Google is now making available to all users, albeit by invitation only for now, Inbox, it’s new Gmail app.
I’ve barely seen it but initially I’m a bit skeptical. There’s a focus on automatically bundling your email for you and managing todo lists. I already manage my email with a strong and extensive set of filters and I manage todo lists and things like that via my implementation of David Allen’s GTD. So I’m probably not an intended user.
It will probably look compelling. One thing I do like are email-like systems where the messages look more like short messages in a chat session rather than email. When I think about this as a good idea and then look back at Gmail, it really already goes a long way in that direction. The messages in a conversation are nicely minimal.
Inbox also seems to have a little floating circle, in this case a red dot. This little floating circle, that is both highly annoying and in the way as far as I’m concerned, seems to be a popular gimmick lately. Witness the little chat circle in Facebook’s mobile apps.
I’m being highly critical of software I’ve never even seen, so I may be wrong about Inbox. I do like the idea of an even nicer and somehow simpler email application but I want full control over what’s happening. And I don’t need a new Gmail. It’s actually nearly perfect already. I fear that ongoing attempts to move it forward will begin to degrade what I like about Gmail.
Using Google Inbox: this feels like the future of email at the Verge.
Google May Be About To Blow Up Email With Its “Inbox” App at Readwrite.