10 months ago

On The Rebooting Show, Brian Morrisey and his guests wondered what will replace email.

They made a few salient observations.

1. Email was never meant to be a content delivery platform.
2. Using it that way is a bit of a hack.
3. You can’t embed a video player in an email.
4. You can’t even control fonts very well.

I’d add to that …

5. People can clog your inbox without your consent.
6. Content you want and value is sitting there next to the latest nonsense.
7. It’s not always easy to find things.

So what comes next?

But before I get into that, I’d like to acknowledge that people have been proclaiming the death of email for a long time, and it continues to defy expectations. I’m not going to argue that email is dead or dying. But I do believe there is a better solution for content delivery.

And that’s a generic reader app.

By “generic” I mean that it’s not tied to a brand or to a walled garden, like Facebook.

By “reader app” I mean that it would be where you’d go for everything you want to read.

Here are some of the key ideas.

* If you see an article on the web that you want to read later, a browser plugin would allow you to send the article to your app. Somewhat like Evernote.
* Your app would have an email address, and all your free e-newsletters would be delivered to the app.
* All your subscription content – newsletters and magazines – would also be delivered to the app.
* Ideally, you could also read books through the app.
* The only content in your app would be stuff you want to be there.
* You can take notes in the app.
* You can comment on things you read in the app, and make them public or keep them private.
* You can organize things in folders, or by keywords, however you want to organize it.

How would the app owner make any money off this?

I can see two ways.

First, users pay a monthly fee for the app.

Second, all paid content delivered through the app would pay a surcharge – some percentage of the price of the content.

I pitched an idea like this to an exec at Evernote a few years ago, and he loved it, but he didn’t follow up because he thought it would have ruined his relationship with Apple.

This app has to be premised on a disdain for all walled gardens. There are no exclusive deals. No content is prohibited. This app is designed for the reader first.

Links

The Rebooting Show
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-rebooting-show/id1595625177

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