Accept no substitutes

Author: Paul (Page 11 of 146)

GetSatisfaction and Gov 2.0 – #noemail to the rescue

Luke Fretwell of GovFresh.com

Luke Fretwell of GovFresh.com

Here and during interview and on discussion boards, I’ve offered GetSatisfaction and related socially empowered answer sites as better tools for handling customer complaints and suggestions for businesses and even schools. Add to that voting systems like Google Moderator and User Voice (this last being used at UNC – Chapel Hill for feedback on the ERP effort)

Luke Fretwell of govFresh writes a very well-argued piece. “GetSatisfaction: Tips for engaging citizens in gov 2.0” at OpenSource.com doing a great job of expanding that same idea in the context of Gov 2.0.

Luke interviewed GetSatisfaction CEO Wendy Lea a few days ago at govFresh on the same topic. Also a good read.

What’s so great about these systems? #noemail of course. But more the technology does what the users and the providers actually want to see happen in a nice clean way. No convoluted emails or mis-sorted trouble tickets.

Getting started with #noemail

A little of what I learned about #noemail so far.

  • Learn from others. Luis Suarez of In Living A World Without Email was a inspiration and eventually a friend. His posts and his four years at IBM without email helped me think about how to appy his experiences to my own experiment. Donald Knuth is always an inspiration, but his experience of abandoning email entirely was less useful to me. A European group called , “We Quit Email” while pretty quiet since its conception and mostly in Dutch, added an additional perspective.
  • It’s a great idea to start telling folks early about your plans to go #noemail. I started several months in advance talking to my family, my Deans and my colleagues about my plans. I also chatted some about the idea to my current (at the time) students.

    I started with an auto-responder/vacation/away message one month in advance of going #noemail telling folks about my plans and offering many various alternatives — perhaps too many and too various — and offering to accept suggestions of additional alternatives.

  • Some people deserve and should get a more tailored explanation and warning. I specifically contacted the students who has signed up for our fall class — also early on.
  • Make some public announcements via the alternatives. I didn’t make a YouTube video, but I did make early announcements on Twitter, Facebook, Quora, Diaspora, LinkedIn and on this blog. Later on, I did some lengthy interviews with OpenSource.com and with ReeseNews.org.
  • Alternatives can and should be flexible, changeable and even in some cases abandoned. When I started #noemail, Google Plus wasn’t announced. I added that service as an alternative soon after the announcement. I’ll likely drop a few of the alternatives that have yet to be used by anyone to contact me
  • Do monitor the alternatives that you’ve suggested heavily at least for the first few weeks. People need to know that you are serious about the alternatives; not just abandoning all communication with them.
  • Browers tabs are your friend. I created one browser instance, in my case Chrome, with a tab for each of the alternatives that I had suggested in my Away message. I kept the browser minimized for most of the day to reduce my distractions.
  • I looked for some good alternatives for Listserv reading and rediscovered RSS. Most Listservs support reading by RSS feeds which are much better organized and much better for reading than having a ton of messages dumped into my inbox — even with filters and folders and the like. Unfortunately Mailman, a favorite Open Source listserving option, doesn’t support RSS in any easy way. Lyris, currently used by UNC, does but not in a very easy to understand way (I blogged about how to get that to work below).

    Some lists are archived on blogs or other sites that have their own RSS feeds.

  • Trouble tickets and customer services are better dealt with by online forms or services like GetSatisfaction. I plan to do a blog post on this in the future. We’ve not used email for trouble tickets at ibiblio for several years nor do many others. Spam is only part of the problem. Applying some structure to trouble tickets helps them be solved more quickly and effectively. Solving the problems openly ala GetSatisfaction increases satisfaction.
  • Use OpenID, GoogleID, Facebook and/or Twitter to join new sites. Email is often required to join a site, make an order etc, but these alternatives are offered by most that I’ve dealt with since going #noemail and they work great. They certainly reduced my cognitive load for handling ids and passwords. Confirmations and resulting announcements from sites really fill up my inbox even though I work hard to turn off those options and/or opt out, like zombies they keep coming. #noemail fixes that problem nicely.
  • Phones are fine. So is Face-to-Face. Some people, particularly those who have a serious and real difficulty, really need to have a meeting over coffee, in the office or at least a phone call. Our email instinct is often to try to hash things out in asynchronous messages. IMs and/or video conferences are better than email, but when folks are anxious or passionate or aggrieved the more open, personal and interactive you can be the better.

    Keep in mind that most studies show that casual calls, sales offers and chitchat while important are bigger timesinks than even email.

  • The most resistant demographic to #noemail are those people between 50 and 65 years old. Not everyone between 50 and 65, but you’ll find many of them. They may need other alternatives — see phone and Face-to-Face.
  • The most vocally resisting group are, unsurprisingly, those who make a living directly or indirectly via email. Those who run a business dealing with mailing management, advising folks about email newsletters, managing contacts, managing email services, and certain systems administrators who are responsible for email and messaging. I’m in sympathy with many of these folks as I’d been the postmaster for UNC for many years (see posts below). But spurious claims about the superior security and control offered email undercut their objections drastically. The argument isn’t really about technology, but about emotion. As Upton Sinclair once observed, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

Email is dead, many say #noemail

[ email is dead ]

Thanks to Andy Ihnatko and Leo Laporte for the mention of #noemail and of me on MacBreak Weekly this past week (about 1:58 into the show).

Just for fun, I did the Google search that I should have done weeks ago just after the show looking for email is dead and “email is dead”. Several million stories, opinion pieces, articles full of dread and/or wishful thinking fill the results.

One thing we all pretty much agree on — okay, I admit I only read over about 20 or so of the articles — is that email is threatened or communications are done better by IM, restricted messaging systems ala Facebook, and now by Google+. Whether email is threatened, changing or will still be here in a much diminished role are mostly arguments of hope (if you are frustrated by email), fear (if you feel your company depends on email especially) or tied to a variation of definitions of what email is (the “message is a message” school of social communications ignorance).

The bottom line is that email as we knew it in the late 1980s and early 1990s is already out the door. Soon email or whatever gets called email will be unrecognizable to the folks like David Crocker who wrote the original RFCs (RFC822 and associated papers) for the Internet Engineering Task Force.

But email won’t die just because of technical considerations. The death or over-extended life of email will depend on an interaction of four forces – technical, psychological, social and political — as described in this earlier post.

As the photo above shows the social normalization of #noemail is and has been underway for a while. There will be no turning back. There are better days and better communications options ahead — and many here right now!

IBM Social Business predicts #noemail, salutes Luis Suarez

A Smarter Planet: Social BusinessIBM’s A Smarter Planet just published a section on Social Business including sets of white papers, videos, studies, surveys and other helpful material.

From the Overview with emphasis added:

Now social networking services are on track to replace email as the primary communications method for many business users in the next few years. It’s a concept IBM social computing evangelist Luis Suarez (who describes his experience in a 2008 article for the New York Times at this link – PJ) has advocated for several years. But this new paradigm impacts more than the inbox. As each company looks to incorporate social networking technologies, it is, in fact, becoming what IBM calls a Social Business.

This approach shifts the focus from static content and other temporary artifacts to the source of the energy, creativity, and decision making that moves the business forward: people. As a result, people not only find what they need, but also discover valuable expertise and information they weren’t even looking for that might solve a problem in a new way.

UNC’s email explosion – 1994 #noemail

tUNC Email Explosion 1994

From the archives of Speed Hallman. The same day a story ran in the Daily Tar Heel about a new course in “Cyberpublishing and Cybercasting”, this chart ran as part of a story on UNC’s email explosion. It shows that the semester was beginning with a giant increase in Internet/email ids — by 1,900 raising the total UNC email space to over 14,000. Note that email and Internet confused even then.

I wonder if UNC’s ending of just over a decade of BITNET involvement was part of the cause of the increase and of the confusion. Note: UNC ceased BITNET membership on August 9, 1993 according to the Timeline of UNC Chapel Hill Computing History.

Leaving the more limited BITNET email for the more sophisticated Internet email, which had existed side-by-side with BITNET mail, was UNC’s first #noemail move.

[graph source: Daily Tar Heel, November 2, 1994]

Four factors for Tech in an #noemail context

People have suggested many reasons why one should or should not use email or #noemail. Like most technology, there are four factors interacting that cannot be isolated from each other but that can really make the choices difficult or simple.

Briefly:

Many of my IT pals would like to fix email through some technical changes (they see these are improvements) aimed at changing misuses of email — shortmail and sentenc.es and even Gmail are promising examples of technology modifications for email. They say mail filters are the answer. etc.

Some people just love email. It means something deep to them. Others just don’t like change. They have something that they are very comfortable with and won’t want to learn anything else. One friend said: I still love Pine — for example. It works the other way too: “Paul is always just trying something new and shiny.”

Where my friends, business, etc are is where I want to be. The social is very strong. Not just about being social but how our social circles define themselves. Examples: I won’t have a Blackberry because that’s for suits. I’m in open source so I need an Android phone. My band and my fans are all still on MySpace; we’ll never leave. Only dorks use [whatever]. All the cool kids are on Google +.

Politics and law are also exert a very strong influence on how tools are used and preceived as in: My boss insists that we all use [whatever system]. We can’t use Facebook at work; the IT folks blocked it because of company policy. HIPPA requires that we keep records this way. Isn’t there a state law about that? I travel to Iran and that software won’t work there.

I summarize:

  1. Technological – the tool part of being a tool including function and interface
  2. Psychological – your attitude, perceptions and use needs etc. you are part of the tool and it’s part of you
  3. Social – how your friends, colleagues, etc see and use the tool in a social and cultural context.
  4. Political – you must or must not use this tool or you may only use this tool for [whatever]

Most futile #noemail article that I’ve read so far

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.

Mashable but broken heart

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?

Red Sky Vision explains #noemail for Biz

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.”

#noemail on WRAL, G+ as email killer, email dead by 2018

Brian 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.”

Looking back on #noemail at 6 weeks

MG Siegler of TechCrunch, who has also given up email, writes and opines about Gmail’s crowdsourced plea to help make keep email relevant by creating Gmail+ in Google Already At Work On “Several” Gmail/Google+ Integrations.

Google+ is not quite two weeks old. I quit doing email just about six weeks ago. I did give a one month warning back on May 1 (and on this blog on May 3).

I’ll admit that giving up email seemed radical, like putting myself at risk of some kind. But I know enough about myself that if I don’t take myself out of my comfort areas, I don’t learn very much and more importantly I don’t see the things that suddenly become obvious. I had spent too much of my life convincing people that email could improve their lives — and relative to phone calls, memos and the like, email has improved our communications environment.

But more and more the juryrigged nature of email showed it cracking up and not just at the edges. Improvements in collaboration technologies for scheduling meetings (shared calendars and Doodle), for coauthoring documents (Gdocs, MindTouch, various wikis, and even Sharepoint), for sharing pictures and videos (Picasa, Flickr, Facebook, YouTube, Vimeo, etc), for transferring files and doing backups (Dropbox, Box.com, etc), for managing the sharing of casual information in social networks (various activity streams) including location (4Square and various check-in providing relatives) left email in the dust. Even trouble ticket reporting via email is dead, replaced by services like GetSatisfaction.

Attempts to curb email abuse by social contract (like Chris Anderson’s Email Charter) or by technology (like the currently hot ShortMail) are mere patchwork and are doomed from the start.

It’s not just that email is time sink. It’s no that over half of the email any of us receive is spam. Filters or no. It’s not that I can’t create a filter for every site that wants to confirm who I am. It’s not that listservs get too busy — but I may need to read them sooner of later — and that RSS could bail me out of a lot of that problem.

It’s that our world of communications interactions has gotten very rich, very sophisticated, very active and very faceted. Email can’t keep up and we can’t keep up with email. As Michael Tiemann observed: email as a “enterprise service bus” that connects many applications via a common messaging format into a central processing unit. That CPU is YOU and was ME.

Technical developments like JSON and HTML5 have provided the technology underpinnings to help us restructure our approaches to activity streams and communications options in ways that allow us to be social and somewhat private as we desire.

I’m not the only one thinking this. Last summer, Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg described some of the same problems and offered some of the solutions that we are beginning to see coming at us.

Sandberg noted, I have here, and Pew Internet studies report that under 25s have already given up on email. In fact, the email sticky demographic is pretty narrow. From my sample, completely observational, since May, that demographic is largely those 50 – 65 and systems administrators in institutions (as opposed to enterprises). The same demographic, at least the age one, resist online social networking according to another Pew Internet study.

My sysadmin/poweruser friends like to tell me on one hand that email is secure and on the other that no one can own their email. These are contradictory claims that don’t click. The more hands an email passes through on it’s way to you, the less secure. The only way to deal with a broad set of communications agents is to send very open messaging protocols across many different environments, few of which you or even people you trust control. Email is about as secure as a post card left at Starbuck’s by the sugar.

Things that are thankfully not email have taken on emailish names but they are no more email that a locomotive is an iron horse (or more recently a Harley) or a car, a horseless carriage. And we are all better for that too.

Horses, mainframes, and very tall hats all have their times of glory. No more. I see the same for email as you now know it. It’s already at the edge of the dustbin of history; soon it will be like photo magazines and radio theatre — seen as a curiosity or in revivals.

Yes #noemail is possible even practical. As Luis Suarez (four years without email at IBM) reminds me living in a world without email #lawwe can be done and can be fun.

One note to help bring insome other posts here in the #noemail category: Google Plus has begun to address many of the problems that I’ve been describing here. Hence a lot of posts here as Google Plus emerges and changes and as we all come to an understanding of how to help form its future. I fully expect that something more awesome than a simple partnership with Skype will be coming from Facebook soon. And I can’t believe that there will be only two players, Google and Facebook, fighting this out.

#noemail in light of Google+

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.

Horses in a Time of Cars; Email in a Time of #noemail

I’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:

Paul Jones, a UNC journalism professor, says that although many university departments use social media, they do not put a lot of energy into having interactions with their audiences.
“The real question about whether it’s social or not is whether there’s any interaction that happens, either with them or as a result of what you put out,” Jones says.
For Jones, who wrote the code for UNC’s email service [more correctly good parts of good parts of some email services – pj], social media is the next step in the evolution of communication.
“I think university email has been obsolete,” he says. Jones no longer communicates via email. Send him an email, and an automatic reply will point you to 14 different social media sites as ways to get in touch with him.
“Tech has moved on,” he says. “It’s like horses — this is a world better built for cars. This is a world that works much better for other varieties of social interaction.”

Joy of HangOut & #noemail on TV & Google+Facebook+Twitter

Middle thing first, my colleague Barbara Wildemuth and myself spoke separately to WRAL-TV’s Brian Schrader aka @wraltraffic for a story about #noemail. Barbara only likes to use email and then only from her office and only during work hours. She has strong self-discipline and no smart phone. Me? Always with the iPhone. My self-discipline? Not so much.

Brian and his pal shot the footage on June 30 with Google + only a few hours old. So a lot has changed in the #noemail space since then — Facebook’s *awesome* announcement (see below) and my own better understanding of Google + for starters.

Speaking of those changes in the #noemail space. Google+ Hangouts are wonderful. I’ve had several very good experiences with Hangouts and several abortive attempts at Facebook+Skype. Hangouts most always work seamlessly.

In one three-way video chat, Howard Rheingold was sitting in his garden in Mill Valley, CA, Dan Gillmor was riding down the New York Expressway online from his G3 phone tethered to his laptop and I was here in my office in Chapel Hill. We did experience some stalls and stutters from Dan’s stream, but overall the quality of the video and of the content was excellent.

Twice, I’ve been disappointed by Facebook Video. Lilyn Hester and I had absolutely no problem doing a HangOut, sharing video from YouTube, etc. But when we tried Facebook Video Chat each of our sessions dropped the camera of the other causing us to restart the sessions and get mostly nowhere.

In another session with someone else, the Facebook+Skype software was tossed in her anti-virus sandbox. Confusion ensued. This was with a very experienced native app Skype user.

HangOut also allowed me to meet with Luis Suarez aka @elsua who has the #noemail lead with nearly four years of ignoring email and using social media instead. Luis’ Living in a World Without Email project #lwwe has been an inspiration and a guide to me. Luis was in Spain and I sadly still here in Chapel Hill.

Google+Facebook+Twitter

I was able to alert Luis to two sick, in a cool way, browser extensions for Google +, Google+Facebook and Google+ Tweet. As you might guess from the names, each adds the activity stream from the respective service as a tab on your G+ tool bar (across the top). You could do something similar with browser tabs, but it’s nice to have everything right there in a single window.

Christy Schoon of Newsgator describes how that company celebrates #NoEmail on #SocialFridays in her Driving Adoption for Social Computing Technology: Kill Your Email. There’s a PR tone to the article but it contains several helpful hints on how a company can encourage the use of social media across the enterprise. As @elsua and I said laughingly during our Hangout, #SocialFridays are the gateway to #noemail and the gateway out of Email Hell.

Another #noemail recruit & 7 Days in email Hell

Evil Email from civin.org

TechCrunch‘s MG Siegler has been very open about his distaste/hatred of email in the past few weeks. Now he’s pulling out entirely as he announced on Twitter and in an article, “I’m Quitting Email” last night. He’s only signing off for the rest of July. But if we encourage him maybe he’ll be challenging Luis Suarez’s three years Living in a World Without Email (#lwwe) and counting.

In the meantime, IT World‘s Dan Tynan decided to answer every email in his inbox for a week and ended up in Seven Days In Email Hell!

I find Dan the more daring of the two. Yikes! I’d be replying to 150+ emails a day plus an equal amount of spam if I tried that — even after getting off of a bunch of mailing lists (thanks RSS) and the folks who read and followed the suggestions in my away message.

Google+ and writing about #noemail have probably taken up a lot of the time that I’ve reclaimed by doing #noemail — I say that as a joke but with some truth. I still need Freedom to get things done, but not as often.

Facebook Video Chat vs Google + HangOut #noemail

For several years, I’ve been claiming that the creation of vernacular videos for conversation and small audience sharing would become an important part of our lives. The playful use of video on YouTube and in increasing integration of video options into chat or personal communications exchanges are just two signs of this wave and change.

This week, we’ve seen the most ambitious bets placed on video communications in quite a while. First, Google Plus’ HangOut and today Facebook+Skype’s Video Calling. The two services are decidedly not equal. HangOut is more full featured while Facebook Video Chat has dropped many of the nice to have Skype features.

Feature Google + Skype (native) Facebook+Skype
Max. number of participants up to 10 pay for up to 10 one on one only
Sharing other feeds YouTube videos Screens, Documents etc nothing
Phone sharing Android devices now; iPhone app in process most smartphones not that I can see
IMishness while on video Gtalk yes in client Facebook Chat
Offer to connect* Active + Passive Active (call) + Passive (Skype Me) Active (message)
Architecture Hub and Spoke Point to point or Originator as hub Unclear at present
platforms Windows XP+, Mac OS X 10.5+, or Linux same 3 Ubuntu folks are complaining

*By “Passive”, I mean that you can declare a HangOut to any Circle of friends who can join in as they choose by clicking a button on their activity stream. By “Active”, I mean you call, message, or send an alert to someone in particular asking them to join you. I didn’t imagine that One On One would often be “Passive” but then I realized that “Skype Me” as a status might be considered a “Passive” invite.

TWiG from TWiT on G+ #noemail

Leo Laporte of This Week in Tech hosts a This Week in Google on G+ with Google VP Bradley Horowitz, Vic Gundotra, Matt Cutts and other Googlers explaining the inside of the Google Plus development and decisions.

A great show that needs no comments (from me). But I can’t hold back saying that there are some very insightful remarks on video conferencing from Vic Gundotra and Bradley Horowitz. And they reveal that Sparks is just a placeholder from which other services will be added.

G+ Would you use it for #noemail ?

I’ve now had G+ for about 24 hours. I can’t say that I have a unified impression quite yet. Like many new G+ers, I’ve been exploring and tweeting about my impressions as I read others tweeting and opining in every major publication and online site.

Some like Fred Stutzman and Farad Manjoo wonder what need G+ fulfills that isn’t already done pretty well but some other site (read Facebook). While I respect Fred and Farad, I know that same question was asked about Friendster (another dating site), Orkut (all the cool kids are running here — then they all ran away), MySpace (which sold for fractions of a penny on the dollars last paid just as G+ was opening up), and even Facebook.

But then I’m not as euphoric as say Tim Wu, who I also respect, who tweets “Using Google+ is like going to heaven and watching your friends slowly appear one by one.” There is fun to reconnecting once again and G+ does make discovery fun and easy. Dan Gillmor wryly observes “I imagine there are some interesting meetings going on at Facebook this week…” Dan expands on his impressions at the Guardian in “A B+ for the beta Google+” where he is a bit more nuanced but still well pleased with G+.

My instinct is to reserve judgement on G+ but to look a little at the features and interface and interactions without worrying too much if G+ will be like one of those never populated Chinese housing projects.

Jacob Kramer-Duffield offers a look at G+ under a microscope that reviews and weighs in on much and the plus and minus of G+ in a very smart way.

First big win is HangOuts. If I had just overpaid for Skype, I’d be worried. I’d start the therapy sessions now. I’d be framing my successes to explain to my investors why I shouldn’t be sent out to pasture. If I had just sold Skype (again), I’d be breaking out the bubbly. I’d be saying “Whew! Just missed that bullet.” Hangout after just a few brief uses is so far superior to Skype that they look and feel decades apart. The multi-site conferencing and YouTube integration are both great wins for G+.

Circles – Wow! This really makes setting up groups simple and fun and easy to understand. Contrast that to Facebook’s attempts at groups. As much as we all said we wanted groups, we hardly used them. Too many friends already to sort, too complicated of interface, general clunkiness. G+ bests Facebook in every way. It helps that you are building groups, Circles, as you add friends so there’s no catchup time involved.

Circles not only makes building and managing groups easy and thanks to HTML5 beautiful and highly interactive, but they/it also make viewing activity streams in different context and controlling over-sharing. Both quite nicely done and strongly aligned with the easy to read and understand G+ privacy policies.

Despite the few clumsily presented privacy and notification, G+ is so far ahead of previous Google offerings — Buzz and Wave — and Facebook that I have to praise G+ for dealing with some tough problems smartly. I do wish that the default for notifications wasn’t email for almost everything! One of my first acts was to chase down the Notifications options and turn them all OFF. (To turn OFF notifications. Got to your name in the upper right. then to Account Settings. Then select Google+ Then turn ’em OFF). Google has already fixed the one privacy issue that was raised today within a few hours. Nice work. Compare to say Microsoft or Facebook.

Mobile is very nice. I can’t for the life of me figure out why the Facebook app on the iPhone sucks so bad. As moblie is the obvious direction for communications in general and for social networking in particular. Even as I was comparing the G+ Web app to the native Facebook app, the Facebook app blew up. A regular annoyance. On the other hand, the G+ Web app looks nice and thanks to HTML5 (I’m guessing) works smoothly and simply. I can only imagine how cool the native Android app will be.

I don’t get Sparks. It looks like Google Alerts with some sharing added. Why? Is it a stand in for Favorites? Is it cool engineering that I don’t yet understand? To side with Farad and Fred, what problem does Sparks solve? If you have ideas, let me know.

Overall, G+ is a giant step in the direction of an integrated activity stream that I’ve been seeking to help me with #noemail.

Two additions –

G+ doesn’t play as well with Facebook or Twitter as I would like, but luckily there’s “Extended Share for Google Plus” a great extension that works wonderfully. +1 for that.

As I was writing this, Google also rolled out a nice new look and some improvements for Google Calendar. They’ve been busy at the Googleplex and with good results.

Extra: Mark Zuckerberg hints that the “awesome announcement” scheduled for Wednesday July 6 at 10 a.m. PDT (1 p.m. EDT) at Facebook’s Palo Alto headquarters will be about in Face video conferencing from Skype and Facebook. Others say it’s an iPad app.

TED’s Chris Anderson presents his Email Charter #noemail

TED organizer and all-round smart guy, Chris Anderson, has refined his proposed Email Charter to 10 important points and put the final product online here. It has a sort of Cluetrain Manifesto feel to it and I mean that in a good way.

Briefly the rules are:

1. Respect Recipients’ Time
2. Short or Slow is not Rude
3. Celebrate Clarity
4. Quash Open-Ended Questions
5. Slash Surplus cc’s
6. Tighten the Thread
7. Attack Attachments
8. Give these Gifts: EOM NNTR (end of message. no need to respond)
9. Cut Contentless Responses
10. Disconnect!

All good and all I agree with especially “We’re drowning in email. And the many hours we spend on it are generating ever more work for our friends and colleagues” and with the Problem Statement, but even better is #noemail at all!

Do visit and read the Email Charter.

Google+ vs Facebook

The Google+ Project

Like many of you today, I was intrigued by the announcement of Google Plus which was touted in the New York Times today (online but tomorrow in print) as “Google Introduces Facebook Competitor, Emphasizing Privacy”. The headline writer wasn’t exactly in tune with the reporter who doesn’t talk about privacy as much as sharing among smaller groups and a design that helps prevent over-sharing. Add to that a strong focus on mobile — one place where Facebook is very weak (Facebook just blew up again on my iPhone a few seconds before I wrote this).

True there is privacy baked into the design. A visit to the mobile Help for Plus.Google.com shows a long section on privacy including a mostly readable Google+ Privacy policy.

So yes there is a serious concern about privacy at two levels. You can manage privacy more readily — in part because of Circles and the other design features that encourage smaller groups and so prevent over-sharing. And the Google+ Policy, which describes your relationship to Google and to third parties, picks up on many of the aspects of privacy policies that Facebook got wrong over and over getting the policy mostly right.

One of the problems about writing about Google+ is that you can’t use it — yet. Google+ is getting a GMail-style rollout using the now famous Google snowball invite system. You have to know someone who is already using Google+ to get an invite, then you will get invites to issue to others.

Right now, when you go to Plus.Google.com you’ll most likely get this:

Google+ is in limited Field Trial
Right now, we’re testing with a small number of people, but it won’t be long before the Google+ project is ready for everyone. Leave us your email address and we’ll make sure you’re the first to know when we’re ready to invite more people.
Already invited? We’ve temporarily exceeded our capacity. Please try again soon.

So you might not be able to try out Google+ itself, you can use the snazzy demo that steps you through the five advertised features:

Circles – easily managed small groups done with groovy drag and drop interface

Hang-outs – small group live video interactions (almost FaceTime or better)

Photo Upload/Sharing – Instant upload to a private folder which can be sorted and shared later

Sparks – search + alerts aimed at purchasing stuff

Huddle – simple group texting environment that’s managed by Circles

One thing I noticed right away; there is #noemail integration in Google+ so far.

Fred Stutzman notes on Twitter that “Circles is that Google learned from Goffman”. A nod to Irving Goffman and his studies including Presentation of Self in Everyday Life..

Jacob Kramer-Duffield has a nice quick take on Google+ (with a reference to entries on this blog about #noemail and small talk).

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