Facebook on Tuesday announced it was hiring the co-founders of MailRank, a startup that focused on prioritizing email.
Co-founders Bethanye McKinney Blount and Bryan O’Sullivan will be joining Facebook in December and shutting down MailRank, the two announced on MailRank’s blog.
“We started MailRank to focus on the email that matters, combining powerful technology with a simple interface,” the blog post reads. “It’s been rewarding to build a solution to problems people face every day. At Facebook, we’ll be working with a first-class team on our favorite types of technology problems while supporting a great product people use every day.”
An introductory post from MailRank described the company as a “solution to the problem of email overload” via “hands-free prioritization without complicated configuration and rules.”
The post goes on to say that they will discontinue MailRank’s private beta for Outlook to “focus on our new jobs.” A Facebook rep declined to comment further on what the two will be doing at their new employer.
Facebook famously introduced a “modern messaging system” last November that was meant to be seamless, informal, immediate, personal, simple and minimal. In a press event explaining the move, Mark Zuckerberg emphasized at the time that the product was “not e-mail.” The introduction, plus Google’s launch of its short-lived Google Wave in 2009, led to some speculation that traditional email was about to be overhauled. Two years on though, that doesn’t seem to be the case.
Facebook Acqui-hires Email Prioritizer MailRank
Todd Wasserman
Tue, 15 Nov 2011 22:55:36 GMT
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