Just wrote a comment on article http://mashable.com/2010/07/09/email-attachments-dokdok/

When will Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo! offer APIs to create plugins for their webmails!

I have gigs of pictures, videos, links and other types of attachments in my inbox. There's simply no way to manage them. Today I should be able to browse using different perspectives (the mail perspective, the photo perspective, the docs perspective, etc.). Webmail providers need to be more opened to allow developers to build new features and functionalities on top of them! 2010 have to be the year of webmail 2.0!!!

Proposal towards webmail 2.0 - Part 1

As of today, I still consider email to be the best communication platform for the internet. It is reliable, cheap and accessible. The web 2.0 services such as Facebook and Twitter are improvements over email because they offer simpler ways to communicate between a groups of people. Web 2.0 strength is the feeling it gives to users for belonging to a community and staying in touch with it. However communicating with these social networks is similar to communicating using an email: you send a text message that a group of people can read or you upload pictures to share it with your community, etc. We can then say emails and social networks share the same goal: communicate between people. The one main feature email services don't offer is supporting communities and allowing people to easily share things within the communities. Otherwise, the other features are already available in your webmail accounts. Email services and webmail providers are still stuck on the Web 1.0. In order for them to move to Web 2.0, there are 2 areas where they must focus: building up social network services on top emails and offering an SDK for developers to create new features.

If we take the first feature, building up a social network on top of your email account, the basics are already there, but never been updated. All webmail accounts offer address books, which are nothing else but rudimentary social network lists. They allow you to save a list of contacts, but there's no way to have the contact information being updated by the contacts themselves. Hence address books can be seen as one way contact list (only the owner can update the contact information and status) whereas a social network list can be seen as 2 way contact lists (the owner and the persons in your address books can update their information).

For the second feature, offering an SDK to create services, this is what truly defines web 2.0: openness. Webmails only offer the setup to access your mailbox, but there’s no way to create something new for your mailbox. You can only access your emails for reading and writing, but you can’t create a new message type (status message, etc.). Also, there’s no way for you to manage all the email attachments you have … and it drives me crazy. Like many, I have gigs of emails in my accounts, which contain pictures, videos, audios, links, etc. I barely look at them because there’s simply no easy way to manage them. I still rely on the basic email search. It works well for megs of emails, but not for gigs. I remember Yahoo Webmail used to offer a service allowing you to easily browse thru your email attachments, but you still couldn’t organize the content.

Now imagine if a smart developer, with an available SDK to access email content (text and attachments), built a Flickr service inside your webmail account: you would easily browse thru your photos, create albums, share them, etc. Imagine also another service that could bookmark the links that were sent in your emails. You could mark your favorites ones that you often revisit, share them, etc.

The conclusion is the webmail services must upgrade to web 2.0. If I had to build the next generation of webmail service, I would turn email servers into messaging platforms. Different message types would be supported (emails, status message, instant messaging, etc.), people would be able to collaborate more easily (forums, discussion groups) and I would offer a rich SDK to build new services. Some might say what I'm describing is already offered by Google Wave, which is partially right. I had the opportunity to test Google Wave, it's a great tool and has been built around the concept of a unified messaging platform. But Google Wave main weakness is that is always shows you your message in one single perspective (wavelets) instead of many (streams, emails, status message, etc.)

I love the new new conversation feature available in http://identi.ca! Much friendlier than Twitter