Who Cares About Email Trends?

Brendan recently asked the following question, which got me thinking:

“I’m seeing lots of new services and lots of articles on graphing your inbox and analytics. What’s the point?”

This is the start of the journey. This is the first customization of every inbox. One needs to look no further than Rapportive, which replaces an email sidebar with social network information; and Boomerang, which allows future delivery or redelivery of email (an Outlook Feature); as well as other add-ons. This proliferation of email customization is the first significant use of data made available by GMail and other online services. Gmail is evolving into the substrate upon which applet developers are allowing us to customize our email experience. (This is akin to the FireFox browser and its ability to use add-ons that personalize the functionality of each browser.) While this functionality has been around for years, I would be interested to find out what the average number of add-ons is used by a typical user as opposed to a power user. While it is easy to be an adopter, remember this is just how power users are beginning to use email now. The question is, when will casual users and people who are less tech-savvy start to customize their inbox experiences? Perhaps never. Unless there is a compelling reason or something simple and straightforward that removes the nerd barrier. What do you think?