Inspired by my article about the
lack of product innovation surrounding Skype, I thought about other pretty obvious features that are missing at some of the biggest and most popular (social) web services. Seven more came to my mind, here they are:
Facebook web mail
For millions of people, Facebook is replacing email. Not for me, but a fully-fletched web mail functionality would ease the pain of Facebook messaging. According to rumours, something like this is actually planned.
Dropbox email feature
There are some workarounds, but I'd love to see the popular file syncing and storage service
Dropbox to add a "send by email" feature, enabling me to CC/BCC a unique Dropbox address when mailing attachments that I'd also like to store in Dropbox.
Xing notifications with content inside
Unlike
LinkedIn or Facebook,
Xing, the Hamburg based business network popular in some parts of Europe, is not sending the actual message in its notification email about new messages. At least for paying users (like me), that should be changed.
Twitter contact manager
Since I think a proper way of managing followers and following users on
Twitter is part of the service's core offering, Twitter shouldn't only count on external apps like
Seesmic Web to fix that issue and instead release an own contact manager.
Xobni for Thunderbird
In the office I love using
Xobni for Outlook, but at home I'm using Thunderbird, and currently there is no Thunderbird version of this free awesome email management and search tool. A pitty.
Export tool for Posterous and Tumblr
This blog is based on
Posterous, and I'm pretty happy with what Posterous offers. One important function is missing, though: Exporting my content, in case I want to continue blogging elsewhere. There is a workaround through the Posterous API, but not integrating this into the web interface just feels weird. Same goes for Posterous competitors
Tumblr.
Accessing Google country sites via national TLD
Maybe it is only me who thinks that this is an issue, but when I surf to
www.google.se or
www.google.co.uk, I directly want to see Googles local, country specific version and SERPs. Instead, because of my browser language German, it's always the German site that appears first. Fixing that would save me a few clicks every day.
