ClearContext, a San Francisco-based start-up whose Outlook inbox management plugin was recommended by us in the past, has released the beta of their product of ClearContext Personal. It is also a free Outlook add-in that help organize email and inbox management. There are a bunch of start-ups that are trying to address the issue of email overload, and at the same using it the inbox as a starting point for a highly social network.
One really good reason to download this app: it automatically sort emails from a wide variety of applications and websites into nice little folders. You can quickly see how many Facebook messages or Evite invitations you got. Mind you those alerts are the biggest annoyance in any InBox. There are other new features such as one that makes Outlook messages appear as threaded conversations, something we Mac’s Mail.app users are quite used to. Anyway this is one Outlook add-in worthy of your time. Enter “gigaom” for immediate download.
Thanks, Om! GigaOm readers can sign up for the beta on the ClearContext homepage with the invite code “gigaom” for priority access to the beta – invites start going out today.
Just FYI, Outlook already has a threaded conversation view built-in, in both 2003 and 2007. When you click (or it may be right-click) to sort by a column, it gives you an option to sort by conversation, which results in a threaded view. It’s pretty non-intuitive and it took me a little while to realize it was even there.
Om, Great review. Thanks for pointing me to Xobni and ClearContext long before anyone else was talking about them. Please send me more like this.
Both companies are doing really innovative things with email and social networking around your email contact list.
Don Dodge
http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2008/05/clearcontext-fo.html
@Don
Has the term sheet been put together for ClearContext, yet:)