You might already know from my previous post WordPress Update: Why Did I Ever? that I’m an organization freak and that this extends to my relationship with technology. If not, all you have to do is look at this blog’s homepage. How many blogs have you seen where the posts are neatly displayed in boxes, along with everything else on the page?
In that previous post, I mentioned that I don’t like to have more than 10 mails in my inbox, but this is becoming more and more difficult to accomplish. For starters, I have chosen to have Twitter send me email notifications for everything: new followers, retweets, replies, DM’s, you name it. Even though I have two separate email accounts, I’m still drowning in emails.
Here comes Mailbox. Have you heard of Mailbox? It’s the Gmail+iPhone app that was specifically created for organization freaks like me, so that we can easily get to a zero-mail mailbox. I had to have it. But, if you think that this is a post reviewing Mailbox, think again. I haven’t been able to use it yet.
You see when you download the app, you’re put on a reservation list to get access to it. When you click on the app you are shown your position on a counter. As of now, and I mean the word “now,” I’m #153,896 and I have 161,032 people behind me. If my calculation is right, I will finally be able to use the app this coming Sunday, 2 weeks after having downloaded it. FYI, when I first signed up I was #545,248.
Mailbox was launched on February 7th of this year. In mid-March, it was bought out by Dropbox, and last Thursday, on March 21st, it reached 1 million users. So by all signs, this app is hot. Although frankly I’m starting to wonder if it’s really worth the wait. When I download an app, I want to start playing with it right away. The only thing that I’ve been able to do with Mailbox so far is watch the counter go down. Sometimes the numbers change very quickly, and that’s a lot of fun to see. But I can get the same satisfaction from my iPhone’s stopwatch feature!
This reservation system has many crying “marketing ploy,” while the company explains that they’re doing this in order to ensure a smooth service and no system crashes from the high demand. Whatever the case may be, I’m not uninstalling the app (like some do in frustration). There is no way I’m losing my place in line.
In the end, the app might not be worth all the hype. But, it seems that Mailbox is already successful at one thing: making us, high-speed-internet-instant-gratification tech junkies wait. Yes, for the past 10 days, I have been thoroughly reminded of what anticipation feels like. I hope that, for my sake, good things do indeed come to those who wait.