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.

Rapleaf says that despite their collection methods, their findings can offer insight into these different userbases. To some extent, that may be true, but we're left wondering how different these findings would be if they hadn't relied on public social media data and rather went with a true random sample.

Gmail Skews Young, AOL Older

That being said, here's what Rapleaf came up with. In terms of age:

It's not all that surprising that Gmail users tend to be young. After all, the service was established years after AOL, Hotmail, and Yahoo. Some of those who already had webmail accounts on other services were hesitant to switch at first (and some still are) since the process of changing email accounts is never entirely painless and often leads to months of checking dual inboxes for emails that may have been missed. Instead, Google's growth likely came from more webmail first-timers looking to set up their brand-new online accounts in addition to the braver "email switchers," a group that also probably skews younger...especially since an effective switchover often requires a bit of technical savvy involving setting up forwarding, auto-responders, etc.

As for AOL being comprised of older users, that too, is relatively unsurprising. Where Google is the newest service, AOL is one of the oldest. Its core user base has aged with it over the years and those who haven't jumped shipped yet are bound to be the older members who don't stay as current with changing technology trends. Still, setting the bar for "old" at 36 is a little humbling - especially for those of us getting up in our years. (That's not old, is it?) It would be interesting to see further breakdowns of this demographic into age segments including 40+, 50+, and so on, but that data was not available.

Gmail Has More Females, Hotmail Has More Males

Perhaps more interesting is the gender variations between the services. Gmail, for instance, includes more females (53%) than males (47%). If those were election poll results, we would call it "too close to call," but in terms of tens of thousands of users, these percentage point differences have meaning.

Why would Gmail attract more females? And conversely, why does Hotmail have more males? (It's 57% male.) Is there something about the aesthetics, workflow or features in those services that appeal more to women than men or vice versa? And if so, what? Unfortunately, raw data can't provide these sorts of answers, but they're definitely intriguing to us. We would imagine they are intriguing to the user interface designers and engineers behind the products, too.

Do women like Gmail's drag-and-drop features or its themes? Do men prefer Hotmail's efficient "quick adds" which allow for one-click additions of Bing content to messages? We doubt those are the reasons for the discrepancy, but it makes us wonder what are. Try as we might, we can't come up with an easy theory to explain this. (If you can, please share in the comments.)

Future details about the study will focus on other data including online activity, friend counts, and social network memberships. Stay tuned to Rapleaf's site for more information.

PMN asked 203 panel members about their day-to-day behavior including the time they spent visiting social networks, reading and writing email, texting, talking on the phone, watching TV, reading magazines and surfing the web (visiting non-social networking sites).

When asked what activity they would be least willing to give up for an entire week, only 9% responded with "social networks." However, 26% responded "email." Another 26% said they wouldn't give up texting, although that finding is less surprising and fits in with other known behavioral traits of this particular demographic.

The report also notes that the time spent on social networks is now nearly the same as the time spent emailing. Panelists reported spending 33 hours per month on social networks and 31 hours per month on email. The difference of 2 hours per month is somewhat negligible. What's unexpected is how close those two numbers are to each other.

Questionable Findings?

According to Michael Della Penna, PMN co-founder and Executive Chairman, Gen Y finds email more critical because it remains the central hub for "social networking updates, including alerts around new followers, discussion updates and friend requests." While that may be true to a point, if the only reason Gen Y desired email access was for the social networking updates, it seems they would just go to the source instead: the social networks themselves. Given a choice between the two, it would be likely that they would have chosen to give up email and not their Facebook accounts. Something else must be going on here.

These findings also somewhat contradict a wider study done by Pew Internet and American Life earlier this year which more deeply examined how the different generations use the Internet. At that time, the study showed that email was still "for old people," so to speak, and email usage among teens had dropped from 89% in 2004 to 73% in 2009. Meanwhile, Pew also found that out of all the demographic groups surveyed, Gen Y was the most likely to use social networks.

Then last month, the Online Publishers Association revealed that web surfers' use of social networking sites like Facebook had become so rampant that it was actually causing a decline in email use.

While neither study specifically compares Gen Y's use of email against that of social networking sites, both seem to imply that email use is trending down thanks to the impact of social networking. That's why it's odd to find that one of the more "connected" generations would be quicker to abandon those social sites in favor of the more antiquated medium.

So Why Would Gen Y Give Up Facebook, but Not Email?

The answer to that question could be something as simple as how the survey question was worded. After all, the survey asked which activity they would give up for a week. Ask them again which one they could give up permanently and you may get a different answer.

Another theory is that all the hype about how Generation Y doesn't care for email is just an overblown stereotype about a demographic that, in reality, isn't all that different from the rest of us...at least when it comes to our inbox addiction.

Or perhaps Gen Y is starting to grow up a bit. Now that a large majority of them have exited their "teen" years and have entered the job market, they have begun to learn the importance of email communications. And no, they aren't just for receiving Facebook updates and friend requests. Email may now involve business-critical messages which jobs depend upon.

Finally, it could be that Gen Y has just a touch of Facebook ennui. The network, which used to be an exclusive hang out, has now been overrun by Baby Boomers and other "old folks" including bosses, parents, and sometimes even grandparents. Meanwhile, many have "aged out" of MySpace, finding themselves no longer as interested in the glittery profiles and loud music that seemed much more attractive in their high school days.

In addition, although we don't have any hard data yet, there are reports that Gen Y users are finding solace in alternative, niche social media sites like FML, Failblog, TextsFromLastNight, and Sporcle. Though not typical "social networks," these timewaster sites skew heavily towards young, college-aged adults says Carol Phillips, president of Brand Amplitude, a marketing firm that focuses heavily on the millennial demographic.

In any event, there's no need to take the PMN's study as gospel, especially given its relatively small sample set. Still, it raises the question whether this purported change in behavior deserves further study. Has Gen Y succumbed to email addiction like the rest of us? Or have they always felt this way? We hope some more in-depth research will reveal those answers in the future.

In yesterday's attack, the list of comprised Hotmail accounts were limited to those where the usernames started with the letter "A" or "B." However, that seemed to imply that the posted portion might actually be a part of a bigger list containing even more login/password combinations. At the time, a Microsoft spokesperson said that the company determined "this was not a breach of internal Microsoft data and initiated our standard process of working to help customers regain control of their accounts." Instead, claimed the spokesperson, those users whose credentials were revealed were likely to be victims of an online phishing attack where a third-party website was involved.

Phishing attacks are typically carried out via email messages where the attacker tricks the recipient into revealing their username and password by pretending to be some sort of trustworthy entity such as the user's bank, IT administrator, a popular website, or an online service. In the case of the stolen Hotmail passwords, it's possible that the attacker sent emails which claimed to be from the end user's email provider. If the user then followed the link contained within the malicious email, they would have ended up not on the actual email provider's site, but on a third-party site whose sole purpose was to capture their username and password when entered.

Beyond Hotmail: More Webmail Providers Affected

According to a story in today's BBC News, the most recent list of compromised accounts, which includes login credentials for Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, Earthlink, and Comcast users, contains some accounts that appear to be old, unused, or fake. However, many others listed are, in fact, genuine.

There's no way to be sure at this point that the new list is a part of the same phishing attack as yesterday's or if it's a new and separate scam.

The website where the accounts were posted - pastebin.com - is now "down for maintenance." Visitors to the site today will receive a message that reads:

Pastebin.com is getting an unprecedented amount of traffic due to a news story in which some leaked Hotmail passwords have been pasted on this site

Pastebin.com was intended as a tool to aid software developers, not for distributing this sort of material. Filters have been put in place to prevent reoccurrence, but the current traffic level is unsustainable.

Pastebin.com is just a fun side project for me, and today it's not fun. It will remain offline all day while I make some further modifications

Paul Dixon

Regardless of whether or not you think your account was compromised, today would be a good day to change the password on whichever webmail service you currently use. Better safe than sorry!

Should Google be worried? Some analysts think so. "This is trouble for Google," said Matthew Cain of Gartner. Google of course, disagrees.

Google, whose online suite of applications is collectively known as Google Apps, has been making steady inroads in the business world with offerings tailored to schools, nonprofits, SMBs, and the enterprise. The company currently touts 15 million Apps users in nearly 2 million companies worldwide. Marketed as a less expensive and easier-to-manage alternative to on-site systems like Microsoft Exchange, the suite has encouraged many companies to switch to their hosted solution, mainly due to ever-decreasing IT budgets which have left penny-pinching companies scrambling to find ways to cut costs.

However, pitting iNotes against Google Apps isn't exactly a fair "apples to apples" comparison. That's because iNotes' focus is just email, calendaring, and contact management. Google Apps, on the other hand, is a more comprehensive suite that includes Google Docs, an online office suite, an intranet-building tool called Google Sites, and much more. Also, iNotes only provides 1 GB of storage for their product - if you want extra, you'll have to pay. Google, however, starts you off with a 25 GB inbox.

Still, since Lotus is the lower-priced solution, that alone may be enough for them to compete. Google Apps currently charges $50 per user per year but iNotes will be only $36. Those cost savings combined with the brand recognition of the IBM name will help iNotes quickly get in the game.

IBM: iNotes Delivers More Than Cost Savings, it Offers Stability

In addition to IBM's primary focus on price, the company is also taking advantage of some very public recent Gmail outages, including one which locked out corporate customers from their email for 2 hours last month, to prop up their solution as the more stable alternative. According to Poulley, IBM has a long-standing record of running "the world's mission-critical systems for banks, telcos, and utilities...We're bringing business class services and support with mission critical reliability at a price lower than the competition."

Google Responds: iNotes is No Google Apps

Google isn't taking all this lying down, though. Dave Girouard, President of Google's Enterprise division, said that Google will learn the business of selling software more quickly than IBM will adapt to cloud computing.

Andrew Kovacs, a Google spokesperson, also noted that IBM's positioning of their iNotes product seemed to be more of a complement to their on-site solutions than it was a replacement for them. With iNotes, it appears that IBM wants to supplement their current install base of Lotus Notes servers to deliver email to both deskless workers and those who didn't have email accounts already. Google Apps, on the other hand, is designed to be a complete "rip and replace" solution allowing businesses to do away with their on-site systems entirely in favor of a fully hosted cloud product.

He also pointed out that IBM's claims of reliability when it came to their iNotes product were unproven at this point. iNotes, which is based on IBM's acquisition of a Hong Kong company called Outblaze, does not appear to offer any service level agreements (SLAs)... at least it doesn't mention any on its website. IBM confirms that's the case, saying the company "has not made any specific promises regarding uptime" but that the company has a solid history of reliability. Still, without an SLA documented in black-and-white, companies, especially those in the enterprise space, are bound to be wary.

Finally, Kovacs spoke of the various ways in which Google products interoperate with other technologies used by large companies. The Google Apps system works with Microsoft Outlook, mobile phones including iPhone, Android, Windows Mobile, and Blackberry. It even integrates with Blackberry Enterprise Server and directory systems like Microsoft's Active Directory.

In the end, though, Google says they're excited about the iNotes launch as it serves as "further validation that the future of computing is in the cloud." Having a well-respected and trusted organization like IBM offer something like this will bring more visibility to cloud computing and that is something that will be good for everyone.

This impressive tool is launching today at the DEMO conference, where it may very well steal the show. Liaise is currently available only for Outlook, but if you're an Outlook user then it's worth your time to download. Outlook user or not, you'll want to check out the video demonstration below.

I really hope that this product will support GMail sometime soon (perhaps with some Google Gears integration?) but for now this is the first software in a long time that's made me give Windows a second look. This level of automated task-tracking and organization, with minimal interruption to your existing work-flow, has got to offer a competitive advantage. The elegance of the real-time analysis and the usefulness of the language processing, at least in theory on the day the product launches, is the kind of experience that reminds us how much innovation is still possible.

The first 200 ReadWriteWeb readers who click this link will get access to download the application.

In 2003, people spent 46% of their time online using sites which fall into the "communications" category - that is, sites whose core capabilities are email and instant messaging. By 2009, that usage dropped to 27% or a 41% decline in overall use.

Although "community" sites like Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn weren't measured back in 2003 when the first analysis was performed, OPA introduced the new category in 2008 at which point they were able to see the impact the social networks had on the habits of online users. While obviously it's not just Facebook which is to blame for the declining use of email and IM, there's no doubt that the world's largest social network plays a more significant role than the others here.

Why Social Networks are Replacing Email

As to why social networking sites have led to declining use of other communication tools, Pam Horan, president of the OPA, speculates that it's because people can conduct the same activities on the social networks as they did before via email, IM, and other communication properties, but now they can do so more efficiently.

While we would argue that in the business world, emailing is still an essential, "can't live without it" tool, it's not so far-fetched to say that Facebook and the like have changed mainstream users' online behavior. Want to share a funny video? Post it to your profile. Have new pictures from your vacation? Upload them to an online album. These are precisely the sorts of online activities that only a few years ago took place primarily via email messages. Social networking has undoubtedly changed that.

And Gen Y Hates Email, Right?

Then there are the constant news stories about how the younger generations, specifically Generation Y and Z, don't use email. "Email is unfashionable and outdated," claims a recent ZDNet headline pointing to a recent story about Boston College's decision to stop handing out email addresses to incoming students. These types of stories are barely even news anymore as the common perception is that communication among these younger groups takes place via social networks (and, of course, text messaging).

Oddly enough, the belief that Gen Y hates email seems to be somewhat contradicted by the late-breaking news that, out of all other demographic groups, it's Gen Y which is most likely to opt-in for email marketing messages. Still that doesn't show that email is their preferred medium, only that they're more open to using it for less-than-personal types of communication. That trend makes sense as they probably don't even think of email as the place to connect with friends and family - that's what social networks are for - so why not use it for collecting coupons instead?

Other Findings

OPA's research also revealed that visits to content sites have increased over the past five years - up 24% since 2003. Time spent on these sites has increased dramatically, too, with an 88% increase since 2003. Today, Internet users spend an average of 6:58 hours on content sites per month. Search and Commerce round out the categories OPA studied with search seeing an increase from 3% to 5% and commerce seeing a slight decline from 16% to 13%.

OPA's Internet Activity Index (IAI), as the research is called, is conducted by Nielsen/NetRatings. It tracks usage across all the above mentioned categories but excludes .gov and .edu domains as well as adult-oriented sites.

An interesting side note here is that the IAI shows the time spent using communications sites is 4:54 hours per month while community sites are at 3:01 hours. That actually contradicts Nielsen's earlier findings from March of this year which claimed that social networks and blogs were now more popular than email based on time spent. This discrepancy in data means we're taking these latest findings and those that came before it with the proverbial grain of salt and you should too. However, what we can take away from both reports is that, numbers aside, email is definitely being impacted by the social networking trend.

Gist is not a system for the casual email user whose main communications involve sending email forwards to friends and pictures of the kids to mom and dad. Instead, Gist is designed to help the professional email user who often opens up their inbox only to feel like it's helplessly out of control. How do you know what the most important communications are? How can you stay up on what your email contacts are doing? Gist aims to solve these problems.

Through ongoing analysis of your email, Gist determines what's important based on the frequency and types of communications that occur. It then provides you with the following: profiles, insights, and actions. Profiles include both individual and company profiles, insights are the relevant information about your most important contacts, and actions are the ability to share news and contact details using the online service.

When you're signed into Gist, you're presented with a dashboard where boxes display key information like your top emailed contacts, news about those contacts, upcoming events, email attachments, and links. All this information is automatically retrieved from your inbox with no effort on your part. It's as if your email inbox serves as the backend database for this unique relationship management system.

Tabs at the top of the page let you move from the dashboard to sections where you can focus on People or Companies specifically, organizing them into groups, tagging them (a new feature), removing those you don't need to track, managing their importance levels via sliders, editing them, and much more. You can also click to view individual contacts and companies and edit the data there if need be.

New Features

One of the new features included in this updated public version of Gist is the ability to pull in contacts from Salesforce. This is a helpful addition to the program which also supports Gmail, Outlook, general Email/IMAP accounts, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. You can import your own CSV file, too.

With additional software, Gist can be integrated right into Outlook and Salesforce. The Outlook integration is done via a plugin which pops up a separate window where you can access info on people, companies, events, messages, and attachments. The plugin was available previously, but has been updated in the new version. The company decided to go with a pop-up type of plugin for a few reasons. For one, by not implementing it as an email sidebar (like Xobni does, for instance), Gist data can be accessed from any screen in Outlook whether that's your inbox itself, a contact's details page, a meeting request form, etc. They also made the plugin work more like a mini-browser so it could perform its actions quickly while not slowing down Outlook in the process.

Also new today is Gist's integration with Salesforce. Not only can you pull data into Gist via the CRM system, you can now set up a Gist widget of sorts that displays right in Salesforce itself. Here, you can stay current on news, blogs, tweets, and other relevant information from your Salesforce contacts.

Integration with Twitter and the ability to share via Twitter and Facebook round out the new features in this latest beta build. Since many business folks can't be bothered to friend and follow their contacts on Twitter, Gist does it for you. It doesn't actually follow users on your behalf in your own Twitter account, but it pulls in their tweets from their publicly available timelines right into Gist. You can then respond or share information via Twitter or Facebook - an important step in managing and maintaining communications in today's tech savvy business world. You can still share items via email or flag them for later, as you could with previous Gist versions, too.

For now Gist remains a free service, though a more advanced paid version is in the works for the future. Gist is also working on their mobile offerings but have nothing to announce as far as specialized mobile applications just yet. New users can sign up for Gist now here: www.gist.com

Postbox Features

Search: Once configured, Postbox looks very much like any other email program you've used in the past - this is no radical redesign like Google Wave plans on being. There's a message list, preview pane, folder lists, favorite folders, etc. However, the killer features in this application don't have anything to do with its design. Instead, what makes Postbox so appealing to power emailers are its search and organization features. The application can help you find anything in your email whether a contact, an address, a link, a picture, an attachment, or even just a snippet of text. Searches appear in Postbox's tabbed interface where visual results - like photo thumbnails, for example - make finding the right result easy.

Topics: Similar to Gmail's "labels," Postbox uses "topics" for organizing email, a system that helps you stay on top of your current projects. And as with Gmail, messages can be flagged with multiple topics. This can be done either after you receive them or as you compose an email. Postbox will also automatically tag future emails within a thread with the same topic.

Compose Sidebar: Also in the Compose window is a sidebar which provides easy access to images, attachments, links, contacts, and signatures stored elsewhere in your email. Click on any of these icons and a search box appears allowing you to quickly retrieve items.

To-Do's: For getting things done, Postbox lets you turn email messages into "to do" items which pushes them to the top of your inbox where they stayed pinned until complete.

Inspector Pane: When viewing an email message, the so-called "Inspector Pane" on the right summarizes the content detected within that email conversation including information about the sender, attachments, images, links, addresses, etc. What's interesting is that the sender's profile picture can actually be retrieved from Facebook or Twitter if you've linked your accounts from the Web Services menu (under Tools).

Extensions: Although Postbox doesn't include a calendar of its own, the Lightning add-on, one of several supported extensions lets you view your calendar as a separate tab in Postbox. It provides access to your Gmail calendar, too.

A Lot to Like

Even though many email users are happy with their web-based solution of choice, there's a lot to like about Postbox's desktop app. For example, we especially like the ability to post from our email directly to Facebook, Twitter, and FriendFeed. And what we wouldn't give for visual search like this in Gmail! Postbox's search features are robust yet simple to use and the handy "Inspector Pane" is a useful tool that could easily become an essential component to your email workflow.

For these reasons and more, it's no surprise that this application made our list of favorites earlier this year. (See: Still Shiny: 23 Apps We're Using One Month Later).

With the public release of version 1.0 of this application, the company isn't introducing any major upgrades, but that shouldn't stop you from giving it a look if you're interested in desktop email clients. Postbox is available as a free trial, but sells for $39.95 if you decide to purchase.

The initial setup can take a while, especially if you are trying to sync a very active email account. ReMail says that it can download and index about 3000 to 4000 messages per hour over WiFi, which, judging from our own experience with the app, sounds reasonable. We would definitely not try to run the initial setup on anything less than a WiFi connection.

After That: Fast and Smart

After the initial setup, however, the app is a breeze to use. ReMail's smart auto-completion makes searching for emails easy and you can reply to emails right from within the application. The real game changer here, of course, is that you can finally search all your email from the iPhone, even if you are offline. What really makes the app stand out, though, is how fast it can search through your emails, even if you have downloaded thousands of emails.

All of these messages obviously take up space on your phone, but according to ReMail, 100,000 messages will only take up about 500 megabytes. That's a small price to pay for having instant access to all of your email.

One limitation we should point out, however, is that the app only supports one email account, so you can't search both your private and business accounts, for example.

ReMail was founded by Gabor Cselle, who used to work on email related products at Google and Xobni. The company raised funding from YCombinator, as well as from Paul Buchheit and Sanjeev Singh, the inventors of Gmail and co-founders of FriendFeed.

The Timeline

According to details on the newly revamped Silentale web site, the startup has three main features: the "Timeline," the "People Book," and "Connectors." In the timeline, you're presented with a view of all your messages from around the web and even from your mobile phone. Silentale is able to connect to Facebook, Google Contacts, most POP3/IMAP email accounts (such as those you might access in Outlook), Gmail, AOL Mail, Yahoo! Mail, Twitter, and it can pull in your SMS messages from your mobile phone. All these are presented in the scrollable timeline view with icons indicating their source along with the date, subject, sender, recipient, and of course, the message itself.

Connectors

The "Connectors" page is where you set up the various connections to the platforms whose messages you want archived. The list of connectors (see above) is short right now, but they promise more will be added in the future. These connectors crawl through your messages and contacts and archive them on the service once you've authorized Silentale to access those accounts. Not only will the service pull in the messages from that point forward, it will also work backwards in time to retrieve older messages too. Attached documents, including Office documents, photos, videos, and links will also be archived. Although at first you won't be able to search within these documents, that functionality will be "introduced shortly," reads the Silentale FAQ.

As for the SMS messages, they'll be archived using special mobile applications. At the moment, the company has developed an iPhone app and an Android app which both use your data connection to archive each text received to the Silentale service. Our only concern with this feature is in regards to those of us who choose to receive either Facebook or Twitter messages via SMS. Since that would be a large number of updates, it would be nice to exclude certain SMS short codes from the archiving process in order to save our precious battery life, which no doubt, the SMS archiving apps would eat up. Besides, since both Facebook and Twitter are available "connectors" on the Silentale service, those particular SMS texts would be redundant.

The People Book

Finally, there is the "People Book" view which is essentially an aggregated address book. Silentale finds the duplicate contacts from across your networks and combines their information together, merging their email, phone numbers, addresses, profiles, etc. into one single contact. This list, like the other views, is searchable, but it can be filtered by network as well to help you find your contacts with ease.

When you click on one of these contacts, all your conversations from across the various supported platforms are displayed. A message timeline at the top of the page lets you hop around from month to month and year to year, too.

Get Your Invite Now!

Of course, since Silentale hasn't launched yet, it's too soon to praise the service. We have no idea how well it will work. For all we know, it could be buggy and slow. But on paper, the service looks useful, promising, and - dare we say it? - exciting. How incredible would it be to have a master copy of all your communication from everywhere in one searchable resource in the cloud? We think it would be great. It's especially exciting since there aren't good ways to archive and search through your communications yet on some of these supported platforms - like Facebook and Twitter, for example.

Still, there may be some concerns about security when it comes to this service. How will Silentale access these networks? Hopefully they'll tap into Twitter via OAuth and into Facebook using Facebook Connect, but will they ask for our email passwords? That always makes people a little uneasy.

During the beta period, Silentale will be free, but when they publicly launch, it will be offered as a "freemium" type service. The basic (free) plan will allow 5 connections, unlimited contacts, but only 8 weeks of message history and a total storage space of 2 GB. The unlimited plan, which looks to be $50/year, will offer unlimited everything.

As we mentioned earlier, Silentale isn't open for business yet, but you can go ahead and sign up for your beta invite right here on the Silentale homepage. Just click the link on the upper-right.

That may be about to change, though, thanks to a new tool created by researchers at the University of Washington. Called "Vanish," the system places a time limit on any message posted to any web service through a web browser.

Perhaps the most amazing thing about Vanish is that it's capable of erasing messages posted practically anywhere on the web. For example, the system is able to erase messages from any web-based email system like Gmail, Hotmail, or Yahoo, instant messaging chats, or even social networking sites like MySpace or Facebook.

To accomplish this, the messages sent with Vanish are encrypted with a secret key, never revealed to the end user. The key is then divided into dozens of pieces and sent out over peer-to-peer (P2P) networks - the same ones where music and movie files are traded every day. Because file-sharing systems are in a state of constant change, the various key parts eventually become inaccessible. Once enough of them are lost, the message can no longer be decrypted and read.

In the current Vanish prototype, however, the network's computers purge their memory every eight hours to simulate the key loss that would occur on P2P networks.

From the recipient's perspective, a message sent using Vanish appears as gibberish until they highlight the text and then press the "Vanish" button to unscramble it.

Try it Now

Currently, the prototype is available as a free, open-source tool that works as a combination of downloadable software and a Firefox plugin. Both sender and recipient have to use the software and plugin in order for Vanish to work. If you would prefer to not install anything on your computer, there's also the Vanish Online Service which you can use from your web browser. Both options are available here if you'd like to try them out now.

Since its launch in early 2008, the software has been offered as a free download to anyone looking to capitalize on the hidden social network in their inbox. But in March of this year, we got wind that things were going to change when Xobni announced their plans to work on a premium version after receiving a new round of funding.

What's Worth Paying For? Xobni Says Search

It's interesting that the company thinks the critical missing feature that users will be willing to pay for is search, especially since Microsoft Outlook includes some pretty robust search tools of its own. In Outlook 2007, for example, a user can configure "Search Folders" which let you easily create a custom query for things like "mail from specific people" or "mail with attachments" or anything else you can dream up. Outlook also offers instant search that finds and highlights keywords in your messages. More recently, though, you may have heard of another popular search feature when Google broke it: Windows Desktop Search. Outlook ties into this search service which lets the Windows OS index your emails so computer-wide searches will also return email results.

So how is Xobni going to improve on the built-in capabilities of Outlook? Essentially, by adding tools and features that make email search more like cramming a real search engine into your inbox.

New Features in Plus

Xobni Plus's query builder makes it easier to configure advanced queries -similar to how search folders might operate. However, unlike search folders, these queries can be built on the fly for one-time use, not saved forever as a new Outlook folder. You can search for exact phrases or keywords and you can even perform Boolean queries.

Xobni is also letting you search entire conversation threads at once instead of having to search your entire inbox or a particular folder, as in Outlook. And thankfully, you can now search through archived PSTs, too. 

Another new search feature is the ability to search calendar appointments and tasks, an interesting choice for a premium product since Outlook's own instant search feature is available in all Mail views, including Calendar, Contacts, and Tasks.

The only feature debuting in Xobni Plus that's not really about building a specific search query is AutoSuggest. However, it's somewhat search-related. If you've ever forgotten the name or email of someone you need to contact, remembering only that they work at a specific company for example, you can use this feature to type in what you can remember (like the company name) and Xobni will display all matching results ranked on how often you and that person communicate. That's a big improvement on the typical autocomplete functionality found in most email clients today.

Why Pay When Outlook Includes Search of Its Own?

Despite some similarities between Outlook's native features and Xobni, the improvement here is Xobni's easier-to-use UI that places everything you need in its sidebar. Also, it's worth noting that Outlook's own search may be a headache for some users, especially if you go by the top Google results for "Outlook 2007 search" which returns tons of links like "search problem," "fix for slow instant search," and "search busted."

Now that the premium software is available, the question is whether or not Outlook users are really struggling so much with Outlook's own search features that they would be willing to pay nearly $30 for these improvements. (Our guess is that they are.) We're a little surprised that the Plus offering didn't incorporate more "social" features, like improvements to their Facebook integration or some sort of microblogging functionality, but we suppose that at the end of the day these sorts of things are probably less useful to the business user than simply finding email fast is.

To buy the new version of Xobni Plus, you can go here.

The original product created collaborative, online work environments called "mailspaces" to contain email messages, both text and multimedia. In the latest release, issued this past Wednesday, the company has significantly enhanced the UX, making it easier for users to track their email threads, know who said what when, and use email in a modern, collaborative way rather than the static fashion to which we've become accustomed.

"People are getting used to all the great social platforms and tools available, and email isn't one of them," said Cc:Betty CEO and co-founder Michael Cerda. "Betty was designed to transport people out of old-school email into a modern day mailspace where they can easily communicate, collaborate, share, and engage in an organized and interconnected environment. Our goal is to make communicating simple and productive again. Our beta users are responding with great input and feedback, which is represented in this latest iteration."

Users will be able to create 'waves,' and add documents and collaborators to it. The system will feature concurrent rich-text editing, as well as email and IM-like messaging functions. Lars Rasmussen, one of the co-founders and lead engineers behind this project, especially stressed the real-time nature of Wave, where edits to a wave, be they new messages or edits in a document, appear immediately on the screens of all participants.

From what we have seen, Wave combines aspects of productivity tools, social networks, and micro-blogging. One of the most interesting features is that every change to a wave is captured and users can 'replay' how the specific wave developed over time. Wave will allow users to send private and public messages, and Google is heavily relying on HTML5 to make the product work well in modern browsers. We will have a more detailed look at all the features of Wave once we get access to the product itself.

Developers, Developers, Developers

Google is also making a set of APIs available to developers today. These APIs should give developers the ability to enhance Wave by building extensions for the core product, but also to embed Wave's features on other sites to make them more collaborative. One extension Google offers today, for those lucky enough to have access to Wave already, is a Twitter extension, and Google will also offer the ability to integrate OpenSocial gadgets into Wave.

Interestingly, Google is taking a very open approach with this new product. Not only will it give developers access to Wave's APIs, but the team also plans to open-source the protocols at the core of Wave, which really points at the greater ambition of the Wave team to see Wave and its protocols replace at least some of today's standard communications systems.