March 19, 2008 – 7:45 am
Mike Sheetal, Next Web WebTipr in Japan

Via a tip off from one of my staff in our internal office chat here at UltraSuperNew Inc., comes news that Google has updated the interface for its top page for Japanese users.

The new design keeps the position of the main search bar and associated links, then adds a line of quick access icons below that to some of Google’s other services. There is a tabbed menu, then 5 items shown under each tab.

The first tab can be translated as “recommended”, it includes Google Mail, Youtube, Google News, Google Maps, Google Transit.

The second tab can be translated as “all kinds of search”, and provides links to search interfaces for images, blogs, books and the desktop.

The third tab is “convenient tools” and includes Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Reader and Google Toolbar.

The final tab is “more fun” and has links to Youtube, Picasa, Blogger and Google Earth.

One thing to note about the treatment of all these links is that they are all referred to by what you can do or what they are rather than the product name. For example Picasa is referred to as a photo management tool and not by its name, “Picasa”.

The design change seems to be more in line with what Japanese users expect (generally a higher need to see more information on the page) and is a big move for Google moving away from their long standing simple home page. Its nice to see Google treating individual markets in a special way.

google, interface, japan

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