tom willerer . com

Email & Micro-blogging Convergence

I was just attempting to embed a video in an email (tried both Y! mail and Outlook), but couldn’t figure it out.  Why isn’t this functionality readily available?  And why not treat email more like micro-blogging?

I think email could learn something from blogging sites like tumblr that make it dead simple to post text, photos, quotes, links, audio, and video.  It’s all a form of communicating and sharing so why not make them more similar?  Instead email makes it hard to do anything except send a text based note.  That needs to change, and companies like Zemanta are taking the first steps toward that, but there is still more that could be done.

Another thought: I wish blogging platforms (i.e. tumblr) would make it easy to share my blog content (selectively) with my contacts via email, twitter or any other way I want.  I don’t want to send everything I post to everyone in my address book (or twitter follower), but I would like to do so for certain posts.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Hands on: Add photos, links to Gmail, Yahoo with Zemanta (arstechnica.com)
• WHOA!!! Zemanta now integrates with Gmail and Ymail. Holly Crap That’s Cool! (newcommbiz.com)
• Tumblr Testing Twitter Integration. Leaning Towards Becoming a Twitter Client itself! (thenextweb.com)