Startup Helps Mitigate E-mail Thread Overload - 1 March 2011

Micromobs, a consumer focused startup attempting to solve group communication challenges, is upgrading its product offering Tuesday. Users can now export entire group e-mail threads to Micromobs to start group discussions and, in a perfect world, free themselves from the inbox overload created by the “reply all” button.

The Micromobs user can essentially offload a group chain to the site. Forwarding an e-mail thread to Micromobs e-mail This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it creates a web based group, invites all thread participants to join the group and pulls in all content from prior e-mails.

Micromobs aims to help groups communicate in a more organized fashion with conversations arranged into sub topics, and lets users manage which messages they want to receive and when.

The new Micromobs recognizes that groups are most often naturally conceived within e-mail, and not dreamt up by individuals when they first visit a group focused site. “The toughest thing to do was to get people to create a group before there was a need,” says Micromobs co-founder Ajay Kamat.

In hooking into e-mail, Micromobs now overlaps with the recently launched, and fast growing Posterous Groups feature. Kamat argues that Micromobs differs in that it can automatically pull in past content from e-mail threads, and only messages group members with notifications when they’re relevant to the individual user.

Micromobs is still very much an early stage, bootstrapped startup looking for its first hit feature. The service has tens of thousands of users, according to Kamat, who openly admits that this latest product upgrade is a stab at a new use case he hopes will better resonate with groups.

Realistically, Micromobs will need to tinker a bit more before it finds the right balance between one to many communication and inbox harmony. As it stands, the startup offers a compelling way for users to do a quick e-mail data or conversation dump. But, ongoing Micromobs usage will do little to eliminate inbox clutter.

By Jennifer Van Groove (Mashable)