Paul Berry is trying to build the news engine of the future, but, like many online media pioneers, he’s finding he just can’t escape the grubby format first used more than 40 years ago, e-mail.
Berry’s baby, RebelMouse, is state of the art new media, mashing information from your Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Google+ accounts into a custom “social front page” on the web. But less than a year after launch, the company decided it needed “RebelAlerts;” still a social mashup, but sent out the good old fashioned way, over e-mail.
Today the company will deepen its three-week-old foray into e-mail by integrating into MailChimp, which sends newsletters on behalf of clients like e-commerce host Shopify and the TED conference. The idea is to make it easy to populate those newsletters by using RebelMouse to suck in content already shared on Facebook and Twitter.
“As much as we’re told e-mail isn’t sexy, no one sends more e-mail than Facebook or Twitter,” says Berry, the former chief technical officer of the Huffington Post. “And the reason they do is we’re all on e-mail and it brings you back” to the site that sent it.
To read more of Ryan Tate’s article in Wired, visit: http://www.wired.com/business/2013/05/why-email-newsletters-wont-die
