You know how you take a break from work to quickly check what’s happening on Facebook or Twitter and you end up wasting 20 minutes of your day? Multiply that several times a day and we’re talking about some serious productivity lost! But what if you could reply to someone’s post without actually going into the social network in the first place, thereby eliminating the temptation to hang out too long?

Now you can. There’s a cool new platform called PowerInbox that lets you run Facebook, Twitter and Groupon right inside your e-mail messages. When you receive an e-mail from one of those networks because, for example, a friend has tagged you in a photo, you can open the message and post a comment right there, without leaving e-mail and opening Facebook separately. It’s the same with Twitter. When Twitter notifies you that someone has mentioned you, you can view the e-mail and reply inside the message without getting sucked into your distracting Twitter stream. And with Groupon, your e-mail message will contain real-time stats and a countdown for a deal that you’re watching.

PowerInbox, which just raised $1.1 million in venture capital funding, works on Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo Mail with Outlook coming soon.

According to Founder and CEO Matt Thazhmon, PowerInbox is an open platform on which any developer can write their email app. “Our vision is to empower users to play games, book travel, complete financial transactions and more, all from their email program,” he says.

Read more at PowerInbox ^[1].