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MySpace Entering the Social Inbox Fray?

MySpace webmail on the horizon?

TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington reported last week that MySpace has been building a new webmail offering on the down-low for the past several months.

According to the article:

The first hint of the new service was a reassignment of some MySpace employee email addresses to [name]@myspace-inc.com, which people have noticed. This is a sign that they are preparing to assign MySpace.com email addresses to users, which is exactly how Yahoo handled the transition when they launched Yahoo Mail in 1997 - Yahoo employees moved to yahoo-inc.com email addresses. We’ve subsequently confirmed that MySpace is currently building a webmail product.

If and when MySpace enters the webmail fray, it will instantly become the web’s third largest webmail provider at 125M users, trailing only Microsoft’s Hotmail (284M users) and Yahoo (277M users).  Gmail, however, will have something to say about that as it currently claims 118M users and is growing faster than any other major webmail provider.

What this means for email marketers remains to be seen; however, it is yet one more bit of evidence that the social inbox arms race is on.  Can an open Facebook webmail client be far behind?  Stay tuned.

Inbox Insanity or Why 23 May Be Enough

Are your inboxes driving you insane?

Here’s a rather mind-blowing exercise for a Friday that brings home the challenge we face as one-to-one marketers today:

• Close your eyes
• Count how many inboxes you have whether you check them regularly or not
• Be sure to include voicemail, online, and postal inboxes

So, what’s your total?  Frankly, I’m a bit overwhelmed with mine — 23!!!  Here’s my complete list:

1. Postal inbox - home
2. Postal inbox - work
3. Voicemail inbox - home
4. Voicemail inbox- work
5. Voicemail inbox - mobile
6. SMS/Text inbox - mobile
7. Email inbox - work (Outlook)
8. Email inbox - personal (Yahoo)
9. Email Inbox - personal (Gmail)
10. Blog comments inbox - work
11. Facebook inbox - personal
12. LinkedIn inbox - personal
13. Twitter Direct Message inbox - personal
14. Twitter Direct Message inbox - work
15. YouTube inbox - personal
16. YouTube inbox - work
17. Flickr inbox - personal
18. Banking inbox - personal
19. Credit card #1 inbox - personal
20. Credit card #2 inbox - personal
21. Credit card #3 inbox - personal
22. Frequent flyer inbox - personal
23. Nintendo Wii inbox - personal

There are several thoughts that jump out at me thanks to this exercise.

First, this is proof positive that I am an unapologetic, online marketing geek.  To understand the rapid evolution of digital media, you must consume it.  Unfortunately, this list may demonstrate that I’m on the verge of being consumed by my media.

Second, social media tools are a significant driver of inbox inflation.  Take Facebook for example.  As a spam-fighting measure, it remains a closed-loop email environment — only friends can email friends through Facebook.  And yet, Facebook needs its users to have external email accounts because that’s where they send your account information, friend requests, and other notices.

At some point, one has to wonder if Facebook will simply throw open the doors and become an open email environment.  Not only would that potentially eliminate one inbox from my list, it could also wake up their entire user base to the notion that they may not need that Yahoo or Gmail account now that Facebook is wide open.

My third observation from this exercise is that the biggest driver of the inbox explosion are those who have been burned by spam, spoofing, and phishing scams the most–the financial services industry.  In the interest of increasing security and assuring message delivery, my bank and credit card issuers have begun setting up their own, closed-loop email systems tied to customer accounts.

The upside of this approach is that the bad guys can’t get in.  The downside — well, how many of us check our bank account inbox as often as our work or personal email inboxes?  My guess is not many.  Accordingly, I suspect that what these companies are gaining in security they are losing in terms of immediacy and customer response.   After all, I check my work and personal email accounts throughout the day whereas I check my online banking email inbox only two or three times a week when I log into my account — and then, only if I see that I have a message.

I could go on and on, but my prevailing thought is that 23 is enough.  In fact, as Dick Van Patten once proclaimed, 8 is enough.  What this means, I leave to ponder in a future post as surely I’m going to break Wordpress thanks to the length of this post.

Until then, I encourage you to share via the comments how many inboxes you have these days - and which ones I might have missed.  Can you beat 23?