DISQUS

The company that dominates the online office space will be the one that combines a strong core offering with a robust plug-in architecture so outside firms can both build out features and connect these systems to other services. The value of these suites over traditional desktop offerings will lie in their ability to encourage other services to build around them.

The potential here is to be the firm that successfully delivers on the promise of moving from the metaphor of the document on the desktop to a notion of documents as collaborative, interactive, and dynamic stores of information. Conversations rather than artifacts.

All this time I thought it was schizophrenia talking when my mom warned me against leaving the door unlocked or "a Japanese woman will come and live in your closet". Really regretting signing off on the commitment, now.

They've already paid the price for it. It's a magnified version of the reaction they got from the friend feed to start with. If they keep improving, it could be a valuable feature. If they abandon it, the long-term PR hit is actually worse since they never demonstrate that there was any value there to begin with.

Print is actually a fairly interesting area if you look at it as the first area of manufacturing to have tools capable of truly personalized production. What we're learning there is going to be applicable to pretty much every physical good and manufacturing process in the next decade or so. We're already seeing more flexible production processes in other areas, mirroring some of the advances that hit print 5-10 years ago. Even for those who aren't interested in print as such, it's a fascinating case study for what's going to happen to the rest of the manufacturing world soon. More, the new web-to-production systems that are being built show some interesting possibilities for other industries.

The big question is how you decided which social network to assign to which side of the cold war.

From preliminary conversations, at least some small papers like the possibility of using dynamic print to produce customized papers for each recipient (articles and ads). Once they see the advantages of that, the web becomes obvious. It's all about delivering the most useful info in the preferred way for each recipient (whether web or print).

While they have unique local sources and content for now, that advantage won't last long. The transition will happen, whether or not they're a part of it.

I appreciate the post!

I don't expect that Postful will push back e-mail or even slow its advance. But I still have friends and family members who don't use e-mail (or computers). I think of this as a way to connect people into our modern communication networks using a format they are comfortable with.

In terms of features, we send more than just the text of the message. If you include photos, those are printed with the letters. You can send html e-mail for formatting. More options are coming as we work through the beta.

For Al Gore, I'd like to think of this as carbon sequestration, one letter at a time...

Thanks to everyone for the comments (positive and negative).