A Universal Inbox from Nokia = nice: Out of Many, One In-box

Digital butler: This universal in-box pulls in e-mails, text messages, tweets, Facebook updates, and more. It’s an effort to make it easier for people to handle all the communication technologies offered by a smart phone.
Credit: Nokia Research Center

Communications

Out of Many, One In-box

Nokia experiments with a universal in-box that combines messages from many separate apps into a single place.

• Wednesday, November 24, 2010
• By Tom Simonite

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via technologyreview.com

Excerpt:

"The universal in-box looks superficially like a regular e-mail in-box. But the stream of recent messages can be a mixture of e-mails, text messages, call logs, tweets, Facebook updates, Flickr photos, and more.

Just last week, Facebook launched its Messages product—aka an "e-mail killer"—to combine e-mail with text messages and private Facebook messages. Smart phones can already receive messages sent over those and other communications channels, but the messages are stuck in separate app "silos." "The universal in-box brings together all those communications into one place so the user does not need to check separate apps," says Rafael Ballagas, a researcher at Nokia Research Center, in Palo Alto, California.

That makes it easier to track and carry out conversations that span different kinds of messaging. For example, it would be simple to see that someone responded to a Twitter update with a text message. It would also be possible to seamlessly switch methods of communication, and reply to a person's latest Facebook update by e-mailing them."

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