Posted by David Towert on Mon, Sep 22, 2008 @ 03:27 AM
A few years ago, David Ing, our CTO and co-founder, came to the same conclusion as many others at the time: email, the killer productivity application of the 90s, was breaking down.
Or as he put it, "Email is basically broken. Or rather it is at the stage where its bad habits are institutionalized and accepted as the norm." He predicted that productivity gains would be eroded to the point where people would want to throw it out.
Sure enough, wikis, blogs, and other intranet solutions popped up in attempts to solve the burgeoning email overload problem. These solutions built on the premise that people use email for purposes it wasn't designed for, so why not offload the work onto other purposefully designed systems?
Well as it turns out, people love email too much, or it's simply too convenient and easy to use for collaboration and information sharing. So after witnessing mixed results, David came up with a brilliant idea: instead of making people leave email, rather extend it to support the way people like to work!
Why not extend it to easily allow people to place information in a fixed location in context? Why not let people browse and subscribe to this information? Why should email be a ‘push' only system? Why not extend it to support ‘pull' like wikis and blogs?
In other words, give people the benefits of wikis and blogs but do it with their email program of choice in a non-disruptive way. Give people less email to process but access to more information on-demand, on their terms.
And so Taglocity 2.0 was conceived! Now two very busy years later, Taglocity is nearing the end of a very successful six month beta program. And we certainly owe a debt of gratitude to all of our beta users for their encouragement and feedback over the last 6 months - thank you very much!
We are very excited about how David's vision has been realized in terms of the solution. Stay tuned for our official launch where we look forward to helping solve email overload and improve knowledge sharing for as many individuals and businesses as we possibly can.
We hope to use this new blog to start a useful dialog about saving email and getting people to love it all over again. Please let us know your thoughts!
David Towert
President & CEO