NutshellMail

» see nutshellmail.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

In 2008 the inbox was the thing you checked without deciding to check it, and the social networks were the thing you went and visited. NutshellMail proposed swapping those two around. You told it which accounts you had and how often you wanted to hear from them, and it mailed you a digest of everything that had happened since the last one. Facebook and Twitter arrived in the same message as MySpace and LinkedIn.

Four people started it in October 2008. It won a place in fbFund the following May, the Facebook-backed grant program that picked twenty projects out of more than four hundred applications, and it took a prize in Ning's app contest that November. For a service whose entire user interface was an email, that is a lot of attention.

Constant Contact bought it on 24 May 2010. Constant Contact sold email marketing to american small businesses, and the logic of the purchase was that a company already mailing your customers on your behalf could also mail you a summary of what those customers were saying back. Four months later NutshellMail dropped the general email consolidation it had launched with and pointed itself entirely at social accounts.

This is a product I can describe and cannot claim. Its open years were 2008 to 2010, and in those years I read updates the ordinary way, by opening the site when I felt like opening it. After the acquisition it was a tool for a business with a storefront and a page to keep an eye on, sold through an american mailing list company, and there was no door into that from where I was standing.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ a schedule you set yourself ~

The interesting thing about NutshellMail was the direction of the traffic. Every social network of that period was building toward the opposite arrangement, where the notification arrives when the network decides it should and the visit happens on the network's terms. NutshellMail let you say: once a day, at eight in the morning. The updates waited.

That is a small feature and a large disagreement. A digest on your own schedule caps how much of your attention the network can take, and it caps it at a number you picked rather than one that was found for you. Every product that has offered this arrangement has been a third party rather than the network itself, and there is a reason for that.

~ what constant contact bought ~

The acquisition was announced without a price and the service stayed free for the people already using it. Constant Contact's interest was the dashboard rather than the digest: a small business owner who cannot keep four accounts open all day would take a morning summary and a single box to post from. That is a real product, and it kept NutshellMail alive for almost six years, which is longer than most of the aggregators in its class managed.

It also fixed the ceiling. A tool that exists to serve the marketing habits of small businesses gets funded for exactly as long as those habits are worth serving, and gets cut the moment the parent decides its mobile people are needed elsewhere. That is close to the sentence Constant Contact actually used in 2016.

~ the last digest ~

The notice went out in February 2016 and the service stopped on 22 March. The reason given was that NutshellMail was no longer a big piece of the strategy and that the social and mobile resources were moving to work customers cared more about. There is no argument to make against that. It is the ordinary way a bought product ends, six years after the buying, with a paragraph.

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