Steve Gillmor of Gillmor Gang writes in TechCrunch about “Remembering Email” which is much like remembering the magic of Top 40 Radio or maybe the first clear FM stations. Steve notes that notifications have taken over his attention and ours, but even more the attention of our kids.
Readers of this blog won’t be surprised by this. Short, fast, highly interactive, mobile. That’s the future of messaging. And that ain’t email. And in case, you haven’t noticed that ain’t even voice anymore. Kids text more than voice and more than email. Many of us older folks do as well. The trend lines are set and the practices of business are changing (again see this blog).
Email puts knowledge in siloed inboxes; social (as Luis Suarez has been saying) makes knowledge more open, additive and makes us all richer. The business case, at least internally, is clear.
Steve notices that email serves most often as the default way to notify us of social updates. But, as he also notices, the new robust iOS notifications do a much better job. Those changes sent many folks running to shut off email notifications and get the notification clutter out of the inbox and on the palm top where they are Short, fast, highly interactive, mobile
Steve has additional observations about authority, command and control, sharing, and even the privacy of direct messages.
All good. Email contains the seeds of its own destruction. “The reason email will disappear is because it is the single most effective tool for moving to social.” Once that bridge is effectively crossed, we’ll burn it behind us.
Archive for the “General” Category
Nov
09
2011
Move away from your inbox & start working together! #noemailPosted by Paul in #noemail, GeneralA tribute to Luis Suarez (aka @elsua) in the form of a Dutch/English language site — Moving/Collaborating/Sharing/Connecting/Thinking/Helping/Innovating/Working/Living Outside the Inbox — from IBM Netherlands. Includes the Prezi from my talk at Duke last month “#noemail – Why you could/should/must use better ways of communicating than email” and this interview with Luis:
Oct
21
2011
@elsua – Luis Suarez tells #jamcamp about Living in a World Without EmailPosted by Paul in #noemail, GeneralGreat, if a bit noisy, hall interview with Luis Suarez at Jamcamp yesterday. He is down to three social networks: Twitter, Google Plus and IBM Connections (for work) –no Facebook (because he dislikes the Terms of Service). Good insights. Including how to stay in contact with your clients without email. Just back from giving a talk and having a talk with the folks at Duke University who do Web and Communications work there. The subject? Productivity in the form of #noemail Here’s the Prezi: A calendar page dated Wednesday August 3 showed up in my atom-based faculty mailbox today from my ever alert colleague, Cal Lee.
A little of what I learned about #noemail so far.
Kinda covers the main point, especially the title: Is email the new “snail mail?” Nick Mehta writing in Mashable blames your overflowing email inbox and your desire to check in on it on — YOU! Yes, you loser, you are just too lonely, vain, anxious, and self-deceiving. Nick assumes somehow if you are social, self-effacing, calmly unparanoid and have a clear self-perception — tada! — your email problems will be solved. Note to Nick: email comes to your inbox from somewhere other than yourself. Mostly not even from people, as I’ve seen in the past weeks are people are redirected to other more sane means of communications, but from various automatic mailings, alerts, confirmations, and the like. No psychological changes on your part will have much impact on the amount of email you receive. You may change your reading and responding habits, but there will be email as sure as the sun rises in the east. Yes, I’m ranting this time and I hope uncharacteristically. I admit I’ve been infected with a rant-virus after having read the rants posing as comments following the WRAL interview. ;-> I have however read not only Nick’s article but also the ongoing Google+ discussion of that article lead by Luis Suarez. I invite you to join Luis and others in a very civil discussion of behaviors and email. The bigger question looms: Can normative email behaviors of humans and of machines acting on behalf of humans be changed by charters, rules or by your own behaviors? One of the many great things that David Christopher brought to my attention is this video on social media for business done by Red Sky Vision of UK which begins with the premise: “There is disconnect between how immersed and digitally connected employees are outside of the workplace, and how their internal communications are being delivered. On the ground, employees are still posting printed communications on the water cooler when they can be engaged, led and informed via the latest digital channel.”. “Technology has somehow skipped the organization.” More deeply it’s about taking social to the C-Suite (as the Brits call the housing for the CxO level execs). It’s a convincing piece of work, beautiful and well-produced. Part a pitch for and to effective Internal Communicators, part a backhanded compliment to services like Yammer.
Social Media @ Work from Red Sky Vision on Vimeo. At about 12 minutes in: “By 2013, we will not be doing email in this organization anymore; we’ll be doing all of this with social networks.”
Jul
12
2011
#noemail on WRAL, G+ as email killer, email dead by 2018Posted by Paul in #noemail, GeneralBrian Shrader of WRAL shot some footage for a #noemail story a few weeks back. He had the story ready before Google Plus was announced, so it may seem a little dated instead of forward looking. Nonetheless he did a great job including digging up some ancient email footage which some old time computer geeks will appreciate. Last night the story ran on the 6 pm news as “UNC professor tries to go email free”. At PC World, Mike Elgan writes about “How Google+ Ends Social Networking Fatigue.” The money quote for me is: “Google+ is the first email replacement I’ve ever seen that’s actually better than email.” I completely agree. Mike also points back to his 2010 Computer World article, “How to kill e-mail (before it kills you)” which suggests doing a lot of what I started doing with the #noemail project. (Thanks to Shannon Turlington for the alert on this good article). David Christopher started even earlier. In 2008, David predicted the dead of email by 2018 at Stop!ThinkSocial. He reminds us of this as he revisits that post this past week in “The Death Of Email By 2018″. David also provides an javascript countdown clock marking the time to email’s end. He writes whistfully: “I spend more time on email than I do with my family.” Two different former students from two different decades asked recently, “When you started #noemail, did you know that Google was going to release Plus? And how did you know what Plus would do?” Somewhere embedded in the questions is: “Did Google give you some kind of head’s up about Plus?” My guess was that someone would do something serious to work on messaging and radically reduce the centricity of email. I knew that Facebook and Google both had projects aiming at changing the way social and messaging work. Of course, there were and are several other players working in the same areas. When I started thinking about #noemail seriously last summer just before hearing of Sheryl Sandberg’s talk at the Nielsen conference, I had already seen the software infrastructure in place or ready to be put into place with projects mentioned in this blog in the early parts of the #noemail category and in interviews with OpenSource.com and Reesenews.org. HTML5 + JSON were just too powerful and too promising to anyone interested in integrating activity streams and changing messaging. Then as you noticed in my classes especially the one in Fall 2009, I’ve been very interested in an emerging literacy powered by vernacular video. Google+ out Skyped Skype on that — leaving out the shared screen and telephone Skype-out parts, but doing a better job of group chats and video sharing. All this said, Google+ is only in limited field trial and will be changing as the Googlers see how we use it, how we work around the constraints, and how we define the communities and communications uses. I expect to see something like visible Circles or cooperatively managed Circles or something to help groups communicate better — perhaps an integration of Reader+Groups with a Plus and Circles spin to it. Services to Groups (of the Facebook type rather than the Google Groups type) missing now and was done as a hack early on in Friendster, then in MySpace, then in Facebook, before each added the feature belatedly. Integration and/or a refinement of Google Groups would be one way to get there pretty quickly. The most pressing question for me is: can we run a class in the fall using Google+ instead of other services? Groups of some sort would help on that a lot. What Google+ has done for or to me after 5 weeks of #noemail is to answer a lot of the questions that I was trying to raise. I already am enjoying the aspects of Plus enough that I’m not upset about the learning curve and the advent of a new service. No, I’m not returning to email as a result of Plus. Just to opposite. I may never use email again.
Jul
08
2011
Horses in a Time of Cars; Email in a Time of #noemailPosted by Paul in #noemail, GeneralI’m quoted about #noemail at in the Triangle Business Journal. The article by Olivia Barrow talks about “[College and University - pj] Administrators embracing social media to reach out.” As you’ll see, I try to push the idea of interactivity rather than broadcast and of social media over email. No surprised here. I wish I could read the article but it requires a subscription and is mostly behind a paywall. In case you have a subscription or would like to start one here’s the link to the article. A friend sends this snipet:
Developers, sysadmins, coders and other members of my Geek tribe, especially open source coding geeks, get their social interactions in the process of writing code and sharing in that environment where they are much less private than in their personal lives. “Here’s my code. Judge me on that. I’ll keep my birthdate to myself.” Nothing wrong with that. We’re all, or have been in my case, on some IRC channel, in some chatroom, using github or sourceforge or launchpad as our places for social connections and fulfillment. But more often than not, we don’t recognize that those places are our own kind of Facebook, Twitter or other services that many Geeks avoid, disparage, or completely ignore. It seems so obvious when I say this, but you wouldn’t believe how many conversations start: “I hate email too. I only use it to communicate with [my clients, my boss, my salesforce]. But I don’t need that kind of idle talk that they have on [Facebook, Twitter, Quora, Hunch, LinkedIn, etc]. Who has time to be social?” Then a conversation will drift to say, where to go for lunch. I get: “Jim says this new place is great! Let’s try it.” “Isn’t Jim in San Jose?” “Yeah, but when he was here last he liked this one. We were just talking about that this morning while we worked on Project X.” My point here is that small talk, important small talk, is going on in a lot of different environments. It’s as common as breathing. So common that like breathing, we don’t pay serious attention to it until there’s some serious problem. But that common talk enriches our lives and deepens our engagement with our co-workers and the world. Melinda Blau and Karen Fingerman devote an entire rich book on our casual almost invisible relationships — with our bus driver, barrista, the wait at our favorite restaurant, etc. Her Consequential Strangers could easily be extended to the shifting teams of problem solvers and co-workers that we geeks interact with on a daily and nightly basis.We, on IRC, are as social as our mothers are as they play Farmville on Facebook. We’re playing a slightly different game — and in general, we’re better paid for it. We’re social but in a more hidden way. So hidden we often don’t see that ourselves. Just to end on a #noemail note. Have you ever send email to a developer, sysadmin, coder? Did they respond? Usually we don’t. We let it sit there aging like fine wine to be appreciated later. Maybe your problem will fix itself. Maybe you’ll ask someone nearby. Maybe you’ll take some initiative and fix it yourself. You didn’t want to talk to the Sysadmin from Hell (BOFH) anyway. We’ve always practiced #noemail but in a passive aggressive way — accent on aggressive. [group hug]
Jun
21
2011
Before it all went wrong – Did Errol Morris’ brother invent email? #noemailPosted by Paul in #noemail, GeneralFilm maker Errol Morris discovers that his brother Noel may have been, along with Tom Van Vleck, one of the first implementers of a mail command in 1965. Among the many nice touches associated with the article is an interactive feature that allows you to send mail as if you were using the MIT CTSS system from a Selectric Typewriter terminal and even do a little programming. Morris promises that this article will be the first of a five part series. I’m looking forward to see what more he and Tom Van Vleck have to say. The proposal for the mail command (see below) is particularly interesting in that it states a couple of uses for email. First, the system could automatically “notify a user that some of his files had been backed-up.” And second, that email could be used “for users to send authors any criticisms.” No other uses are mentioned. One feature that has just reappeared as Google Priority Mail is URGENT MAIL. Mail from the system to “the user will always be placed in a file called URGENT MAIL.” The MAIL ME command which presents the user with the contents of her inbox “will always print the URGENT MAIL before [the more pedestrian mail file] MAIL BOX.” There at the very beginning, email was already a box clogger, already a place where priorities needed to be established automagically for the user, and already with some guiding suggestions about use that would quickly be ignored.
One thing that I hear over and over in comments and in person is: “Man, you’re handing all your information over to {Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc}! Not me! I have email and it’s secure and mine only.” Obviously, I’m on different medication for the folks who say this. They completely ignore just how insecure and how available the information in email and the information behind that behavior is.
Back in the late 1980s, writing as Emily Postmail, I said: “Imagine leaving a postcard with your phone number and a time stamp on it at the coffee shop. That’s about how secure your email is. Be aware that anyone and everyone can read it.” And now I would add that your behavior in sending email can be traced and analyzed by someone smarter than you. In case you secure minded emailers missed the reports of AT&T’s cooperation with NSA in domestic surveillance back in 2006, let me point you to a very good Wired article from that period “AT&T Whistle-Blower’s Evidence”. You’ve already been watched. And The Atlantic reports that you are now being even more closely watched today in “Prepare to Have Your Email Read by the NSA”. At least, Facebook, Twitter, etc give you some tangible improvement in services as a result of their surveillance of your behaviors. AT&T + NSA not so much. True, you can encrypt your email messages — but who really does this? In the meantime, projects like Securebook give you a way to communicate privately, if not secretly, on Facebook. Offered in lite and for pay (99 cents) at the Android Store, Securebook promises Social Steganography which I hope is something better than the X-Ray Specs or Amazing Sea Monkeys that were sold in the back of X-men comics of my youth. Securebook says:
Jun
13
2011
What’s the biggest time sink Email or other social media?Posted by Paul in #noemail, General
No question about the answer. Take a look, a close look, at these findings from an harmon.ie commissioned survey run by uStamp (n=500). Despite the co-mingling of the results at harmon.ie’s own site’s cover page for the report, the survey shows there is a giant difference in the amount to time and effort wasted on email than on all other social practices on-line. harmon.ie also commits the sin of mislabeling online behaviors as addictive: “The increasingly common addiction to web-based activity – which psychologists call ‘online compulsive disorder’ – is pervasive in the workplace.”
Still the survey provides interesting data that tell a tale of differences in distractions and their management. Let’s sample a few from harmon.ie’s press release to Yahoo! Finance and elsewhere:
Individual users are more aggressive than even their employers in taking control of their own time and managing distractions:
It’s not too hard to see where the problems are. Email and worse the misuse of email for document sharing are by far the biggest waste of time and effort. I am aware that harmon.ie does have a commercial interest in these results. They say of their company: “The harmon.ie product family brings enterprise collaboration to every business user by transforming the email client into a collaboration and social workspace, called ’social email’.” Fast Company features a good summary of the results — but keep in mind that the author, David Lavenda, is an executive with harmon.ie. David clearly discloses his relationship to harmon.ie in the course of the article. +1
Jun
10
2011
Living in a World Without Google – #noemail scheduling w/GcalPosted by Paul in #noemail, General
Living in a World Without Google (instead of #noemail or #lwwe ): Joshua Romero swears off all things Googlish, thereby missing out on this past Thursday’s great Les Paul tribute doodle, as described at length in IEEE Spectrum called “How I Learned to Live Google-free. A quest to quit the most pervasive company on the Web” (Thanks to @shivaviad Googlization of Everything author).
IEEE Spectrum has a great special issue, “The Social Web,” (June 2011). Authors including Robin (150 friends) Dunbar, Siva (Googlization) Vaidhyanathan, Jeff Jarvis, Bob Garfield, and others look at the current state of the Social Web through the lens of Facebook vs Google for the most part. If you like me have stuck with Google and love Google Calendar — especially as an intelligent scheduling service –, you’ll be delighted to learn that the Calendar now supports Appointment Slots, that is times when you will agree to meet with people, instead of just any open times. Now you don’t have to mark large amounts of time as “Busy” just to get some serious reading, writing, research or sleep done. You can have actual office hours! One more nail in the email coffin. Scheduling with me; don’t send email.
On page 59 of the Independent Weekly’s Best of the Triangle 2011 (sharing a page with an IP3 advert “Best Place to Watch International Soccer for 6 years in a row”) is my little piece about my favorite discovery and reuse of Bill Smith’s Honeysuckle Sorbet. It’s not online yet but is out in print so here’s the text I sent in unedited:
Honeysuckle Sorbet What invasive species and its transformation into food would give rise to my most transient Triangle experience? No, it’s not kudzu or bamboo grass or starlings that I’m talking about but that lovely scented treat from Southern childhood – honeysuckle. How many of us spent the first hot days of May and early June risking ticks and chiggers as we plucked honeysuckle flowers? We pinched each flower’s base and drew the anther through the blossom’s cone to reveal a sweet drop of nectar. Like bees or humming birds, we would suckle on the honey. Then–repeat. I could and did spend hours at a mass of vine learning in the process which of the flower colors indicated the sweetest drops. (Answer: not the whitest nor the most yellow, but white going to yellow a sort of middle aged bloom is the most tasty and most reliable). A few years back, I heard that Bill Smith at Crook’s Corner had invented a new dessert treat that captured this experience and improved on it. I rushed down to Crook’s and I wasn’t disappointed – I was taken to a special section of foodie heaven, a place where the most formative tastes of my childhood were re-presented and reformed and reimagined. Bill had kept the distinctive honeysuckle flavor, made it both sweeter and cooler, by borrowing a cool extraction process some Persian recipes for flower nectar ices. Bill’s invention took me to the cool late May evenings spent along the vine covered hedges picking flowers but without the chiggers or ticks or – thanks Crook’s – the mosquitoes. Since that first night at Crook’s, I’ve started making my own batches of sorbet. I returned to being food for the insect pests. I’ve been back out in the summer heat – especially this past weekend. But I can stockpile the honeysuckle flavor for a while and make some new uses of the sorbet Since Bill was good enough to share his recipe in “Seasoned in the South,” I’ll share one innovation here. Instead of putting the final liquid into an ice cream maker, I pour it into ice trays. Once the ice has solidly formed, serve about four cubes per chilled glass. Add two shots of good bourbon. Garnish with mint. Then as with Mint Juleps, sip slowly while holding the glass from the bottom allowing the heat of your palm to slightly warm the mixture. Don’t hurry. In time, you will be transported and transformed. I finally posted this to Quora this afternoon:
Then I started poking into the UNC Lyris documentation for help. After pointing me to an unusable URL form ( http://example.com/read/rss?forum=forumname&rev=0.92 don’t even bother), I found this bit which looked promising and with a little improvisation worked! I apologize for the UNC-centric-ness of this post, but I hope it will be useful to others here in Chapel Hill.
Translation:
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