Although there are plenty of already useful Gmail plugins like Rapportive, Boomerang, or TaskForce to help make email life a little easier, I am predicting  that a new wave of Gmail “apps” are coming thanks to new developments by the Gmail team.

John and I have known the next revolution was going to be in email since Glider was founded, however only recently we got official confirmation from Google themselves about new development techniques for Google as revealed at Google I/O.

Most notably Gmail team leader Shalini Argwal explained in her presentation how most tasks beginning with an email take at least 6 inefficient steps to complete an action! Users get lost, distracted, confused, or just plain bored with the task at hand. She mentions how these steps end up creating even more unnecessary email such as password reminders for non-authenticated users. In the end, the volume of transactional email to take make one action is just staggering; Argwal shares that in her 40 minute presentation over 100 million emails will be sent! I am also willing to bet that over 40 million of those emails (and that is a safe bet) are actually bacn emails.

Quick fun fact: Glider was originally developed as a standalone webmail client with its own interface design. In this design we had big ideas for the compose button. The idea was that you can use the compose button for so much more than just preparing a blank email. In this sense the compose button would act like a quick one start button for numerous apps like sending out a mailing list email, sending just an attachment, or even something crazier like ordering a pizza!

Well today Google has allowed for all this to become possible and we are as excited as they are! Let’s loop back to our 6 step problem. Google has announced that third party apps will now be able to introduce “actions” in Gmail making “Email smarter” in order to turn the 6 step problem into a 2 step breeze.

Today, we are introducing schemas in emails to make messages more interactive and allow developers to deliver a slice of their apps to users’ inboxes. Schemas in emails can be used to represent various types of entities and actions. In the case of Gmail, this means that the emails can display quick action buttons that let users take actions directly from their inboxes. – Claudio Cherubino of the Google Drive Dev. Relations Team

Schematas have already existed on web pages to help Google search crawl sites more effectively, and now the content of email can be structured for your benefit too. Anyone who sends HTML emails can create their very own schemas that make actions easier for the recipients. The previous 6 step process was so long because most of the process was spent getting the “action” in front of the user and then relaying the user information back to the company. With the new and improved capabilities, companies can now use their home-made schemas to make actions the only thing a user does and then simply send information back, making it a 2 step process.

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The Gmail team mentions companies like Seamless who struggled to keep their users engaged in this 6 step process to simply rate a restaurant. Now Seamless users can review a restaurant with one two clicks, and in turn Seamless will have a higher participation rate. It’s a win-win for companies and customers. Companies like Netflix, mailChimp, and maybe even Facebook or Twitter will soon have handy-dandy email “actions” to make your life easier & more productive using schemata for easy actions, such as approving a rating a Netflix movie or approving a Facebook friend request from within Gmail. Imagine being able to highlight a section of an email and make it a tweet in two clicks! Some cool schema examples can be found here.

We can certainly expect to see an increase of Gmail apps found in the Google Chrome Web Store. Glider is also taking full advantage of this new schema capability. We are working very fast to develop a Glider button that will allow you to organize your inbox more easily. Instead of ordering a pizza (we’ll let Dominoes handle that.), we will allow you to do useful things like pay your Glider subscription quickly.

This will hopefully improve the way we read bacn as well. Commercial email senders can now let you buy a deal straight from within the email (maybe even with Google Wallet).

Are there any apps or actions you would like to see in Gmail? Tell us in the comments below!

And remember, too much bacon is unhealthy! Manage your email diet with Glider.io

Back in 2005 SPAM was a major email problem (as illustrated by the graph below) but it has been almost completely eradicated today. Here’s a video Google made in order to explain SPAM, once a common query that has now become a household word.

Spam protection has evolved as email has grown. Today most people don’t have SPAM on their minds. Now someone sees a can of spam in the supermarket and chuckles a little.

Todd Jackson, Gmail’s Product Mananger, even announced “we’re keeping more unwanted messages out of your inbox than ever before.” What this means is that Gmail’s SPAM filters have gained serious strength but this still leaves your inbox very vulnerable. Many emails from merchants or other commercial senders are cluttering your inbox more than ever before.

Looking at the economy from a macro level, the brick and mortar retail industry is shifting their marketing efforts towards online sales. In fact, the top online retailers sent an average of 211 marketing messages per subscriber in 2012 (Bloomberg). And 77% of consumers actually prefer email as a method of contact over social, phone, and direct mail (ExactTarget). In fact, it’s so effective that marketers call it the “golden goose”:

E-mail has “gotten this bad reputation in the past of being spammy and people misusing it,” Kritzer said, explaining why more companies aren’t talking about it as a marketing tactic. “But it’s also because it’s the secret sauce that works so well. So people might not want to talk about it because it’s kind of like the golden goose. They don’t want to ruin the golden goose.

The results speak for themselves: For every $1 invested in email marketing, $40 in sales are returned. That is double the return on search or display ads, and triple the return of social (Bloomberg). This golden goose tactic of email marketing for retailers is now turning into an annoyance for consumers. What is a person to do when they want to stay in touch with multiple retailers and commercial email senders?

Many are saying simply unsubscribe and your inbox will be clutter free! I respectfully disagree. Commercial senders are still important to consumers and they still want to see these messages when they have time. Emails like that you signed up for but want to see on your own time are called “bacn”.

One of the struggles with building an email filtering service is finding universally understandable terminology to describe the problem of receiving too many emails. Glider means something different for every user because each person does email slightly differently.

Depending on the target audience you will find a variety of preferences. Older business users are familiar with “spam filter”, Mommy-bloggers prefer “junk email filter”, and many others just want a “clean inbox”. We chose to use “distracting emails” because it describes the core pain of “bacn” emails.

Bacn emails are the emails that you want to see from commercial senders, but on your own time. Here’s a definition from Wikipedia:

Bacn (pronounced like bacon), is email that has been subscribed to and is therefore not unsolicited (like email spam is), but is often not read by the recipient for a long period of time, if at all. Bacn has been described as “email you want but not right now.”

As the article states, bacn is not spam and it is not unwanted. The difference between spam and bacn is that the user has signed up an agreed to receive the emails. Spam and bacn are similar in that they are both sent automatically, not from a personal contact.

Glider filters away bacn emails from the inbox, and further divides bacn emails into two groups: newsletters and notifications. Newsletters are typically consumed in bulk and contain anonymous data. Notifications are consumed personally and often relate to your online activity.

In short, bacn is the reason why your inbox feels more cluttered and disorganized than ever despite having a reliable spam filter. And I promise you’re not alone. There were over 27 billion bacn emails sent in 2010. The math works out to about 20 bacn emails per day for every person with an active email address. (Unsubscribe.com)

With thousands of bacn emails cluttering the inbox each year, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. Glider removes the pain of bacn emails by filtering them away from your inbox into two labels that you can check on your own time. So whether or not your flavor of bacn is “junk email”, “spam”, “distracting”, “commercial”, sign up for a free trial on Glider for a clean inbox and peace of mind.

P.S. Here is a picture of real, crispy, mouth-watering bacon. Just in case that is what you came here for.

Editor’s Note: Check out this awesome article by Mark Ward on the BBC in response to this blog post.

Looking Back

We did some research on “email assistant” and discovered that more and more people are starting to search for more effective ways to cut down on email or maximize email productivity. (as seen by the graph below).

As you can see in the graph, the Google search interest in “email assistant” was just 53 in March 2009. Five years later it is projected to nearly double at 93 this month, and 98 later this 2013. Email assistants are best at filtering a high volume of emails that vary in context. The need for email services that recognize emails of differing context is clearly increasing shown by the increase in searches for “email assistant” on Google.

Looking Ahead

The idea of Glider being your email assistant stuck very close to home with us. Glider already helps you spend less time and get more things done thanks to 24/7 automatic email filtering, providing data on your email habits, or informing others of your current inbox load.

As informed tech guru’s we all know that there needs to be immediate change to the archaic system of email. As our world and internet develops we plan on making Glider a replacement for your email assistant. By studying email trends we can start to create new features like “Sleep Mode” to protect you from disturbing emails or a “New Contacts inbox” for emails sent by someone who you have never connected with before.

Change And What This Means For The Future

Right now our primary goal is to provide our users with accurate automated email filtering. Still we believe there are even better ways to attain and maintain a clean inbox. As we evolve these ideas you may start to see changes and additional features added to the product in the future. Be sure to check back on the blog for product updates.

“The growth rate of a persons productivity determines the growth rate of a persons income.” – A wise man.

We believe one of the greatest challenges faced by the growing population of knowledge workers in the modern workforce is to combine the advantages of email used for conversational and commercial purposes. The abuse of the inbox by commercial email senders is a problem that can be remedied, and we have created Glider, a service that filters commercial emails away from the inbox. It is our belief that a focused and non-interrupted workforce is a prerequisite for a growing economy.

After learning many lessons from designing our first product, a webmail client, we moved forwards in a way that optimizes for simplicity both during and after our users first interaction with Glider. The second iteration of Glider is designed to integrate into the existing workflow of our target users. We aim to minimize user activation energy and immediately begin providing time savings. Our results are manifested in a decision to adopt ”0123″ as the core design principal of our Gmail-based filtering service.

0 – No user manual.

1 – One button to start.

2 – Two options to choose from.

3 – Three seconds to have your problem solved.