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Email Finally Emerges as a Platform: 3 Must-Have Plug-ins What They Mean

2010-08-31 18:18
Email is old fashioned, right Not so fast - that rich source of data about your personal connections and interests is finally emerging as a platform for some really innovative services. Yesterday we saw the launch of Gmail s new Priority Inbox, which automatically sorts inbound messages by priority. That s something we ve been expecting since hints of it emerged 18 months ago. This Spring, Gmail began offering secure, programatic access permission for the contents of your inbox - a move we said heralded a new era of inbox applications. Now we re finally seeing that flood of services emerge. Here are three of the best new email apps that you don t want to miss. Following screenshots and a screencast, we discuss what it all means and how these are just the beginning of the coming era of email as a platform. Sponsor Rapportive Rapportive is a browser plug-in we wrote about this Spring, but we still see people saying I don t know how I lived without this months later. For now it s simple: the program looks at the adress you ve received an email from and displays social network data, job titles and locations in the sidebar of your browser. Rapportive has a lot more planned, but you ll be amazed to see how much even this adds to your email experience. The one down side It s not very easy to correct the information Rapportive shows about you or other people. You may have already added Rapportive, though. Read on for more applications you probably haven t begun using yet. How This Leverages Email as a Platform Email as identity indicator, plus that identity as hub for data aggregation, equals awesome. WiseStamp WiseStamp is a browser plug-in that makes it easy to automatically add dynamic content to your email signature. TechCrunch just wrote about the service opening up to the public today. In five minutes, I set up WiseStamp to automatically add a link to the most recent article I ve written here on ReadWriteWeb, the most recent post I ve written on my personal blog , my most recent message from Twitter and my next published plan via my Plancast account. How This Leverages Email as a Platform WiseStamp mashes up the communication platform of email with streams of our personal syndicated published content. This is a great example of how feeds of content can enrich our everyday lives. In this case, there s nothing in our emails being analyzed, but email s communication capabilities (and what really beats email for communication, still ) are built upon and added to by WiseStamp. The Killer App: Greplin Also first written about on TechCrunch today (grrrr....) is Greplin, an incredible cloud-based search service that indexes and adds to a universal personal search box the contents of your emails, calendar, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, BaseCamp, Evernote, Salesforce and more. It is, if it works as well as it says it does, a dream come true. Don t remember which communication service a message came through Greplin will solve that problem. Uber-geek Stephan...
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