Confused? We were too when we discovered in late November that Ankesh Kumar and Rajiv Dutta started a group email service called SocialMail. You may recall that we launched a group email service last year called SocialMail. We have contacted Ankesh and Rajiv and explained that their use of our trademark would likely confuse users and asked them nicely to start using another name. Their response? Let me assure you, it wasn’t very “social”.

First, they suggested that since we released the SocialMail source code under the GPL license, we removed our right to a trademark on the name SocialMail. Later Ankesh clarified that that open source is a defined business model worthy of trademark protection, but he wasn’t sure that we were running an open source project worthy of trademark protection.

Next, they suggested that you could not “protect a name when it’s not part of your core business.” His feeling was that my post indicating why we were open sourcing our tools indicated that we no longer sought trademark protection for the SocialMail brand. This, despite, the fact that we stressed that we would continue to operate the SocialMail service as well as sell it to our clients as a dedicated service.

To be clear: SocialMail is a trademark of Big in Japan. We filed an application with the USPTO (No. 77055585) and have used the term in trade for quite some time. We will continue to use the brand in the marketing of our group email service and software.

Companies make mistakes all of the time.  For example, Big in Japan printed shirts for this month’s issue of Valleyschwag.  They never got a chance to see the shirts before Thor shipped them and learned from a subscriber that they were see through.  Ouch!  This did not seem to mind the TechSlut, but Mierla was not to impressed.  What if your users were so excited about your service that they took the time to fix your mistakes?
This afternoon I noticed a few new pictures tagged with biggu on flickr bubble up on the SocialMail footer and clicked through.  Turns out Mierla, not deterred by the mashup goofup ‘remixed’ the shirts.  She documented her effort on flickr:

Alexander & I have been working a lot lately on all the Big in Japan tools. Lots of changes to PodServe, revamping FrankenFeed in Rails and with the new user experience tweaks we’ve been doing to all the tools, and launching the remaining tools. (Note to self: doing ten apps at once is not a good idea.) We posted up SocialMail for a bit of feedback, and we’re getting it.

What’s SocialMail? It’s a tool that lets you get any email as an RSS feed. Now, for non-geeks, that means you don’t have to keep piling on your Inbox just to stay connected with people. For me, and perhaps for many of you, email is just not as effective anymore. If I’m out for half a day, my email piles up so much that I’m not as effective in paying attention to things. I’m managing most of my projects through various Basecamps, and getting feed updates on new actions and such.

You can use SocialMail to:

• Forward any email to an RSS feed, tracking it in your newsreader or republishing to a blog. For instance, it might be handy to have all support@ emails republished to an internal blog where your team has better access to them.
• Create non-managed email discussion lists. Want to have a quick talk about Bay Area Hiking? Create BayHikes@biggu.com and let everyone interested subscribe to that feed. They don’t have to give you an email address, nor do they have to unsub and manage their participation when they tire of the conversation. They simply unsub from the feed. Then, again, you can republish the information to a blog, etc., making it more searchable, indexable, easier to interact with than typical email.
• Share common addresses. Instead of having one person responsible for sales@ or support@, create a SocialMail feed and let everyone in the company have access to these public emails.

I’m sure our users will come up with many more things, but we’ve started the ball rolling. Read Alexander’s write-up or check out what TechMeme is tracking on this new tool.

Brian is going to do a full post on SocialMail, but I thought I would mention that it was turned on last week. For those of you who use various Big in Japan tools, you will note that SocialMail is the first example of our new login and footer design (no more sidebar). All of the tools will adopt these two SocialMail features. Otherwise check it out…