Three young men from Australia are sick of the antiquated way we view our email and have left their bureaucratic and frustrating positions at Google to pursue a new way for users to interact with their email. Cameron Adams, Jochen Bekmann and Dhanji Prasanna have developed a product they’re calling Fluent. The product is capable of integrating multiple email accounts and allowing users to view their messages in a streaming format with headlines, kind of like Facebook updates.
Cameron Adams comments on the design and aspirations for Fluent:
“We’re trying to … imagine the future of email,”
“So rather than having to receive a message, look at the subject, click on it, read the conversation, and then decide what to do, we sort of present you with the information that you need to immediately action on it.”
“The market that we’re going for initially is sort of independent professionals and small businesses that tend to have personal accounts [and] maybe several work accounts, It’s quite important for them to be able to check their multiple accounts at the same time.”
A great feature that Fluent adds to email searches is the ability to view emails and attachments in a streaming reverse timeline. If you know about when you received something you can view those timeframes and people on a scale.
Here’s a preview of how Fluent will look and function:
The team says that their product will make email viewing 20% faster, especially for those who have multiple email accounts and need to access their mail via smartphones. Currently, and perhaps ironically the Fluent software only works with Gmail, but efforts are already underway to integrate others like Hotmail. No word is given on how soon we may see this technology available in the United States.