Speed has always been one of the most important areas for Mailroom. Our goal is to help you get through your email as fast as possible so you can get onto other things. We’ve been making steady improvements in this area since our launch and this next release will be no exception.

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Indigo Moon Systems mentions us along with some other easy business tools. I like his description of Sproutit Mailroom:

I just came across this one-it’s not free, but it’s interesting and I have at least one current client I’m going to recommend it to. It’s an online automated e-mail management system, using basic artificial intelligence to receive and sort mail coming in to common addresses (like “sales” or “support”) and automatically produce recommended replies, reducing the time to manage each individual piece of mail. This has long been a function available in helpdesk software, but that’s either very expensive or very complicated to implement-this is entirely web-based, easy to get started with, easy to quit if it doesn’t work well.

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Peter is training Dan to do support:

“The important thing to remember about doing support is that you have to use Mailroom and absorb it until you love working with it. That way when you write people back, it will show that you love Mailroom and, once you help them fix the problem they are having right now, you are sure they will love it too.”

Support is a challenge because most of the email you receive will be negative (people having problems, needing help, etc.) but you must be able to look past that, enjoy solving their problems, and keep a great attitude about using their product.

If you think having evangelists for your company is important, don’t forget support. Support people have a hard job, but they are your most important evangelists.

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Peter says he loves Management by Feeds because he can learn about new changes and new bug fixes as soon as they happen. There is nothing like an informed support person to make your customers exceedingly happy.

As Chris said yesterday, he loves Management by Feeds because while he is out on the road meeting investors, arranging our move back to the States, and doing his podcast, he can stay on top of all the news happening in the office. It’s like he is still here.

Shanti loves Management by Feeds because he doesn’t have a manager standing over his shoulder, breathing down his neck while he tries to work. He can focus on coding, knowing that we will all know what he’s up to whenever he checks in some code and it shows up in our feedreaders.

I love Management by Feeds because we have a team of 12 people spread all over the world and I need to know what all of them are doing. I might spend my whole day on the phone or IM with people, but thanks for feeds, I don’t generally have to interrupt them unless we have something important to talk about or I just want to be social. (happens occasionally)

No one likes having to give or listen to long drawn out reports. Everyone loves conversation, debate, and getting things done. Management by Feeds makes work more fun.

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Ken Yarmosh has an excellent post today about bringing Web 2.0 technologies to the mainstream. It’s true. RSS may seem world changing, but it won’t be as long as only 11% of users know what it is.

So what will it take to take technologies like RSS mainstream? Well, they need a killer app, for one thing. And blogs aren’t it. Sorry.

A killer app must solve a specific, major problem in a way that affects most people in the market. It must be so compelling that everyone will want it, even if it is new and “risky”.

The problem with blogs is that they solve a problem the majority of users never knew they had. Sure, for a select few, the global conversation enabled by RSS and blogs is life changing. But, as Shel Israel points out, the blogger lifestyle isn’t for everyone. In fact, for most people, spending their days trying to stay on top of a global conversation is not appealing at all.

So, back to the drawing board. What could take RSS mainstream? How about Business Management?

Think about this: every company thrives on the flow of information. Most of us spend the first hour or two of our day checking website, reading email reports, and hanging around the water cooler to catch up on all the important information flowing through our business.

This not only takes a lot of time, but its very inefficient. Informal communication networks and fixed reporting systems are unreliable. When an important event happens in a business, the news may or may not get to the right person. It all depends on who’s at work they day, their priorities, and so on.

Now enter RSS. Imagine if every software system in your business published an RSS feed. Imagine if every important project in your company had its own blog. Imagine hundreds of feeds running through your business that you can subscribe to selectively. Imagine having immediate, reliable notification of important events going all the way up the management chain as soon as they occur. Now that’s life changing!

This kind of information flow is possible even today. I’m the CEO of a small team. We have 12 people spread all over the world working on different parts of the business literally 24 hours a day. Thanks to the 43 Sprout-related feeds I have in my newsreader, I know almost immediately when something important happens anywhere at anytime. And no one has to stop what they are doing to come and tell me.

It feels great to know what is going on in the business. What’s even better though, is that when a problem comes up that I need to deal with, I’m generally already well informed. It isn’t just me either. Our whole team works like this, which means that we can make better decisions, faster, and with less effort than we could without our feed readers.

As RSS feeds begin to appear in more and more business software and as more and more businesses learn the power of “Management by Feed”, eventually this is going to reach a tipping point. And that is when you will finally start to see RSS both understood and adopted by the masses.

Mainstream is just around the corner for Web 2.0 technologies. We just need to find the right killer apps.

UPDATE: Peter and I talked about this quite a bit more after I first posted this. We are going to write some more posts in the coming days outlining some of the ways Management by Feed has helped Sproutit.

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Sproutit builds web apps for small business. Our new service Mailroom can do wonders for your sales and support email. (And yes, it has RSS feeds.)

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Yahoo Photos was launched at DEMO and we had a chance to chat with the man, Will Aldrich.

How to use a simple financing strategy to extend your cash until the revenue comes. Warning: this example SHOULD be used at home and your small business.