The Micromobs user can essentially offload a group chain to the site. Forwarding an e-mail thread to Micromobs -- e-mail [email protected] -- creates a web-based group, invites all thread participants to join the group and pulls in all content from prior e-mails.
Micromobs aims to help groups communicate in a more organized fashion with conversations arranged into sub-topics, and lets users manage which messages they want to receive and when.
The new Micromobs recognizes that groups are most often naturally conceived within e-mail, and not dreamt up by individuals when they first visit a group-focused site. "The toughest thing to do was to get people to create a group before there was a need," says Micromobs co-founder Ajay Kamat.
In hooking into e-mail, Micromobs now overlaps with the recently launched, and fast-growing Posterous Groups feature. Kamat argues that Micromobs differs in that it can automatically pull in past content from e-mail threads, and only messages group members with notifications when they're relevant to the individual user.
Micromobs is still very much an early-stage, bootstrapped startup looking for its first hit feature. The service has tens of thousands of users, according to Kamat, who openly admits that this latest product upgrade is a stab at a new use case he hopes will better resonate with groups.
Realistically, Micromobs will need to tinker a bit more before it finds the right balance between one-to-many communication and inbox harmony. As it stands, the startup offers a compelling way for users to do a quick e-mail data or conversation dump. But, ongoing Micromobs usage will do little to eliminate inbox clutter.
