Idea: Active Subject
An idea came to me while I was working on VoSnap the other day. It was also partly inspired by Intense Debate who has been developing products to essentially own a part of the Internet, in their case, blog comments.
I got to thinking, why hasn’t anyone done anything with email subject lines. Through all the years email has been around, and all the innovation that has gone into email products, the subject line is still a static, plain element in your mail reader. Certainly it could be possible to embed HTML in the subject line and have it displayed with a little pizazz. If I remember correctly, Colorful subject lines were a feature of BBS systems back in the day, thanks to a helping of ANSI graphics.
Then I was thinking - Why does the subject line have to be static in the first place? Take for instance VoSnap. Why can’t the email subject line show how much time is left in a vote, and update every minute until the vote is closed. Sure providing executable / dynamic code in the email subject line would be “subject” to all the issues and nightmares that come with executable code anywhere. Spammers would probably love it, and no amount of Xanax would prevent Microsoft Vista from going off the deep end due to an active-subject line induced anxiety attack.
For applications such as VoSnap, meeting requests, and things of that nature it could prove to be very useful as the email subject line is the first and many times only thing that is consumed by the recipient.