[davebaines]

You're absolutely right about the problem we're solving (which is the cause of many sleepless nights).

Hopefully it's Lucolo to do this, but we believe that this idea will win on a strategy that alleviates perceived (or real) switching costs (possibly through integration) and has a feature set that is simple, effective, and obviously superior over email for the user. We have to be careful to not work to "replace" email but simply build an alternative that users couldn't imagine not having before. Kind of like the iPhone, or Dropbox, even Google, or - dare I say - the car.

It's ambitious for sure, but we don't believe the answer is IRC-like XXMP services since they don't provide the same experience and value as email. We want to hit a larger audience than those that are familiar and see value in chat-based architectures (like me as I'm 27 and grew up on AIM and loved it).

Lastly, we're really going to rely on our first few batches of users for input and feedback on how Lucolo makes the feel about communicating via the internet; it sounds obvious but the closer we get to creating a communicative experience that adds the most value and reduces the most noise and pain, we think we'll have a winner.

These are great questions you pose and not 5 seconds goes by without me thinking about them....