Accept no substitutes

Category: #noemail (Page 7 of 10)

Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook Messages as #noemail

In most of this interview with John Battelle and Tim O’Reilly at the Web 2.0 Summit 2010 conference last fall, Mark Zuckerberg talks about replacing email with Facebook Messages — why FB Msgs isn’t email and why email is broken hopelessly — and how the Facebook Social Graph changes everything.

This talk and Sheryl Sandberg’s earlier talk convinced me that Facebook, not Google or Microsoft or Yahoo or others, would be the ones to succeed in creating better data portability, better messaging and activity streams. Interestingly, much of what Zuckerberg talks about concerning user control of data are addressed in Google + Circles, Google Checkout and Google+ itself.

I particularly love the subtitles on this version above. For the full interview, see http://youtu.be/CRUOl03nZIc

@elsua is Living “A World Without Email” … in Google Plus

Luis Suarez has been Living in A World Without Email #lawwe since February 2008 and blogging about his experiences and insights at Elsua.net. His latest entry Living “A World Without Email” … in Google Plus is a great review of Google Plus from the #noemail / #lawwe perspective. Luis also provides an important link to and brief review of Matt Hames’ post Google+ is not taking on Facebook; it is taking on email. Luis isn’t limited to the email challenge by Google+; he’s also interested in how G+ works for building social capital and business.

Plus One

Plus One

2008: IBM Predicts 5 Future Trends That Will Drive Unified Communications

IBM Lotus SametimeLet’s go back in time. Not so far back, but back to 2008. IBM was making big changes in how their company worked and continues to work. These five predictions are credited to Mike Rhodin who was then head of the Lotus division and pushing Sametime and Sametime Advanced as IBM’s unified communications and collaboration platform and services to be used internally and to be offered to other companies. Even or especially keeping that in mind, the recognition of these 5 trends all point in the same directions as the #noemail project as described in the process of writing this blog.

We’re talking about #noemail in the marketplace (as one G+ commentor called his business), in serving customers (one reason that another G+er claimed he could not possibly even think of trying #noemail), and building internal communications (as Luis Suarez at IBM has been practicing and promoting since 2009 or earlier).

Here are the five trends, slightly abridged but described in full in this Fierce Wireless archived press release from 08):

  1. The Virtual Workplace will become the rule. By that IBM means that you’ll be carrying your work everywhere you are. Imagine working in a coffee shop! Or taking calls and IMing during off hours!
  2. Instant Messaging and other real-time collaboration tools will become the norm, bypassing e-mail. IBM wasn’t quite ready with something like Google Plus or even Facebook messages, but they are right about collaboration tools changing the way we communicate and work together.
  3. Beyond Phone Calls to Collaborative Business Processes We’ve seen this too. Most smart phone users I know are using more Smart than Phone. That is to say that the phone part has become more about connectivity than about voice messages. In business this has been true for a while. I confess: before I completely turned off my desk phone, I changed the voice mail to ask people to send me email instead — or finally to find me online
  4. Interoperability and Open Standards will tear down proprietary walls across business and public domains. I like this and hope that it’s true. There is continuing evidence that things are becoming more open. But closed and non-interoperable systems persist. Android is gaining on the iPhone. Google Plus includes a Data Checkout option. But Apple remains mostly closed even as Microsoft is diminished in our communications sphere.
  5. New meeting models will emerge. Here IBM is pushing Virtual Worlds as meeting spaces. For whatever reasons, Second Life and others still seem too soon and too flaky. But Skype, and now Google Plus, have become a regular part of our lives in business and in private or social life.


Read the entire press release here.

The Cost of #noemail

Cost of #noemailToday, I paid the cost for #noemail. The cost was $7.00.

I was cleaning my office and picking up books that I’d checked out of the UNC Library. Among those books was one that was just out and so had some sort of truncated checkout time. Most books are available to faculty for several months. This book was only allowed to be taken out for a few weeks. Oops!

I trucked my books over to the Library. First as a negotiator trained at the Grand Bazaar, I tried to get credit for the books I was returning early to offset the few days that my one special book was overdue. No dice.

Then I was told that my fine was extra. Not because of my negotiation attempts, but because the book had been recalled even before the due date.

The Library robot had sent me email. Err, didn’t the Library robot or her minder get my message that I don’t do email? If they had, then there are many ways to contact me.

— Oh, we’ve set up the messages so that we don’t receive replies. But we do include a link in the message so that you can just click on that link and then we add your message to our database.

Doesn’t adding several links to an automated message pretty much assure that the message gets marked as spam?

— We never thought of that. $7 is the charge.

But is there any way at all that you contact people who choose not to use email? I mean, everyone fills out a lot of contact information and the UNC One Card is tied to the Campus directory. It’s not hard to find ways to contact people other than email. Hey, the robot could call or text just as easily.

— We only do email.

I paid $7. 1/20th the cost of a new Kindle.

Love Changes Over email & #noemail

Love Changes over Email & #noemail

Thanks to Victor of poofytoo.tumblr.com and @acarvin on G+

The tide turned and junk moved online. Talk of email addiction has changed to internet and social network and game and particularly Facebook addiction tracking the trends closely. Addiction? No. Over-fascination? Yes. The mechanics and contents are unchanged but the social and psychological relations between postal mail and email have switched places.

And with that switch, love forever changes.

Arthur Lee and Love – Forever Changes (London 2001)

John Cage Quote That Applies Nicely to #noemail

I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones.
Quoted in Richard Kostelanetz (1988) “Conversing with Cage”

John Cage preparing his piano

John Cage preparing his piano

As you may know, John Cage is famous in part for his pieces that used silence especially in his 4’33” — not playing or performing but listening to what you would have missed had you been listening only to a performance. He seems then the right person to join Marshall McLuhan as a guiding light for the #noemail project.

E-mail as a Source and Symbol of Stress; thus #noemail

What email means is as important as what it does and doesn’t do. That is one of the points of the #noemail project. There are better ways of communication. Those better ways should assist in relieving stress rather than becoming a cultural and individual symbol of overwork and stress.

This paper just out from researchers at Stanford and Boston University does a fine job of quantifying and explaining what email means. May require library access or subscription for access.

I note with some irony that the email addresses of the authors are included in the abstract and in the paper.

Of course, you can “Email This Article to A Friend” or better to an enemy.

ORGANIZATION SCIENCE
Vol. 22, No. 4, July-August 2011, pp. 887-906
DOI: 10.1287/orsc.1100.0573

E-mail as a Source and Symbol of Stress
Stephen R. Barley, Debra E. Meyerson, Stine Grodal

Department of Management Science and Engineering, School of Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305
School of Education, Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305
Department of Strategy and Innovation, School of Management, Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts 02215
sbarley@stanford.edu
debram@stanford.edu
grodal@bu.edu

The increasing volume of e-mail and other technologically enabled communications are widely regarded as a growing source of stress in people’s lives. Yet research also suggests that new media afford people additional flexibility and control by enabling them to communicate from anywhere at any time. Using a combination of quantitative and qualitative data, this paper builds theory that unravels this apparent contradiction. As the literature would predict, we found that the more time people spent handling e-mail, the greater was their sense of being overloaded, and the more e-mail they processed, the greater their perceived ability to cope. Contrary to assumptions of prior studies, we found no evidence that time spent working mediates e-mail-related overload. Instead, e-mail’s material properties entwined with social norms and interpretations in a way that led informants to single out e-mail as a cultural symbol of the overload they experience in their lives. Moreover, by serving as a symbol, e-mail distracted people from recognizing other sources of overload in their work lives. Our study deepens our understanding of the impact of communication technologies on people’s lives and helps untangle those technologies’ seemingly contradictory influences.

OpenSource.com: 8 Weeks With #noemail

Bascha Harris of OpenSource.com and I did an interview using Google Docs checking in after 8 weeks without email. Part of the pleasure of the interview is how nicely interactive Google Docs is and how well that environment works for interviews. The integration with Gtalk, the change tracking, the real time updates, the easy for adding comments and notes make for a painless way of collaborative writing — and a good, I think, interview.

Here it is: Eight weeks of #noemail (and the results are in)

Open Source dot Com

Medium is the Message in the #noemail context

The Medium is the Massage (classic cover)
If you are an engineer and don’t like #noemail and dismiss the change of the context and environment in which a message is transmitted and received — you know who you are the guy who comes up to me and says, “text is text. a message is a message. form and context make not difference.” –, you need to revisit Marshall McLuhan. Or if you have ten minutes, you would profit from listening to Benjamin Walker talk with Douglas Coupland, Eric McLuhan and others.

Especially interesting — to those of us who love the McLuhan books — is the story behind the title of his groundbreaking book, “The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects.”

See also Douglas Coupland’s thoughtful entry on McLuhan as seen today “Why McLuhan’s chilling vision still matters today”

Money quote from McLuhan via Coupland:

“The next medium, whatever it is – it may be the extension of consciousness – will include television as its content, not as its environment. A computer as a research and communication instrument could enhance retrieval, obsolesce mass library organisation, retrieve the individual’s encyclopedic function and flip it into a private line to speedily tailored data of a saleable kind.” McLuhan 1962

Happy 100th Birthday, Marshall McLuhan.

You Know Nothing of My Work (Annie Hall)

My next message will be a singing telegram.

Why Librarians must go #noemail

Hard on the heels of today’s GetSatisfaction post, Daniel Beaver-Seitz alerts me to this graphic based on a week in the life of librarian Janie Hermann from 365 Sketches and revisioned by MastersInEducation.org as part of a larger graphic of a Librarian’s Worth. Working some of the math for you: Janie works 2,785 minutes in this week or 46.4+ hours of which 800 minutes or 28.7+% of her time is spent on email. According the 356Sketches, Janie received 73 (I assume post-spam-filter) emails and sent 182 emails during this week.

A Librarian's Week - via MastersInEducation.org

A Librarian's Week - via MastersInEducation.org

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.”

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