3D mailbox - worst app ever or revolutionary?

Not sure if everyone caught the press around 3D Mailbox over the past week or so.

I guess the general sentiment can be summed up by the Tech Crunch Article - 3D Mailbox: Worst. App. Ever - lol,that's pretty harsh

Anyway, I think alot of people are missing the point on this one.

Sure the graphics kinda suck, the James Bond theming is a bit odd and it's debatable as to whether this app could scale to handle the thousands of emails that exist in many mailboxes - but that's not really what this is about.

In my opinion this could very well be a revolutionary first step in the way that we consume and organise information. I'm very serious about that. Chances are that 3D mailbox, in this form, will disappear and be replaced by either a more useful iteration or a better competitor, but that doesn't discount its value.

Let me explain a little more.


The Internet as we currently know it is a very artificial and rudimentary concept. It's essentially a set of 2D pages that are linked together. We don't go around in every day life relying on 2D sources to gather information, rather, everything in our real life is 3 dimensional. The fact that we are so adept at using email and other applications, as they have been developed, says a lot for our ability, as humans, to adapt as opposed to the appropriateness of the applications as a means to gather, assess and organise information.

Now enter 3D Mailbox. It presents information using the types of stereotypical visual cues that many of us can understand from our experiences in real life (whether you agree with them or not is another story). Because of that it allows the user to more rapidly and more efficiently deal with information, in this case types of emails, than traditional folders, tags, colours etc.

This type of stuff is gold and in my opinion will be the basis of the next generation of web based applications.

I'm looking forward to seeing what else comes out of this, especially considering the publicity the launch has received.

What do you think?