A New App Called Ping May Have Finally Made Email Less Of A Pain
Email, as you know, can sometimes be daunting, annoying, and even worse: distracting.
Ping's creator and CEO Erez Pilosof told Business Insider that he created Ping as a way to re-think the way we deal with email and make it more conversational. "Email should adapt to us no the other way around," Pilosof said.
Any email that deals directly with a person is tossed into one category and messages like newsletters, subscriptions, and offers are tossed into another column, out of view.
Ping's biggest draws are an excellent design, ease of use, and it's ability to de-clutter your inbox without overwhelming you.
Pilosof built Ping by identifying two core issues with electronic messages: email today is a bunch of folders and filters.
"Popular mobile email apps like Mailbox only complicate the process," Pilosof said. He felt that most email apps don't reflect the different ways that email has evolved.
Ping organizes your email in a more modern way. You see all of your conversations in one simple stream. The app sorts the messages into people, groups, and sources and the result looks more like a instant message or text than the way we see email now. The result looks more like a social network.
Besides just making your emails look different, Ping also integrates services like video chat and voice calls. You can assign colors and sounds to specific senders so you'll know whether or not you should pull out your phone when a new message arrives.
Some other features include: real-time responses, meaning you can see when another Ping user is typing or online. There's instant access to shared media like attachments, documents, and pictures, and you can snooze messages to save them for later.
Ping can't handle multiple email addresses yet. There's also a desktop client being built so you can check your email Ping style while on your computer. We're told an Android app isn't too far out either.
Ping will launch full time, Sept. 18 but you can sign up for the waiting list now over at the Ping site. The app will be free at launch and available for iPhone.
Also take a look at this video the company put together. It gives you a better idea of just how the app works: