Kwaga, installation and first thoughts.

I’ve been using Etacs for a couple months now, ever since I heard of it. I love it, its so simple in its functionality but seems like a total savior. I get 45 – 200 true legitimate emails every 1 – 2 days, I get a couple hundred total spam messages that I don’t even look at, but then there are those that might be a little bit in between, like newsletters, alerts & notifications and stuff like that. I’ve managed to wrangle all the email I get very nicely with labels and automatic filters by Gmail, but these are a little bit cumbersome to use. Don’t get me wrong, using filters and labels is one of the best things about gmail, but they could use some improvement.

Then I heard of Kwaga, Kwaga aims at being that personal assistant we so desperately need, it is supposed to manage your inbox and surface those emails which are most important. Don’t ask me how this is done, and don’t ask me how you prevent the other emails from being obscured and forgotten. In fact, don’t ask me much about this product… yet, I’ve just installed it. I’m looking forward to using it and testing it out to see what all the fuzz is about. I feel pretty confident in my email labeling system and filtering methods, but if this can do a better job, with less management and administration time on my side then I’m all for it.

Here’s a quick video to show how to get it installed.

The downside to using Kwaga right now is that it only works for Google Apps for domains, you can’t use it in your personal gmail. That sucks! I am using Etacts on my personal gmail and trying this out on one of my google apps domains. So far I’m unimpressed, It doesn’t seem to go back and account for emails and threads prior to Kwaga’s installation. Instead it starts tracking after you install it, which is okay but not ideal.

The concept is great, but so far its just meh. For example, Kwaga tries to pull in social profiles for the individuals you’re emailing and put them at the bottom of an email. I tried looking through some older messages and it found the social profiles for this particular individual, the linkedin profile, the facebook, myspace as well as twitter. The problem was that Twitter for example took me to the wrong profile. I have no idea how it determined to pull that information in, but in this case it pulled wrong and directed me to the wrong twitter profile. This isn’t a big deal if you know what you’re doing, but if this happens to other people, you might actually be looking at one person’s Twitter profile –making judgments etc– while you really should be looking at someone else.

Here’s a screenshot of how an email is displayed after Kwaga is installed. Notice the red boxes.

I’m putting together a better video that will show some of the features and a walk-through of the application features. Check back in a day or so.

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