Excluding spam, your email has always been the #1 source of your social graph, but has not been leveraged in unique, innovative and productive ways.

Over the past few years, we've seen the proliferation of social network platforms (i.e. MySpace, Facebook, and LinkedIn) and their ability to map the social graph.  This is the core of what these sites do and do well.  The messaging capabilities of these sites are an important, yet tertiary feature, but are increasingly being utilized.  How many times have you responded to a message on one of these sites, or perhaps, are now habitual users of this feature?

This lies at the juxtaposition of the inbox and the social Internet.  Your email has always harnessed the social graph (the hard part), but has not leveraged social features that many of these above-mentioned platforms do very well in a way that also utilizes your various other accounts (i.e. YouTube, Flickr, and Wordpress) in a integrated and productive fashion.  Essentially, opening the platform API (to a varied degree) to third-party developers.  This is what sites like Facebook and recently, LinkedIn, have done to provide more utility (and sometimes, mindless applications) to users, while leveraging the brainpower of developers and promoting exposure to their respective sites.

This is rapidly changing and you will be seeing some momentous changes to your inbox during the next few years. 

Recently, Yahoo announced their "Open Strategy" plan, which essentially creates a social element to Yahoo and opens their platform API to third-party developers.  One such initiative from this is Yahoo Mail, whose key elements were just recently announced.  Yahoo Mail users will be able to interact with users via their inbox and have the ability to leverage various social features such as your friends updates, connections, etc.  You will also be able to integrate web services into your inbox such as being able to access your Flickr photos right from your current inbox to include in an email that you want to send out. 

It's all about user convenience, applications, features, and distributed social networking.  This is a step in the right direction.

Not to be outdone, Microsoft's Windows Live and the upcoming integration of messenger are treading down the same course.  If you are using Microsoft Outlook, check out Xobni, which is "Inbox" spelled backwards.  Its powerful social features allow you to look at your Inbox in ways never viewed before.  Essentially, it's an inbox management tool.  Do you want to know when you send the most emails to this friend or what their phone number is, no problem.  Xobni is just scratching the surface, but it's headed down the right path.  It's no surprise that Microsoft tried to acquire them earlier this year.

The static inbox is gone - and the prospects of what lies ahead are definitely exciting.

Google, with its various initiatives including Open Social and Chrome, are also heading down this path, but with a much greater vision in mind (not to discredit Microsoft and Yahoo, but Google is perhaps best equipped).  Its goes beyond distributed social networking, the socialization of the browser, and cloud computing.  It's the integration of these three areas in creating a true Web operating system (OS). 

Yes, desktop operating systems will become a thing of the past. I'll be examining this in my next article.

I trust you had a great holiday season and wish you a fantastic New Year!