Nurphy Wants to Replace Email with Conversations
The beta launch of Google Wave has once again put the spotlight on the shortcomings of email. Wave tries to be everything for everybody, but others, like the recently launched Nurphy, have opted for a more focused approach. Nurphy, founded by Paul Horsfall and Neil Cauldwell, wants to be a replacement for email conversations with multiple recipients. The result is an interesting mix between email, Twitter, Yammer and IM that is aimed at both business and casual users.
Conversations Instead of Email
To initiate a conversation, you first have to sign up to the service or sign in with your Twitter credentials, which doesn't take more than a minute. On the website itself, Nurphy looks a bit like a cross between Twitter and an email client. After you have signed up, you can start a conversation with anybody who is on the service already or by email. Recipients who don't want to sign up for Nurphy can continue to reply to messages by email.
Conversations on Nurphy are shown in a Twitter-like timeline in reverse chronological order. Conversations can be public, private or by invitation only (though still visible to the public). Public threats - like Nurphy's own customer service site - look a bit like forums and Nurphy recommends that you post links to these public conversations on your social networking profiles so that you can have a 'real' conversation with your friends. Without threaded conversations, however, it can be hard keep track of conversations. Instead of using sub-threads like Yammer, Nurphy borrowed Twitter's @reply structure.
It is clear that Nurphy's designers paid a lot of attention to detail. If you ever registered for a Gravatar in the past, for example, it will automatically choose this picture as your profile image in Nurphy. The service also offers a nifty mobile website, which looks especially good on the iPhone.
Needs some Fine-Tuning
The service, however, also still needs a bit of fine-tuning. You can't edit messages once they have been posted - the only option is to delete the whole message. It can also take a few minutes before an emailed message actually appears in a conversation. There are also a few small design flaws that take a user out of the experience. When you add a message, the whole page reloads, for example, even though the system seems perfectly capable of adding incoming messages to the conversation without a reset.
It almost seems like Nurphy is trying to keep things too simple in its current iteration. While we understand that the company is trying to make it as easy as possible for new users to get started, it would be nice if you could set up a private Yammer-like network for your friends or colleagues, for example.
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Threaded, conversational email was only a matter of time after the iPhone did it with SMS (in my opinion gamechanging for SMS). I expect we'll see everyone trying to make email more conversational and probably even Microsoft before long.
Why, exactly, does everybody seem to think that some service is going to "replace email"?
Clue time: No service based on one specific website will ever replace email. Why? Several reasons, with the main one being that the parties must use the service as well. Even if you make the thing work with other services, there's going to be some point where, to fully populate the conversation, all parties need to be on the same page.
The closest anybody has come to replacing email is Facebook, simply because of reach. Lots and lots people are on FB, and can be reached through it. But even so, it's nowhere near the reach of email, which is ubiquitous.
Email is distributed. It's not a 'service', it's a protocol. Anybody can build on top of it. If my email goes down, then everybody else's email keeps working. Thousands of apps exist to send and receive email, on all platforms.
Email is entrenched. It's not going anywhere, and it's not getting replaced. It might get built upon, but it's certainly not going to be some single-point-of-failure website that will do so. It'll be a protocol, one which everybody adopts.
Thanks @Frederic, what's your Nurphy username? I was about to start a conversation with you. We've been working on the threading issue (we wanted something really slick), I'll send you an update soon.
@Steve, yes, the iPhone SMS app was a real revelation - I was on a Nokia N70 'til I bought a 3GS a few weeks ago. Threaded SMS is so useful.
@Otto, email is a great notification protocol. We don't intend on directly replacing the space which email occupies - our focus is on conversations, and that's why we wanted to make Nurphy backwards compatible with email.
Yes, I also find that forums often involve public threats (check your spelling)!
@Otto you're exactly right.
Email is open and distributed. It cannot be replaced with a website like Facebook or Twitter nor Nurphy.
Google Wave is also open and distributed using XMPP federation. However, it probably won't replace email for a while. There will likely be an open standard that will supersede Google Wave, since the name is still tied to a single company which means it isn't truly open like Email. However, Google Wave has popularized the ability to effectively implement concurrency control over the web.
Email is a great notification protocol. We don't intend on directly replacing the space which email occupies - our focus is on conversations, and that's why we wanted to make Nurphy backwards compatible with email.
For corporate users there are mailspace products that dynamically create visual maps from e-mail conversations and share them as SharePoint mailspaces.