Seven building relevancy into unified messaging

Mobile e-mail provider Seven is taking a crack at creating an integrated messaging and social networking client, but unlike the dozens of other unified messaging clients out there, Seven is offering up a twist. It’s adding context and relevancy to its interface, which sorts through hundreds of contacts and thousands of individual messages to focus on the people and conversations most important to the customer at any given time.

Seven is calling the application Ping, which is actually the name it gave to its push messaging platform last year, but Seven decided to completely revamp the service to reflect how people actually engaged with communications services. The old Ping was a behind the scenes service, which allowed apps to add push capability to Facebook, IM and Twitter messaging (CP: Seven extends power of push e-mail to apps), but according to Seven CTO Michael Luna, Seven quickly learned that providing background synchronization technology wasn’t enough.

What phones really needed was a way for customers to manage all of those various networks and conversations, but not necessarily a unified messaging client that piled all of those conversations into a single inbox, Luna said. While customers were comfortable communicating in the various stand alone clients and applications on their devices, there was no overarching solution that brought the various communication streams together and organized them in meaningful way.

“The applications are all in vertical silos,” Luna said. Users have become accustomed to interacting with an application, rather than the person at the other end of the message, Luna said. Ping doesn’t replace SMS and e-mail, but we start to think of the person rather than the application,” he concluded.
Ping uses a contact carousel that automatically organizes messages by contact and allows users to view, read and send messages through a single client.

ouching an individual icon brings up the message, while holding on the button launches the app for that service, allowing the user to reply. Though there are several such applications on the market, such as the MyFaves client used by T-Mobile, Ping goes one further by adding relevancy to its organizational structure. Rather than organize contacts alphabetically or through friends and family categories the customer selects, Ping organizes contextually, automatically bringing to the forefront contacts a user communicates with most often.

A user who communicates with his boss and business colleagues would find those contacts and their associated messages pushed to the top of the Ping client, but as the weekend rolled around and the messages from friends increased, those conversations and contacts would come to the fore and business-related communications would recede, Luna said.

Ping is built around a chat client that operators can use to offer their own real-time messaging services. By bringing Facebook messaging, IM, SMS, e-mail and voicemail into a single client, carriers can draw more attention to their own chat services, helping them mitigate the loss of SMS revenues as customers move to more real-time communications apps. The client doesn’t yet support all social messaging feeds or some emerging applications like video chat, but Luna said Seven will eventually bring such features into the client. As Ping only organizes contacts and the raw messages, while the individual apps handle their own two-way communication, the client doesn’t need to approximate other messaging functions like unified communications clients.

“We’re not trying to change their natural experience,” Luna said of the apps. “We’re just trying to manage how they get there.”