Peter Black's Freedom to Differ

Obama really wants his Blackberry

The New York Times reports that Obama is still trying to hold on to his Blackberry:

President-elect Barack Obama has yet to relent, but he conceded that he might be losing the battle to keep his independent lifeline to the outside world.

“I’m still clinging to my BlackBerry,” Mr. Obama said Wednesday. “They’re going to pry it out of my hands.”

Of all the fights facing Mr. Obama as he prepares for the White House, one of the most maddening for him is the prospect of losing the BlackBerry that has been attached to his belt for years. It is, he has vigorously argued, an essential link to keeping him apprised of events outside his ever-tightening cocoon.

“This is a concern, I should add, not just of Secret Service, but also lawyers,” Mr. Obama said, speaking in an interview with CNBC and The New York Times. “You know, this town’s full of lawyers. I don’t know if you’ve noticed.”

Mr. Obama shared his agitation at the prospect of losing his last form of direct communication with friends and other advisers who sent him e-mail throughout the presidential campaign. But he, like President Bush before him, is being advised for security reasons and his own legal protection to refrain from sending e-mail during his presidency.

“I don’t know that I’ll win,” Mr. Obama said. But, he added, “I’m still fighting it.”

Read it here.

"Embarrassment is only a math problem away"

I had a piece in The Courier Mail this morning on Google's ridiculous Mail Goggles application.  I'd suggested the headline for the piece should be "Embarrassment is only a math problem away", but instead they went for "Google math test will prove no barrier for the determined drunk" in the print version and "Drunks outsmart Google" in the online version.  Anyway, you can read my piece here.

Email to remain dominant

Media Post reports on the future of email:

One of the issues raised repeatedly during Wednesday's opening sessions at the Email Insider Summit was: Whither email when a younger generation raised on Facebook, MySpace and social networking platforms enters the workforce?

Will they use email to communicate with their colleagues, plan meetings, strategize about PowerPoints, etc.? Or will Facebook--or more likely, a more professional type of social networking option--come to dominate intra-office communication?

The scenario may be a few years out, but not as many as some might think. One grad student at Ball State, Brandon Prebynski, appearing on the Summit's first panel, said he would be content to use Facebook solely at his next job. (A panel of Ball State students affiliated with the school's Center for Media Design offered marketers the opportunity to gain insight into changing behaviors among the college set.)

Nonetheless, online firm Habeas released its annual study of consumer attitudes Wednesday, which showed that email remains the "primary method of communications in personal and business capacities." (Two other Ball State students said they might have trouble using Facebook at the office because it doesn't quite meet a "professional" standard.)

The Habeas research (conducted by Ipsos) also led to the conclusion that email will continue to be preferable "despite the rise of online threats and the emergence of other communication channels and Web 2.0 applications."

  Habeas CEO Des Cahill said the study "illustrates the relevance and longevity email has within the online ecosystem."

The survey found that 67% of respondents prefer email to communicate online, and 65% feel that will still be the case in five years. And vis-à-vis a younger generation "aging out of email," the survey found that 65% in the 18-to-34 demo "will favor email to communicate with businesses in five years."

...

At the Summit, Alan Chapell, president of Chapell & Associates, said he has a separate Hotmail address he gives companies who insist on obtaining an email address when he signs up for something. The Habeas research found again that some 60% of respondents seem to follow at least part of Chapell's thinking, and have two or more email addresses, "giving a different address to entities they do not trust while maintaining separate accounts for trustworthy sources."

Read more here.

Happy birthday

Spam turns 30:

Spam - the scourge of every e-mail inbox - celebrates its 30th anniversary this weekend.

The first recognisable e-mail marketing message was sent on 3 May, 1978 to 400 people on behalf of DEC - a now-defunct computer-maker.

The message was sent via Arpanet - the internet's forerunner - and won its sender much criticism from recipients.

Thirty years on, spam has grown into an underground industry that sends out billions of messages every day.

Statistics gathered by the FBI suggest that 75% of net scams snare people through junk e-mail. In 2007 these cons netted criminals more than $239m (£121m).

Statistics suggest that more than 80%-85% of all e-mail is spam or junk and more than 100 billion spam messages are sent every day.

The majority of these messages are being sent via hijacked home computers that have been compromised by a computer virus.

Read more here (from BBC News).

How to stop your inbox exploding

Cory Doctorow offers five tips to stop from your inbox from exploding:

I live and die in my email, receiving hundreds of non-spam messages every day. If I'm stationary and not actually feeding or playing with the baby, chances are I've got my laptop open somewhere nearby, online and downloading mail. It's my alpha and my omega, my version control system (if I want to find an old version of a document, I just find the copy I emailed to someone earlier), my address book, my journal and my confessor. I have over a million archived pieces of email, going back to 1991.

What's more, my inbox is almost always empty.

I've spent more than a decade tinkering with my email workflow, perfecting it so that I can manage whatever life throws at me through my inbox. I've come up with a few tips and hacks that never fail to surprise and delight my friends and colleagues when I show them off, and here they are, for the record ...

Read more here (from The Guardian).

no caps? no worries ... lol

A recent study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project considers the e-communication language of teenagers:

As e-mail messages, text messages and social network postings become nearly ubiquitous in the lives of teenagers, the informality of electronic communications is seeping into their schoolwork, a new study says.

Nearly two-thirds of 700 students surveyed said their e-communication style sometimes bled into school assignments, according to the study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, in partnership with the College Board’s National Commission on Writing. About half said they sometimes omitted proper punctuation and capitalization in schoolwork. A quarter said they had used emoticons like smiley faces. About a third said they had used text shortcuts like “LOL” for “laugh out loud.”

“I think this is not a worrying issue at all,” said Richard Sterling, emeritus executive director of the National Writing Project, which aims to improve the teaching of writing.

When e-mail shorthand — or for that matter, slang — appears in academic assignments, Professor Sterling said, it is an opportunity for teachers to explain that while such usages are acceptable in some contexts, they do not belong in schoolwork. And as the English language evolves, he said, some e-mail conventions, like starting sentences without a capital letter, may well become accepted practice.

“I think in the future, capitalization will disappear,” said Professor Sterling, who teaches at the University of California, Berkeley. In fact, he said, when his teenage son asked what the presence of the capital letter added to what the period at the end of the sentence signified, he had no answer.

...

Most teenagers do not think of their e-mail messages, text messages and social network postings as “real writing,” the study found.

More than half of the teenagers surveyed had a profile on a social networking site like Facebook or MySpace, 27 percent had an online journal or blog and 11 percent had a personal Web site. Generally, girls dominated the teenage blogosphere and social networks.

Read more here (from the New York Times).  Jason Lee Miller from WebProNews also doesn't think there is much to worry about in this study:

Nothing makes parents and educators more concerned about the youth than the youth's embracing attitude of new technology; when I was a kid video games were rotting our minds, and these days it's, well, everything. A new survey from Pew Internet says, as usual, grownups may be overreacting.

All that texting, all that abbreviated nonsense you see in cell phone commercials where it seems like teenage girls are speaking an entirely different language, all that damnable leet and those emoticons—teenagers say they're well aware of the difference between electronic communication and formal writing and adjust accordingly.

Think of it this way: I speak differently when visiting my hometown than I do in Lexington, Ky. Maybe you alter your patterns, too.

Most teens (60%), according to Pew, don't think of electronic communications as "writing," which should be a relief to the purists and pessimists out there worried that their children's surest chance for success – good writing skills – is taking a backseat to a memetic and potentially short-lived subculture pidgin language.

...

Sometimes a teen's reality is duplicitous, though. Many didn't think texting and such influenced their formal writing, but did have to admit sometimes their informal styles crept into their formal schoolwork. Although 73% said e-communications had no impact on school writing, just under two-thirds admitted they improvised sometimes by using emoticons (25%), informal punctuation and grammar (50%), and abbreviations like LOL (38%).

...

The good news is that more teens than parents believe good writing is essential to their success. Eight in ten parents think so, but 86% of teens do. Maybe a few parents need a talkin-to instead. 

Read more here.

Too much email

The New York Times looks at the problem of too much email:

E-MAIL has become the bane of some people’s professional lives. Michael Arrington, the founder of TechCrunch, a blog covering new Internet companies, last month stared balefully at his inbox, with 2,433 unread e-mail messages, not counting 721 messages awaiting his attention in Facebook.

Mr. Arrington might be tempted to purge his inbox and start afresh — the phrase “e-mail bankruptcy” has been with us since at least 2002. But he declares e-mail bankruptcy regularly, to no avail. New messages swiftly replace those that are deleted unread.

For most of us who are not prominent bloggers, our inbox, thankfully, will never become quite so crowded, at least with nonspam messages. But it doesn’t take all that many to seem overwhelming — for me, the sight of two dozen messages awaiting individual responses makes me perspire.

Eventually, someone will come up with software that greatly eases the burden of managing a high volume of e-mail. But in the meantime, we perhaps should look to the past and see what tips we might draw from prolific letter writers in the pre-electronic era who handled ridiculously large volumes of correspondence without being crushed.

When Mr. Arrington wrote a post about the persistent problem of e-mail overload and the opportunity for an entrepreneur to devise a solution, almost 200 comments were posted within two days. Some start-up companies were mentioned favorably, like ClearContext (sorts Outlook inbox messages by imputed importance), Xobni (offers a full communications history within Outlook for every sender, as well as very fast searching), Boxbe (restricts incoming e-mail if the sender is not known), and RapidReader (displays e-mail messages, a single word at a time, for accelerated reading speeds that can reach up to 950 words a minute).

But none of these services really eliminates the problem of e-mail overload because none helps us prepare replies. And a recurring theme in many comments was that Mr. Arrington was blind to the simplest solution: a secretary.

Read more here.

My Name is URL

A cute YouTube video parodying My Name is Earl:

"Everywhere and nowhere"

The Economist writes that social networking will become a ubiquitous feature of online life, but that does not mean it is a business:

So it is entirely conceivable that social networking, like web-mail, will never make oodles of money. That, however, in no way detracts from its enormous utility. Social networking has made explicit the connections between people, so that a thriving ecosystem of small programs can exploit this “social graph” to enable friends to interact via games, greetings, video clips and so on.

Coming up for air

But should users really have to visit a specific website to do this sort of thing? “We will look back to 2008 and think it archaic and quaint that we had to go to a destination like Facebook or LinkedIn to be social,” says Charlene Li at Forrester Research, a consultancy. Future social networks, she thinks, “will be like air. They will be anywhere and everywhere we need and want them to be.” No more logging on to Facebook just to see the “news feed” of updates from your friends; instead it will come straight to your e-mail inbox, RSS reader or instant messenger. No need to upload photos to Facebook to show them to friends, since those with privacy permissions in your electronic address book can automatically get them.

The problem with today's social networks is that they are often closed to the outside web. The big networks have decided to be “open” toward independent programmers, to encourage them to write fun new software for them. But they are reluctant to become equally open towards their users, because the networks' lofty valuations depend on maximising their page views—so they maintain a tight grip on their users' information, to ensure that they keep coming back. As a result, avid internet users often maintain separate accounts on several social networks, instant-messaging services, photo-sharing and blogging sites, and usually cannot even send simple messages from one to the other. They must invite the same friends to each service separately. It is a drag.

Read more here.

Capitals or lowercase?

Information Week's Mitch Wagner addresses a question that has bugged me for some time, "Should 'Internet,' 'Web,' And 'E-Mail' Start With Lowercase Letters?":

Just as the Internet has evolved over the past decade and a half, the language used to describe it has evolved as well. We used to say "World Wide Web," now we just say "Web." English tends to get more compact and faster over time.

A year or two ago, people started dropping the uppercase letters in "Internet" and "Web." They made a sensible argument: The Internet and Web aren't singular objects, like the Washington Monument or the Pacific Ocean. They are networks of networks, like the phone or highway systems, which we write about in lowercase.

Another great controversy in language circles revolves around the word "e-mail." These days, the most common spelling is probably "email," dropping the hyphen. But some people (including InformationWeek) are purists, hanging on to that hyphen as a recognition that the word "e-mail" is a mashup of "electronic mail," and noting that "email" and "e-mail" would normally be pronounced differently -- the "e" in "email" would usually be a short "e," not the long "e" in "e-mail."

At InformationWeek, we lag a little bit behind the cutting edge in language. We still say "Internet" and "Web." That works for us, it emphasizes our identity as a publication that writes about the practical use of technology, not jumping on the latest fad and hailing it as a revolution that will sweep aside everything that came before. We wait for technology to prove itself before falling down and praising it.

I just included the following paragraph in an e-mail to a freelance contributor:

BTW, we still use "e-mail" and "Web," not "email" and "web." I know that's old-fashioned. I actually think it's kind of charming, and we should go all the way and just use Victorian language: "Aetheric Correspondence" instead of "e-mail," "Visual Telegraph," instead of "Web." The copy-editors are taking this under advisement.

Read more here.

Broken email

The Observer looks at whether email is a broken business tool:

The deluge of email flooding workers' inboxes every day has become so overwhelming that it is now a 'broken business tool' in urgent need of fixing, companies have been warned.

The average employee spends an estimated 90 minutes to two hours a day wading through hundreds of messages, suffering interruptions and distractions with every ping from their PC or BlackBerry. Worldwide email traffic has now hit 196 billion messages a day, according to the research firm the Radicati Group, and is predicted to reach 374 billion per day by 2011.

Some organisations, such as worldwide accountancy consultants Deloitte and the publisher Cedar, have held 'No email days' to encourage staff to use the phone or talk to each other instead. But these are only stopgap measures.

'Email is a broken business tool,' said Jason Preston, new media manager at the Parnassus Group, a social media consultancy. 'There's been no innovation to separate the junk letters from the real ones.'

Read more here.

The death of email?

At the  Future of Web Apps Conference in Miami,         Caroline McCarthy wonders about the future of email:

The way people have been talking about e-mail at the Future of Web Apps conference, you'd think it were a cell phone carrier or a domestic airline. It's antiquated, it's backward, and everybody hates it.

Kevin Marks, a Google engineer and Technorati veteran, said in a talk about the company's OpenSocial project and Social Graph APIs that e-mail is a "strange legacy idea."

"E-mail has died away for a group of users. For the younger generation, they don't use e-mail," he said, talking about the young Web users who have started to abandon e-mail for Facebook messaging and mobile texting. "They see it as this noisy spam-filled thing that annoys them every day...they see it as how you talk to the university, how you talk to the bank." Marks pointed to technologies like OpenID that promote the notion that online identities these days are defined by so much more than e-mail addresses--URLs and social-networking profiles, to name a few.

Marks wasn't the only one expounding upon e-mail's suckiness. Earlier in the day, WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg inferred that overwhelming volumes of spam were making Web users explore options other than e-mail.

And when a lively group of Web 2.0 elite (including Mullenweg, Digg's Kevin Rose, Pownce's Leah Culver, and Flickr's Cal Henderson) tackled a panel led by TechCrunch's Erick Schonfeld that involved creating the concept for a new Web app in 45 minutes, their end result was a product that would make e-mail less of a headache by making sure that users reply to everything. (It was done in 45 minutes, so the specifics weren't totally ironed out.)

To top it all off, when I had a meeting with Marks on Friday morning, we used Twitter direct messaging rather than e-mail to confirm the time and location.

That was before Twitter suffered a downage when the start-up's architect, Blaine Cook, was giving a talk later in the day at FOWA and his phone kept ringing with calls from the site's server administrators. Twitter's unreliability is well-known, and certainly calls into question the fact that all these messaging start-ups and social-networking features that are supposedly killing e-mail still might not be stable enough to overhaul the way we communicate.

The recent high-profile e-mail provider crashes, however, provide a counterpoint.

Read more here (from The Social).

NB. Reading this post from the screen will make you green!

Every email my sister a friend sends me from her work account has at the end of the email:

PS. Reading this email from the screen will make you green!

As this has actually bugged me some time, I could not agree more with Michael Arrington's recent rant at TechCrunch titled "Hey, You Condescending Jerk, No One Prints Emails Anyway":

I know it’s all the rage right now to be green. but is it really necessary to put a line at the bottom of every email telling me to consider the environment and not to print it?

It was fine when just a few people did it last year (it was a ding against their startup, but didn’t necessarily kill a story), but now a significant percentage of emails coming in every day have some variation of the “do not print this email” message. Not everyone does it, just the condescending holier-than-thou types. But it happens often enough to have become a serious annoyance. For background on the “movement,” see this article.

You know what? I don’t need you to tell me that I need to be a good Earth citizen. I don’t print emails (no one does, you idiots), but if someone wants to I have no problem with it. Maybe they want to print out a map or something. I don’t think that makes them a bad person.

The same people who insist on wearing colored rubber bracelets to show their support for the cause du jour put this crap at the bottom of emails. My suspicion is that they don’t particularly care about the issue, they just want credit from everyone that they are a caring, thoughtful human being.

Read more here.

Bringing us together

In a column for Wired, Tim Harford explains how email brings you closer to the person in the next cubicle:

As a columnist (which is fancy for "journalist in jammies"), I ought to personify the conventional wisdom that distance is dead: All I need to get my work done is a place to perch and a Wi-Fi signal. But if that's true, why do I still live in London, the second-most expensive city in the world?

If distance really didn't matter, rents in places like London, New York, Bangalore, and Shanghai would be converging with those in Hitchcock County, Nebraska (population 2,926 and falling). Yet, as far as we can tell through the noise of the real estate bust, they aren't. Wharton real estate professor Joseph Gyourko talks instead of "superstar cities," which have become the equivalent of luxury goods — highly coveted and ultra-expensive. If geography has died, nobody bothered to tell Hitchcock County.

Maybe it's because society hasn't wholeheartedly accepted the idea of working remotely. Or perhaps communications technology just isn't all it's hyped up to be. After all, the journalists and consultants who tell us that location is insignificant are biased. Like me, they're the people whose lives have been most transformed by the Internet and cell phones.

But I think the truth is more profound than either of those glib explanations: Technology makes it more fun and more profitable to live and work close to the people who matter most to your life and work. Harvard economist Ed Glaeser, an expert on city economies, argues that communications technology and face-to-face interactions are complements like salt and pepper, rather than substitutes like butter and margarine. Paradoxically, your cell phone, email, and Facebook networks are making it more attractive to meet people in the flesh.

Read more here.

Social media and elections

I've come across two interesting posts on the power of social media and elections today that approach the issue from two very different perspectives.  First, Media Post's Online Spin blog looks at the potential of social media as a way to improve political discourse:

The United States sits on the cusp of an election in which not only will the winner define the nation’s course, but the election process itself has the potential to reverse a trend of disenfranchisement with the political process. It’s a chance to truly allow those who would lead a nation, hear and speak with the people as never before. We may look back at 2008 and realize the implications of social media were far greater than we ever expected, as it raised political discourse and action ...

There is so much potential for social media to become a decisive tool for those politicians and campaigns that listen to and enable the social media community, because social media is the people’s voice. While individual politicians’ successes may well lie in the proper participation in social media (”Forget Innovative; Be Inspiring“  and “Social Networks and Politics” ), social media may play a far greater role in helping to change the way people engage in government and discuss the issues that divide, regardless of who wins individual elections. It’s funny that such a powerful line from Lincoln’s Gettysburg address meant to describe an ideal state of government would have such applicability to social media: “Of the people, by the people, for the people.” Can social media give new meaning to these epic words? How?

Increasing citizens’ political discourse ...

Issue discourse ...

Nonpartisan use of social media ...

Read how social media can achieve these three objectives here.  Then I read techPresident's more practical look at the differences between Hillary Clinton's social media support and Barack Obama's and the level of engagement they have been able to retain as a result:

Back in early September, Hillary Clinton's campaign made a big deal about how it had signed up its millionth supporter, a computer programmer from Georgia named Ron Wood. You can watch the video of Wood and his friend Michelle Smith meeting the Clintons, and traveling to a labor rally in Des Moines, here. Clinton campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle sent out an email bragging of the accomplishment: "What's the power of a million? It's the power to run a winning campaign; it's the power to restart the 21st century; it's the power to make history."

As best as I can recall, that's the only metric of grassroots organizing the Clinton campaign has ever shared with the public. And the news that it had, by September, built a million-member email list, was no small accomplishment. Until recently, that was every politician's goal: a huge list that you could hit up for donations and volunteers, again and again.

But compare the power of a list to the power of a network.

Right now, according to Joe Rospars, Barack Obama's new media director, the Obama campaign boasts that more than 350,000 people have created personal accounts on My.BarackObama.com, more than 25,000 have created blogs on the site; more than 20,000 have created their own personal fundraising pages with their own goals, thermometers to track progress, and follow-up tools; more than 20,000 offline local events have been planned using related tools on the site; and more than 6,500 active grassroots volunteer groups have formed in support of Obama with more than 200,000 members.

To be purely schematic about it, let's posit that Clinton's giant list falls into this form of one-to-many communication ...

Here we have one speaker and many recipients. The conversation is all one-way. The citizens are isolated from each other, and the politician isn't do much to either introduce them to each other, or to respond to their feedback.

That was the paradigm of broadcast TV and direct mail fundraising. Now we're in a networked age, where everyone can connect to everyone else and expects some degree of interactivity and reciprocity. Further, the power is shifting away from the speaker at the top towards the network of connections forming among all the participants.

In practice, this converts in all kinds of ways to political power. A campaign can send an appeal to its million-member list, or it can foster a network of 20,000 small-donor activists, each with their own personal lists. If you assume that an email to a million people will have about a 20% open rate and a 20% click thru, that's 40,000 responses. Not bad. But people are far more likely to respond to a personal appeal from a friend or an acquaintance than an impersonal mass email.

To date, Obama's campaign has amassed more than 750,000 contributions from more than 500,000 individual donors. And that doesn't reflect whatever additional fundraising they've experienced since winning the Iowa caucus!

There's more power in a network than a list.

Read more here.

Yahoo Life!

Yahoo co-founder and CEO Jerry Yang made his inaugural CES appearance to announce, among other things, Yahoo Life!.  Here is what some of the leading blogs are saying ...

TechCrunch's Michael Arrington:

Everyone wants to be more like Facebook these days, and Yahoo is no exception. Google’s strategy is Open Social, a set of open APIs that allow third parties to embed stuff on other third parties. The cornerstone of Open Social for Google is Gmail, where all the action happens for a user (and to a lesser extent Orkut and iGoogle). Yahoo’s going in much the same direction, it seems, by making Yahoo Mail the center of their new social networking strategy.

The new product is only a proof of concept at this point, Yang said. The goal is to unite services like mail, search, etc. under a social framework, with Yahoo Mail serving as the central hub. Your email and Im contacts serve as your contacts and fill out the social graph. Their closeness to you is based on how frequently you communicate with them.

...

It’s unfortunate that Yahoo, which has had a muddled past at best with regard to social networking, is referring to the product as “Life.” It’s too close to Microsoft’s Live strategy of bucketing online services under a new brand. It’s gone nowhere but sideways over the last couple of years, and shows that repackaging and marketing do little to drive user adoption in today’s Internet.

But the name aside, and despite my previous criticism, Yahoo Life looks like an intelligent social architecture for Yahoo. Assuming all this social networking stuff isn’t just a fad (it isn’t), then it makes sense for Yahoo to focus their resources in this fight. Of course, developers will now have yet another platform to build to, beyond the Facebook and Google ones that exist today.

Read more here.

Mashable's Stan Schroeder:

Unlike Bill Gates’ boring keynote, Yahoo’s CES keynote actually had some interesting product announcements - namely Yahoo Life! and Yahoo Mobile. Yahoo Life! (yes, the exclamation mark is obligatory until everyone gets sick of it and simply drops it from the name) is in fact more of a sneak peak of a future product; there is no date set for its release, but it seems to be quite polished even at this early stage.

The premise is this: take Yahoo Mail, and make it the hub of your daily online activities; turn e-mail addresses into social profiles; connect e-mail to other services, and use the info from the contacts in these services according to the context.

...

It sounds and looks great, but we can’t know how well it works until the product actually goes live. What we can do, however, is think hard of how many times you actually felt the need to use e-mail in such a way. Personally, I wouldn’t mind having the ability to do all this extra stuff as long as my e-mail doesn’t get too cluttered; e.i. as long as I can turn the extras off. I would hate to see my Inbox turning into Facebook-like hell. I must admit that - as dated as it is - e-mail still is an important part of my online activity, and therefore it might be a good idea to make it the center around which everything else revolves.

Read more here.

ZDNet's Dan Farber:

Yahoo co-founder and CEO Jerry Yang made his inaugural CES appearance, outlining how he plans to evolve his company ahead of the curve and to become an indispensable starting point for consumers’ Web experience, which has become richer and more complex over the last decade. “We call this Life with an exclamation point,” Yang said. “At Yahoo we want to be most essential starting point for your life,” and “take the complexity of the Web and simplify your life through very powerful technologies.”

Yang said that more people use Yahoo as their starting point, via Yahoo Mail, MyYahoo. search and the Yahoo home page. We possess so much of basic tools and services to make life on the Web simpler, he proclaimed.

For the first time, Yang showed what the company has been up to in developing a next generation user experience that unites it various services in a social context. Yang labeled the demo a sneak peak and not a product announcement, but it is very well thought out as a service the integrates email, structured data, social context, tags and a variety of other applications.

Read more here.

Email or social networks?

Blogging for Media Post's Online Spin, Max Kalehoff argues that email blows away all social networks:

With the explosive excitement and high valuations of Facebook and the like, it’s time to take a step back and acknowledge the mother of all social networks: email. Yes, plain-vanilla email.

Sure, a few of the big social networks have really taken off recently, but email is still by far the dominant and most practical platform for social connections. A recent Pew Internet & American Life Project survey found that 91% of Internet users between the ages of 18 and 64 send or read e-mail, far more than any social network.

In fact, email is so dominant that it’s the single open-source backbone of nearly every social network. Think about it: Most social networks require your email address to sign up. Then they try to upload your email address book in order to communicate with your contacts.

...

I believe online social networks have a big future, and they’re a critical part of my personal and professional life today. But email still is the most reliable and manageable platform for social interaction. It is my default.

In the future, I hope the benefits of the latest wave of social networks will begin to merge seamlessly with the simplicity, compatibility and utility of email. That includes integrated profiling, information feeds, social-network analysis, privacy and controls. Of course, the big hurdle will be the ongoing fight against spam. Spammers may validate significance, but they’re also preventing email from becoming a truly great social network.

Will any social network ever become more important than email?

Read more here.  Unfortunately I can't really agree and was reminded of a previous post of mine from November, where I agreed with Slate's Chad Lorenz in pronouncing the death of email.  I've reproduced that post below ...

Last week I suggested that social networks were replacing email (see here) - a proposition not everyone agreed with (see here).  Now Slate's Chad Lorenz pronounces (with some sense of loss) the death of email:

Those of us older than 25 can't imagine a life without e-mail. For the Facebook generation, it's hard to imagine a life of only e-mail, much less a life before it. I can still remember the proud moment in 1996 when I sent my first e-mail from the college computer lab. It felt like sending a postcard from the future. I was getting a glimpse of how the Internet would change everything—nothing could be faster and easier than e-mail.

Ten years later, e-mail is looking obsolete. According to a 2005 Pew study, almost half of Web-using teenagers prefer to chat with friends via instant messaging rather than e-mail. Last year, comScore reported that teen e-mail use was down 8 percent, compared with a 6 percent increase in e-mailing for users of all ages. As mobile phones and sites like Twitter and Facebook have become more popular, those old Yahoo! and Hotmail accounts increasingly lie dormant.

How have we reached this point?

...

But transitioning beyond e-mail doesn't have to be as painful as transitioning to it. While its popularity may wane, it's hard to see e-mail vanishing completely—we'll always need some way to send each other long-form messages. Besides, we're already seeing technology that makes it simpler for everyone to communicate across all of these various channels. Gmail elegantly melds IM and e-mail, making it easy to chat with your contacts and file away instant-message conversations alongside your mail. You can now send and receive every kind of message—texts, IMs, e-mails, and Facebook posts—with most new mobile phones. It's not hard to imagine a future communications command center where, on a single screen, you'll be able to choose between sending an e-mail, instant message, status note, or blog post—or sending all of them at once—and then have all those bits of text neatly and securely archived. Once that happens, nostalgic e-mailers like me won't have to feel like dinosaurs.

Read more here.

I certainly find that I prefer social networking or instant messaging for anything personal, but strictly email for work.  Maybe that will change one day, but for the moment I try to keep my email account just for work.  Apart from anything else, this approach helps keep work at work.

 

More spam than legitimate email

Read/WriteWeb breaks the bad news:

Reasearchers at IDC predict that this year the number of spam messages sent will eclipse the amount of legit email correspondence for the first time ever, reports USA Today. Approximately 10.8 trillion spam messages will have crossed through inboxes in the past year, compared to 10.5 trillion legitimate person-to-person email messages. The numbers indicate that spam is a growing problem, despite the promise of better filtering technology.

"Two years from now, spam will be solved," said Bill Gates in 2004 addressing World Economic Forum in Switzerland. But 2007 will go down as the worst year yet for spam, a trend that has held for the past four years, according to Rebecca Steinberg Herson, vice president of marketing at Commtouch, an email security firm.

In an interview last month with USA Today, Gates reminded that though the volume of spam has increased, more of it is being deleted by spam filters. "Sure, there's a lot [of spam] out there, but software is deleting 99.9% of that anyway," he said, though Microsoft has revised that claim to 85% - 95%.

Read more here.

The benefits of IM

Wired reports on some of the benefits of instant messaging:

Sure, instant messaging is fast and efficient. For many teenagers, it's also a great way to avoid those OMG moments - that's "omigod" - of mortifying face-to-face confrontations.

More than four in 10 teens, or 43 percent, who instant message use it for things they wouldn't say in person, according to an Associated Press-AOL poll released Thursday. Twenty-two percent use IMs to ask people out on dates or accept them, and 13 percent use them to break up.

"If they freak out or something, you don't see it," said Cassy Hobert, 17, a high school senior from Frenchburg, Ky., and avid IMer who has used it to arrange dates. "And if I freak out, they don't have to see it."

Overall, nearly half of teens age 13 to 18 said they use instant messaging, those staccato, Internet-borne strings of real-time chatter often coupled with enough frenzied multitasking to fry the typical adult brain. Only about one in five adults said they use IMs - though usually with less technological aplomb or hormone-driven social drama.

Read more here.

"The death of email"

Last week I suggested that social networks were replacing email (see here) - a proposition not everyone agreed with (see here).  Now Slate's Chad Lorenz pronounces (with some sense of loss) the death of email:

Those of us older than 25 can't imagine a life without e-mail. For the Facebook generation, it's hard to imagine a life of only e-mail, much less a life before it. I can still remember the proud moment in 1996 when I sent my first e-mail from the college computer lab. It felt like sending a postcard from the future. I was getting a glimpse of how the Internet would change everything—nothing could be faster and easier than e-mail.

Ten years later, e-mail is looking obsolete. According to a 2005 Pew study, almost half of Web-using teenagers prefer to chat with friends via instant messaging rather than e-mail. Last year, comScore reported that teen e-mail use was down 8 percent, compared with a 6 percent increase in e-mailing for users of all ages. As mobile phones and sites like Twitter and Facebook have become more popular, those old Yahoo! and Hotmail accounts increasingly lie dormant.

How have we reached this point?

...

But transitioning beyond e-mail doesn't have to be as painful as transitioning to it. While its popularity may wane, it's hard to see e-mail vanishing completely—we'll always need some way to send each other long-form messages. Besides, we're already seeing technology that makes it simpler for everyone to communicate across all of these various channels. Gmail elegantly melds IM and e-mail, making it easy to chat with your contacts and file away instant-message conversations alongside your mail. You can now send and receive every kind of message—texts, IMs, e-mails, and Facebook posts—with most new mobile phones. It's not hard to imagine a future communications command center where, on a single screen, you'll be able to choose between sending an e-mail, instant message, status note, or blog post—or sending all of them at once—and then have all those bits of text neatly and securely archived. Once that happens, nostalgic e-mailers like me won't have to feel like dinosaurs.

Read more here.

"Australia's Spam Legislation: A Modern-Day King Canute?"

Mark Bender analyses Australia's spam legislation in this research paper:

Bender, Mark R., "Australia's Spam Legislation: A Modern-Day King Canute?" (September 2006). Monash U. Department of Business Law & Taxation Research Paper No. 2 Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=916724

Abstract: This paper considers a number of aspects of Australia's recently introduced unsolicited commercial email (UCE or spam) legislation, the Spam Act 2003 (Cth). The magnitude and nature of the harm caused by the spam problem is outlined, as are the key provisions of the legislation enacted in an attempt to reduce spam. Observations are made as to some of the perceived shortcomings of the Act, and of lawmakers' approaches in general in trying to legislate against spam. The fundamentals of Australia's legislative approach are contrasted with those of the corresponding US legislation and some key distinctions drawn, notably the Opt-In/Opt-Out dichotomy, Australia having used the former approach, while the US used the latter. Some alternative approaches and suggested enhancements to the Australian legislation are also considered, including proposals by Bill Gates and Lawrence Lessig. Finally there is a summary of and some limited comment on the first case brought under the Australian legislation.

Inbox 2.0

The New York Times blog Bits reports on Inbox 2.0:

Ignore Orkut, OpenSocial, Yahoo Mash and Yahoo 360. Google and Yahoo have come up with new and very similar plans to respond to the challenge from MySpace and Facebook: They hope to turn their e-mail systems and personalized home page services (iGoogle and MyYahoo) into social networks.

Web-based e-mail systems already contain much of what Facebook calls the social graph — the connections between people. That’s why the social networks offer to import the e-mail address books of new users to jump-start their list of friends. Yahoo and Google realize that they have this information and can use it to build their own services that connect people to their contacts.

I don’t have a lot of detail from Google, but I’ve heard  from several executives that this is their plan ...

Brad Garlinghouse, who runs the communication and community products for Yahoo, was a lot more forthcoming. He didn’t-have dates or specific product details either. But he did say that Yahoo was working on what he called “Inbox 2.0.”

...

This approach has a lot of potential and a few pitfalls. To start with, everyone who joins Facebook understands that what they do on the site is about sharing information with friends and sometimes strangers. People who use Yahoo Mail, or just exchange messages with someone using a Yahoo Mail account, have no such expectations. So the company will have to be very careful in how it explains what it is doing and ask for permission in the right places.

“This isn’t a separate product,” Mr. Garlinghouse said.  “This is an integration that has to be seamless to the user.”

What’s more, running social networks is like starting nightclubs. You need music and beer, of course, and some hard-to describe magic that draws people to the club. Yahoo and Google are so big that the most they could aspire to would be to create the online equivalent of a crowded bar at a train station, rather than a club for a particular sort of person.

But since Yahoo and Google already have hundreds of millions of people visiting each month, it may well be that they can get a fair number to stop and chat.

Read more here.  Mashable's Kristen Nicole is also somewhat concerned by the pitfalls of this approach:

Screwing with people’s existing schemas around email will ruffle a lot of feathers, require mind-altering concepts to be introduced, and a lot of people to question the driving motives. Not to mention options for preserving existing methods (to an extent), and permission for changing them in the first place. Would it feel like Yahoo’s spying on me if they know emails from Jenni are more important than that daily horoscope spam? Emails are extremely private sectors of our online life. One of the last spaces we can feel like we have privacy. I’m not entirely sure that Yahoo and Google should mess that up.

Read more here.  Approaching this move from a slightly different perspective, TechCrunch's Michael Arrington goes even further with "Inbox 2.0 Makes Me Sad":

It makes me sad because it is absurd for Yahoo to keep launching new social networking products, almost monthly, without what appears to be any sort of high level strategic vision.

A few months ago it was Mash, followed by a quiet closure of Yahoo 360. Earlier this month they let loose a new college/alumni network experiment called Kickstart.

And now Inbox 2.0, but without any statement about integration with Mash or any other Yahoo properties.

I mean, I follow these products for a living, and I can’t keep their strategies straight. Or even figure out if there is a strategy. If Inbox 2.0 is part of Yahoo’s big vision for the future, then tell us more than the bits about the news feed and profile pages. Tell us how it can change the entire company, as OpenSocial appears poised to do with Google. And if it’s just an experiment, why screw around with one of your biggest assets.

Read more here.

"I just can't be a college student without Facebook"

TechCrunch's Michael Arrington blogs about an email he received  yesterday:

A reader sends a touching email today, complaining that his Facebook account has been deleted for no reason:

Dear Michael,

I’m a college student at University of Michigan and Facebook has deactivated my account. I’ve noticed, from reading your blog, you have connections to Facebook’s staff. Can you please forward this email to someone or do something… I just can’t be a college student without Facebook. I did nothing to have my account deactivated… it just happened late Sunday night. I’ve emailed them, but they don’t care.

Steven
xxxx@umich.edu

I did a quick search for Steven on facebook but search is still down, so I have no idea if this guy’s profile is back up or not. And frankly, I don’t care all that much, ’cause the last thing I want is for everyone with a Facebook customer service issue to start emailing me.

But that sentence in the middle of the email that says “I just can’t be a college student without Facebook” fascinates me. What other brands have this kind of loyalty? Heroin?

Anyway, good luck in your quest to get Facebook to care about you again, Steven. And let me know how it all works out. I sincerely hope that this tragedy does not force you to drop out of college and…shudder…resort to becoming a MySpace user along with the rest of the unwashed masses.

Read more here.  From my perspective, the scary thing is this: I totally get what Steven is saying and why he is so upset.  What does that say about me?

Social networks replacing email

I've thought for some time that social network messaging was replacing personal emails, now there is some data to back that assumption up:

For the first time last month, traffic to social networks overtook traffic to web-based email services in the UK.  Top networks Facebook, Bebo and MySpace took 5.17% of all UK Internet visits, with only 4.98% going to email services including Hotmail, Yahoo Mail and Gmail. 

So what does this mean? It emphasizes the shift in online behavior as it moves from email clients to social networks. Ten years ago, your online activity revolved around your email. It still does now, to a certain extent, but the manner in which go access your email and receive messages from others is evolving.

...

So does this mean that social networks are replacing web-based email clients? Hardly. Email is still an important part of our online activity, no matter which way you get to it. Hitwise is also good to point out the age difference between those using social networks more than email, and it looks to be that the young ones have taken over on this front.

Read more here (from Mashable).

MP3 spam

I was surprised to read on Ars Technica about the rise and rise of MP3 spam:

As anti-spam tools and e-mail users become more sophisticated, spammers are turning to new mediums to get their unwelcome messages through filters and into inboxes. One of the more recent developments is spam with attached MP3 files. One security software vendor, MXSweep, is reporting that MP3 spam now accounts for between 7 and 10 percent of all spam being sent.

Anyway, it doesn't seem like a good idea:

The files are given innocuous-sounding names like elvis.mp3, oursong.mp3, smashingpumpkins.mp3, or coolringtone.mp3. The payload is disappointing: a voice recording touting the virtues of some corporate stock; in other words, it's pump-and-dump stock spam in a new format. It's also a dumb idea. The overlap of those gullible enough to click on MP3 files of unknown provenance and those willing and able to invest in a stock that they've never heard of is certainly minute. It's bound to be more of an annoyance than anything else and seems unlikely to result in the desired stock purchases.

Read more here