mardi 22 décembre 2009

Did you forget me?

This is my first Post in a serie called "Why we are building Kwaga"

I write a lot of mail. To a lot of people. And I have huge expectations. I really would like mail exchange to be just like a conversation, only asynchronous.

However, conversations, being real time and real space, have one big advantage: when the opposite party fails to answer, it's pretty obvious. No such things in mail: how many threads fall behind by lack of answer from one of the protagonists?

And I'm not perfect either, so I probably fail to answer to a fair share of threads.

I used to "Star" threads that I really wanted to get an answer to. This didn't work so well because I often forgot to "Unstar" them once I got an answer. And it worked only in one direction, from me the to world. It did not help when I was the one forgetting to answer.

So we dreamed a feature for Kwaga: "Send and Follow". When I want an answer, I use the "Send and Follow" button instead of the "Send" button. I can even set a time frame, like if I would like an answer for tomorrow or next week. That way, from time to time, I can review my "Followed mail" list and see which threads I lagging and need follow-up, safely knowing that answered threads are automatically taken out of this list.

And from the other side, if both my correspondent and I have Kwaga, I know which threads I still have to answer.

Just like when I had a personal assistant. Neat. This is why we are building Kwaga.

And you, how do you keep people for forgetting to answer ?