Mailbeans

An interesting site that we came across recently is Mailbeans.com, a web based email aggregator.   The email aggregation space is interesting and already includes sites such as zenbe, orgoo, fuser and topicr.  Most of these other sites have already included calendars, Facebook and Twitter integration for example.  Carving out a niche in this space will not be easy.

Overview of the site
After you sign in you are shown a control panel styled layout.  The left side of the control panel has a link to your global inbox where your email is aggregated.   Also on the left is where you have your settings so you can make all the necessary configurations.  On the right side of the page is a listing of your individual email accounts, your frequent contacts, files and tags that you have used for your email.   The global inbox is a standard view that is not much different then most web based email and has the standard functionality.   I did find the user interface to be pretty simple and easy to use for the most part.  The one thing that I had an issue with when testing it out is that I had trouble navigating back to the main control panel after I clicked on one of the individual email boxes.  After a few minutes of working with the application I was able to figure it out.  The site is designed to have more of an application based experience then a web site.

One of the nice features I like about the site is the information you get when you click on a frequent contact.  When you click on a frequent contact in the main panel it gives you details such as the hourly distribution of received mail, the mail count and a graph on what is read/unread.  I think if this is expanded to more reporting and includes all emails and email accounts it would be beneficial.

Thoughts
I think this site has a lot of potential and you have to remind yourself that it is in beta.  The site will really need to add in features and integrate with other services to become more of a communication platform for it to get ahead of the other available sites.  Staying as it is as an email aggregation tool may not be enough.  It will be interesting to see where this site is in a few months and what they have planned.

Competitor Sites
Zenbe, Orgoo, Fuser, Google Wave and Topicr

Screenshots