[Netherlands] InBox2 is a fledging product which attempts to bring together all your input streams (multiple mail accounts, Twitter, Facebook, etc.) into a single master inbox. The company has just launched a Facebook application which gives you access to that Inbox via Facebook.
Recipients
The release of Google Wave has prompted a lot of discussion on the future of email or the lack thereof. InBox2 was inspired by the insight that people use their inboxes for all kinds of purposes including content sharing – sending themselves or others links or files – and storage. According to InBox2 people have an average of 2.9 email accounts. They communicate with certain contacts mainly via Facebook or Twitter rather than email and they access mail from multiple devices. Ideally, users should be able to filter, label and organise messages, documents and files arriving from all sources on any device.
Message Body
The InBox2 Facebook application let’s you select email and Twitter accounts. The application pulls all your messages (email, DMs, mentions) and organises them into threads. Documents and other files included in the messages are listed independently as well as being accessible via messages. You can add labels and hide certain people or message sources like Twitter. More services like LinkedIn and Hyves, the biggest dutch social network, should be added soon. Twitter status can be updated and emails sent directly from Facebook. One feature I particularly like is the integration of email and DM alerts into Facebook’s notifications. There are some teething problems – the execution can be flaky at times – but there is definitely potential in the concept.
CC
There are plenty of social media stream aggregation tools but InBox2 concentrates more on email. The most direct competitors in that space seem to be Fuser, Digsby and Zenbe. Fuser is only available in the US and UK. Digsby is a desktop client only. Zenbe already has a desktop and mobile apps as well a Google Wave clone called Shareflow. It’s a subscription service though while web access at least is free with InBox2. Still, Inbox2 has some catching up to do.
Destination Address
By the end of 2009, InBox2 wants to offer a holy trinity of clients: a desktop client and phone applications in addition to the web clients. I have seen screenshots of the desktop client which looks great and has nifty features like previews of file attachments. Once all your input streams are accessible via a single client it’s easy to see the scope for many kinds of value-added features. The phone and desktop clients will be paid applications. The web clients will be ad-supported.
Something seriously messed up here, I am seeing the gmail account of a guy named gus, 2 twitter accounts which are not mine and I just asked them to delete my account IMMEDIATELY.
This is the last thing you want to see on a service like this!!!! FAIL.
Also nice their support forums are down:
http://support.inbox2.com/
We’re still looking at how this can happen. Are you absolutely positive that somebody else hasn’t logged into Inbox2 on your machine?
Every query that goes to our database is locked down to only return the result for the specific user that is requesting the data.
In the 2 months that we have run in private beta with about 100 users for the FB app we haven’t see this.
We have had around 60 signups in the last hour, none of them has had any issues.
Actually I forgot Silentale – also possibly a competitor.
https://silentale.com/
Hi Niels,
We are frantically trying to produce your behavior, so far we haven’t been able to.
Support forums are indeed down since they are still being worked on.
I would love to get in touch with you to see how this could have happened because I assure you the privacy of our users is our priotity number 1.
You could do me a huge favor if you can send me an email at waseem@inbox2.com detailing if you are on a public computer, what browser you use, etc. Naturally we will delete your account as requested.
Are you positive that you aren’t logged into a Facebook account which is not yours since we use Facebook for authentication?
Thanks
Hi Waseem,
I’m pretty sure I was logged in to my facebook account, the same as I connected to TCEurope. Besides I saw a mix of my own account and other accounts. I will send you a few screenshots via mail.
Cheers
Hi Niels, would be greatly appreciated.
Do you happen to be behind a proxy server?
We’re still trying to reproduce and have asked several of our users to retest, still no look.
Like I said this is currently on the very top of our todo list.
Email with Browser/OS and screenshots sent. And I’m not behind a proxy either.
It took me two minutes to start-up. Everything seems work out pretty well for me.