Bear's Log

All last month, and now with Kevin Rose’s new Foundation newsletter, I have been seeing a resurgence of email as a delivery/notification tool.

and it looks like others have also.

I think the reason this is happening is because of a convergence of small changes over the last couple of years that have all reached a tipping point that has let email reappear as a viable delivery conduit:

• Google and companies like Mailroute have enabled people to take back their inboxes from spammers. Not that spam has gone away, but email is now enterprise/big-business so options exist for people who need to send lots of email that will be delivered on-time and not end up in the spam folders,
• Email clients now handle all of the web media formats. Heck, most modern email clients use tech like WebKit to display the content,
• Companies like MailChimp and TinyLetter now exist to handle all of the tedious parts of managing an email/newsletter subscription list.

With the above you can now create a newsletter infrastructure in hours instead of days and you have all of the required features to manage it.

So while I really hope people don’t start to use “email 2.0” to describe this trend, I do hope they realize that what is really important is that good content is being made using open web tools and is now being delivered using non-silo’d delivery paths. That is the real excitement!