Rediff is taking the threat from Orkut and Facebook very seriously – they do understand that they can’t build another orkut/FB, so integration is the way to go. Rediffmail has integrated news feeds from Orkut and Facebook into the mailbox enabling users to stay up-to-date on the activities of their friends/family on the sites.
Once you signin to your Rediffmail account, you can provide your Orkut/FB details and Rediff will automatically import news feeds from thse chosen social networking sites.
While this may seem like a simple feature add, at the depth lies the fight
for ‘starting page‘!
With email transforming into becoming a dashboard of users activities on the internet, introduction of feeds from social networks into Rediffmail is an evolutionary step in the direction to make Rediffmail a more social email application. The new feature will help users to conveniently, and efficiently keep abreast of the activities of their friends and family on various social networking platforms – Rediff CTO, Venki Nishtala
What really happens is that most of the web workers tend to check their email first thing in the morning and any email solution that shows a snapshot of activities from other socionets stands a huge chance of being the starting page – i.e. stickiness.
Google/Yahoo are taking a different approach with iGoogle and MyYahoo – i.e. personalized pages/starting points that integrates email accounts.
What is the first thing you check in the morning?
- Updates from Socionets? or,
- Email?
What’s your take?











Each of the communication tools on the internet have different characteristics signal to noise ratio, personal vs public, anonymity vs identity.. Building “One ring to rule them all” applications seems fundamentally hard in such a landscape.
But, aggregating the snippets from each application and presenting them under one umbrella seems like a good strategy to follow the myriad of activity
BTW, Here is a crazy thought that just passed by:
We use various modes of transport: Walk, Cycle, Car, Bus, Ship..
We use various modes of communication: Email, IM, Groups, Twitter, Blogs, Flickr, SocioNets..
Compare the efforts for grand unification or converged experiences in the non-physical world: String Theory, Friendfeed, Universal search… Interesting!!
-Mahesh
Celebrating Life…
Awesome!
That will make a good mashup!
well such mash ups are available in some sites with all the above mentioned stuff