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Two weeks ago, Chris Holten Hempel, the "chief detonator" at Spark Public Relations in Palo Alto, fired off an e-mail to 20 of her P.R. cohorts with the subject line: "Congrats! P.R. Bunny/Bimbo!"

"OK, since I've been receiving so much e-mail on the latest Harper's article on 'P.R. babes' I thought I'd open up this issue for vote/comment (see the poll I put together below) among the industry. PLEASE FORWARD TO ALL THE P.R. PEOPLE YOU KNOW."

It was the kind of contagious message that could turn out to be a plague on its recipients' already overloaded in boxes: Imagine all the potential replies and replies to replies and replies to replies to replies.

But this wasn't an ordinary e-mail; it was a new kind of message, called a Zaplet, that brings a kind of interactivity to e-mail. And so after 48 replies to Hempel's message, there was still only one e-mail in her colleagues' in boxes.

At first glance, a Zaplet looks like a typical HTML-enhanced message, with whizzy color, graphics and formatting. But a Zaplet doesn't just look like a Web page, as HTML-based mail does; it acts like one. When you scroll down, you can interact with the message, by commenting on a bulletin board within the e-mail or voting in a poll. If your e-mail client doesn't accept e-mail with HTML, and you receive a Zaplet, you see a link to a Web page along with text explaining who has sent you the message.

In the case of Hempel's message, she'd included a poll asking recipients how they should respond to Harper's Bazaar's slur on their profession: "Flood Harper's with complaints about the article? Do nothing and let it go? Send a crapogram to the reporter's house? See www.crapogram.com for more details! Create a 'Ditzy Reporting Award.' Hey, after all, we keep getting slammed by the press. Let's fight back. We deserve respect!"

Vote results are tallied live in a graph on the Zaplet itself. Reporters take note: After 48 votes, the ditzy reporting award option was clearly in the lead, with 25 votes, or 52 percent.

"It's better than sending out e-mail," says Hempel -- who, just for the record, doesn't represent FireDrop, the Redwood City-based (and Kleiner Perkins-backed) start-up that has created Zaplets. "Because it stays in your e-mail box and you can keep going back to it, and you don't have 50 e-mail messages on a particular topic -- all the data is in there."

"Opening a Zaplet feels like walking into a meeting that's already going on," says FireDrop CEO David Roberts. But this sort of dynamic e-mail takes some getting used to.

In my own experiments with Zaplets, I found myself wondering petulantly why not one of four friends had sent an e-mail response to my Saturday night dinner invitation. Then it occurred to me that, of course, I had to open the original Zaplet again to see if anyone had RSVPed, rather than wait for new mail to arrive.

So here I was, the sender of the message, specifically trying to test out this new nifty gizmo, not quite getting it: Imagine what it would be like for someone who just got a Zaplet out of the blue.

Next page | The "Mission Impossible" Zaplet and other uses for "live" e-mail