Zenbe

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

~ the obituary ~

i never touched Zenbe, and there was never a reason i would have. mail in Turkey lived where everyone's did, a Hotmail address first and then a Gmail invite once those started going around, and neither was going to be unseated by a webmail startup in New York that most people here never heard named once. Zenbe was for the American early adopter who tries a new inbox the way other people try a new coffee place.

it launched around 2006 and it did not want to be another Hotmail. it wanted the inbox to be a place you got things done with other people, not just a bin that filled up. it earned good press for a few years, and then in 2010 Facebook came and hired the people who built it, and Zenbe Mail was switched off that October. the product was the ticket. the team was the thing being bought.

~ the case file ~

~ the inbox it wanted to be ~

the piece worth keeping is the ZenPage. you could take an email thread and grow it into a shared workspace, a page other people could be invited into, with a to-do list and a calendar sitting right beside the messages. it tagged your mail instead of foldering it, the way Gmail had just taught everyone to expect, and it let you rummage through everything by the kind of file attached. this was 2008. it read, at the time, like a real argument about what email was allowed to become.

~ what the team went to build ~

the ending has a small cruelty folded into it. the Zenbe engineers were pulled into Facebook to help build Facebook Messages, the company's 2010 attempt to swallow email whole, the one that handed everyone an @facebook.com address nobody had asked for. the team that made a careful little inbox got hired to make a giant careless one. and that one died too, quietly shut in 2014 once it was clear almost nobody used the address. the people outlived two inboxes inside four years.

~ what it was reaching for ~

Zenbe was early to something that will not stop coming back. the notion that your inbox should not only hold mail but be a place small groups actually work, threads turning into shared pages with tasks and dates hung on them, has been rebuilt over and over since, by Slack and by every app that swore it would kill email and mostly just opened another tab. Zenbe reached for it in 2006 behind a webmail login and lost, the way the early ones usually do. it saw the shape a decade before the industry agreed to call it collaboration.

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