A Future Without Emails?

Google Wave is out - in beta yet pretty amazing. And with that, a heavy campaign promoting the abolition of traditional emails.

I recently came across Nurphy. A very interesting service that mixes email with Twitter and IM and that promotes conversations as the center of business and personal online relationships instead of emails.

"To initiate a conversation, you first have to sign up to the service or sign in with your Twitter credentials, which doesn't take more than a minute. On the website itself, Nurphy looks a bit like a cross between Twitter and an email client. After you have signed up, you can start a conversation with anybody who is on the service already or by email. Recipients who don't want to sign up for Nurphy can continue to reply to messages by email.

Conversations on Nurphy are shown in a Twitter-like timeline in reverse chronological order. Conversations can be public, private or by invitation only (though still visible to the public). Public threats - like Nurphy's own customer service site - look a bit like forums and Nurphy recommends that you post links to these public conversations on your social networking profiles so that you can have a 'real' conversation with your friends. Without threaded conversations, however, it can be hard keep track of conversations. Instead of using sub-threads like Yammer, Nurphy borrowed Twitter's @reply structure."

Very interesting take on the same subject I believe. Yet after been using Wave for several weeks I must say this seems too simplistic and missing many topics that make Google's tool much better. Regardless, it is great to see more signs of a future beyond traditional emails.