Email seems to be a flavour of the moment, and Chris Morrison continues the trend over at VentureBeat with a short but informative write-up of four startups innovating around email.

Fuser and Orgoo both focus on the integrated/universal messaging client, bringing IM, social networks and other communication mediums into a single client along-side email. Xoopit is still in stealth-mode, so they haven’t revealed much publicly about the details of their work, but their focus appears to be on extracting and compiling collections of attached documents, images etc. from email archives. More interesting to me is Xobni, who I’ve been following with some interest since Vitor Carvalho brought the company to my attention a few weeks ago.

Chris Morrison notes that while Xobni already pulls out some information like phone numbers from email, there’s much more information waiting for someone to find an innovative way to highlight. Of course, highlighting is only one option for making such structure available and useful for end users. Matt Brezina, co-founder of Xobni, also comments about the latent, untapped structure in email:

“There’s a structure that just hasn’t been broken apart and exposed”
Matt Brezina – Co-Founder Xobni

I think Matt is right on target with this assessment. It’ll be interesting to see which avenues of structure they pursue. I have my own ideas on important latent structure in email, some of which you can hopefully read about in an upcoming conference paper. More details coming if and when the paper actually gets accepted.