Accept no substitutes

Category: #noemail (Page 8 of 10)

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).

#noemail noted by friends

Michael Czeiszperger, posting on Facebook, directs us all to Weird Al Yankovich’s new “Stop Forwarding That Crap To Me” (iTunes Store link) which he suggests as the theme song to #noemail. It does address the spam and friends who send spam and well meaning people who share crap through email, but #noemail is bigger than that. Here’s one video of the song:

“Weird Al” Yankovic – Stop Forwarding That Crap To Me from Fube on Vimeo.

Mark Turner stirs up some tech.wasps with a post on his blog Mark Turner dot Net about “Paul Jones’s #noemail experience”. The comments are not quite a retread of those on Open Source.com although at least one of the commenters is the same.

Josh Lockhart makes changes in the way his business, RapidWeaver, deals with customers by changing from email help to a much more effective trouble ticket tracking system inspired, he says by #noemail. Read about that here on his blog.

Thanks, guys. I’ve taken today off for some dental surgery and I’m delighted that you provided some great #noemail content and links and love for today’s post.

Kids today do #noemail & a little Moral Panic ensues

Generation FBIn case you needed another tale or set of tales to illuminate the data from various Pew studies on youth usage of email verses their use of other alternatives, Katrin Bennhold writes of her experience with a teen at Davos and various teens from her old high school, the Ratsgymnasium in Osnabrück, Germany,in “Generation FB” published both in the New York Times and in the International Herald Tribune on June 23.

Bennhold finds that even cool teachers are out of touch, kids are facile in when they cheat, teen girls can be mean girls, kids work hard on their presentations of self, teachers complain that students don’t listen and can’t sit still, and kids complain that teachers are boring and don’t make their subject relevant. In other words (in Bennhold’s words):

At my old school I was struck by how much teenagers have changed. But I was also struck by how little the school had changed, and I don’t think it’s an exception. Teachers are right to fret about attention deficits and lazy thinking. But no fundamental rethink seems to have occurred about how teaching and learning should take place in the age of social networking.

“The problem is with adults,” says Leo.“If they say we’re becoming more stupid, it’s perhaps because we’re in a school system they invented.

In the meantime, Emily Bazelon writing in the New York Times Magazine warns us not of the Nanny State but the “Ninny State.” The Ninny State, says Bazelon is seized by “juvenoia” a specific kind of Moral Panic caused by an “exaggerated fear about the influence of social change on children.” (quoted texts from David Finkelhor who has changed his position from his 1988 stance). Bazelon likens the various instances of panics about sexting, abduction, and violent video games to the comic book panic of the late 1940s and early 50s.

Okay Bazelon’s article isn’t so much about email or #noemail as it is about our reactions to our technologies and our kids. It’s a good companion piece to Bennhold’s article describing the over-reactions to change that the teachers at the Ratsgymnasium are expressing.

[Is it just me or does the name Ratsgymnasium immediately bring hamster wheels to mind?]

Facebookers more social than vain #noemail

While the first stage of Facebook use may be mostly about managing personal identity and presentation of self, there seems to be a more mature stage during which self matters much less than social. The latest Pew Internet report reveals that Facebookers are slack on updating their own status, but pretty busy Liking and commenting on others’ posts, statuses and photographs.

Answering the question, What do Facebook User Do? Keith Hampton, Lauren Sessions Goulet, Lee Rainie, and Kristen Purcell show that current Facebookers are social groomers more that peacocks. Harkening back to Brett Bumgarner’s 2007 study of emerging adults and their uses of Facebook, You’ve Been Poked (First Monday), we’re reminded that social networking sites are used for social engagement and in specific in maintaining ties rather than hooking up or profiling and preening — not that those other activities don’t go on, just those activities are minor compared to social grooming (see box below)

On an average day:

15% of Facebook users update their own status.
22% comment on another’s post or status.
20% comment on another user’s photos.
26% “Like” another user’s content.
10% send another user a private message

Of course many of us use Facebook’s News Feed as our activity stream routing Twitter, Quora, and other social activities into the Facebook News Feed stream rather than update our statuses. Once Twitter entries did become the status, but no longer.

No surprise, under 22’s update their statuses more often than any other age demographic; over 50s the least.

Frequency of Facebook Status Updates by Age

How developers get social with #noemail

Developers, sysadmins, coders and other members of my Geek tribe, especially open source coding geeks, get their social interactions in the process of writing code and sharing in that environment where they are much less private than in their personal lives. “Here’s my code. Judge me on that. I’ll keep my birthdate to myself.” Nothing wrong with that.

We’re all, or have been in my case, on some IRC channel, in some chatroom, using github or sourceforge or launchpad as our places for social connections and fulfillment. But more often than not, we don’t recognize that those places are our own kind of Facebook, Twitter or other services that many Geeks avoid, disparage, or completely ignore.

It seems so obvious when I say this, but you wouldn’t believe how many conversations start: “I hate email too. I only use it to communicate with [my clients, my boss, my salesforce]. But I don’t need that kind of idle talk that they have on [Facebook, Twitter, Quora, Hunch, LinkedIn, etc]. Who has time to be social?”

Then a conversation will drift to say, where to go for lunch. I get: “Jim says this new place is great! Let’s try it.” “Isn’t Jim in San Jose?” “Yeah, but when he was here last he liked this one. We were just talking about that this morning while we worked on Project X.”

My point here is that small talk, important small talk, is going on in a lot of different environments. It’s as common as breathing. So common that like breathing, we don’t pay serious attention to it until there’s some serious problem. But that common talk enriches our lives and deepens our engagement with our co-workers and the world.

Consequential Strangers

Consequential Strangers

Melinda Blau and Karen Fingerman devote an entire rich book on our casual almost invisible relationships — with our bus driver, barrista, the wait at our favorite restaurant, etc. Her Consequential Strangers could easily be extended to the shifting teams of problem solvers and co-workers that we geeks interact with on a daily and nightly basis.

We, on IRC, are as social as our mothers are as they play Farmville on Facebook. We’re playing a slightly different game — and in general, we’re better paid for it. We’re social but in a more hidden way. So hidden we often don’t see that ourselves.

Just to end on a #noemail note. Have you ever send email to a developer, sysadmin, coder? Did they respond? Usually we don’t. We let it sit there aging like fine wine to be appreciated later. Maybe your problem will fix itself. Maybe you’ll ask someone nearby. Maybe you’ll take some initiative and fix it yourself. You didn’t want to talk to the Sysadmin from Hell (BOFH) anyway. We’ve always practiced #noemail but in a passive aggressive way — accent on aggressive.

[group hug]

My #noemail exception

Three weeks into #noemail and overall I’m on point and still alive and still in touch with most folks and organizations that want to be in touch with me for good reasons. I see that I still get about 120 emails per day that aren’t flagged as spam by Gmail. Of those, about 1/10th are flagged as Priority by Gmail — and for the most part Gmail is correct if overly so. None of the non-Priority really required my attention at all. Most were listservs that I had forgotten about, notifications that I haven’t yet turned off, random group emails, “special” offers and invitations, and notification that one of my neighbor’s email accounts had been hacked claiming that her purse was stolen in London (I got the phishing mail as well).

I have no problem getting my “important” School emails via RSS (see articles below) which I’ve been delighted to rediscover as part of the #noemail exercise. RSS is a much better way to deal with the general interest announcements that make our faculty into a community — and I’m not a sorting machine for email.

So far so good. Much of my Priority mail is bounced versions of my Away message; I need to train Gmail on that I guess.

Serbian Family Across from the Petrovaradin fortress

Serbian Family Across from the Petrovaradin fortress


But the complication is that our son, who was scheduled to enter college at Princeton in the fall, has decided instead to go to southeastern Europe and live with the Serbs and Roma. I would be in shock except that this means that has was accepted into the Princeton Bridge Year Program. He’ll be one of five incoming first years who will put off their initial year of school to do a year of service in Serbia.

I’m delighted of course and proud and all the other emotions that you might expect me to be feeling. But Princeton isn’t all that hep on #noemail or even the milder #pleasedontsendattachments. I could pass all this on to my wife, as Wendell Berry does for his typing etc or as Donald Knuth does to his secretary, but that’s not fair to her and I want to be involved as far as I’m allowed — Princeton emails are full of warnings that your child needs to be responsible and that you shouldn’t be flying over to check him/her out etc. All helicopter parents are grounded.

So far the next several weeks, I’ll be reading email from Princeton. Nowhere else. That’s it.

Before it all went wrong – Did Errol Morris’ brother invent email? #noemail

Film maker Errol Morris discovers that his brother Noel may have been, along with Tom Van Vleck, one of the first implementers of a mail command in 1965.

Among the many nice touches associated with the article is an interactive feature that allows you to send mail as if you were using the MIT CTSS system from a Selectric Typewriter terminal and even do a little programming.

Morris promises that this article will be the first of a five part series. I’m looking forward to see what more he and Tom Van Vleck have to say.

The proposal for the mail command (see below) is particularly interesting in that it states a couple of uses for email. First, the system could automatically “notify a user that some of his files had been backed-up.” And second, that email could be used “for users to send authors any criticisms.” No other uses are mentioned.

One feature that has just reappeared as Google Priority Mail is URGENT MAIL. Mail from the system to “the user will always be placed in a file called URGENT MAIL.” The MAIL ME command which presents the user with the contents of her inbox “will always print the URGENT MAIL before [the more pedestrian mail file] MAIL BOX.”

There at the very beginning, email was already a box clogger, already a place where priorities needed to be established automagically for the user, and already with some guiding suggestions about use that would quickly be ignored.

mail command help

Talking bout my social networking site resisting generation – #noemail

American LinkedIn (786) and Twitter (838) members have significantly larger networks than even Facebook (648) users, according to the latest Pew Internet study from Keith Hampton, Lauren Sessions Goulet, Lee Rainie, Kristen Purcell.

One possible explanation for the very large number of connections held by Twitter users — the demographics tend toward much more female and more educated than other Social Networking Sites. Education is by far the biggest influence on network size; “those with a 4-year university degree average 12% more close ties than those with only a high school diploma.” While female tend to have slightly smaller networks, their connections are closer especially in the number of core confidants, those with whom you would share sensitive information and call on for close support.

Speaking of core confidants, one interesting chart from the study (included below) shows that overall 40% of Americans are connected on some SNS with ALL of their core confidants.

In 2008, it was primarily SNS users under the age of 23 who friended their closest social ties. In 2010, with the exception of those who are 50-65, 40% or more of social networking site users in all other age groups – including those over the age of 65 –have friended all of their core discussion confidants.

Interestingly, the age demographic for lowest SNS core confidant connects is exactly the age, 50 – 65, from which I hear the strongest objection to #noemail.

There is something particular and peculiar about that age group — not only because I’m in there. This seems to me to be a group that has settled on a key technology, email, and is pretty happy with what it does. While I have a personal dissatisfaction with email, I can see my age cohort’s point. Many of us went through some rapid changes in communications technologies and successfully integrated email into our professional and social lives. Social networking software has come toward the end of our careers. It started with our children and younger colleagues and worked it’s way up to our awareness. We generally have our connections pretty well set. We aren’t just out of high school nor are we reconnecting (yet) at the same pace of our mostly retired and reflective elders.

Or are we the old foggies that we always feared we would become? Still some of us resist resisting.

% of Core Confidants who are Friends

Is email more secure than #noemail?

You only think you have privacy - We have ways to see you

You only think you have privacy - We have ways to see you

One thing that I hear over and over in comments and in person is: “Man, you’re handing all your information over to {Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc}! Not me! I have email and it’s secure and mine only.” Obviously, I’m on different medication for the folks who say this. They completely ignore just how insecure and how available the information in email and the information behind that behavior is.

Back in the late 1980s, writing as Emily Postmail, I said: “Imagine leaving a postcard with your phone number and a time stamp on it at the coffee shop. That’s about how secure your email is. Be aware that anyone and everyone can read it.” And now I would add that your behavior in sending email can be traced and analyzed by someone smarter than you.

In case you secure minded emailers missed the reports of AT&T’s cooperation with NSA in domestic surveillance back in 2006, let me point you to a very good Wired article from that period “AT&T Whistle-Blower’s Evidence”.

You’ve already been watched. And The Atlantic reports that you are now being even more closely watched today in “Prepare to Have Your Email Read by the NSA”.

At least, Facebook, Twitter, etc give you some tangible improvement in services as a result of their surveillance of your behaviors. AT&T + NSA not so much.

True, you can encrypt your email messages — but who really does this? In the meantime, projects like Securebook give you a way to communicate privately, if not secretly, on Facebook. Offered in lite and for pay (99 cents) at the Android Store, Securebook promises Social Steganography which I hope is something better than the X-Ray Specs or Amazing Sea Monkeys that were sold in the back of X-men comics of my youth.

Securebook says:

Communicate with your Facebook friends securely through encrypted messages.

Securebook allows you to send hidden messages in Facebook posts, making it the first official “Social Steganography” application. By encrypting your message (cryptography) and hiding it within an seemingly normal Facebook post (steganography) you are able to add extra information to your posts that you may not wish to divulge to the world.

Use Securebook to communicate with your friends on Facebook without your parents and other relatives on Facebook knowing even if they have your password!

Use Securebook as both a viral marketing tool and a way to safely send company proprietary information through social media.

Tiger and Anthony Weiner should have used Securebook! Make sure you do!

Riding the Ripple to #noemail

RIP email

RIP email

Jon Weedon writes in an article titled “RIP email. Is the writing on the Wall?” on his Ridding the Ripple blog:

Today, I’m afraid email has lost its sparkle. It has become nothing more than a tedious, ponderous and bloated utility. My use is pretty much confined to business, where it remains ubiquitous and, for the foreseeable future, will remain so until someone comes up with a better dashboard for managing ones private business communications, tasks and appointments

A lively discussion follows in the comments. Where among other things, the generational tendencies to use or not use email are underscored.

Fun read from a different angle than that of Luis Suarez and myself — although we both join in in the comments section.

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Rockmelt + Facebook = Toward a social browser & #noemail

Rockmelt

Rockmelt

Facebook

Facebook

The very cool, but very busy, browser Rockmelt is getting closer to Facebook with the aim of integrating Facebook’s Unified Messaging System.

Although Facebook messaging was announced last year with the caveat “This is not an email killer.“, just one glance at the rest of the discussion and the charts tell you that email will be drastically different if not dead were the Unified Messaging to be successfully and broadly adopted. But to achieve broad adoption, Facebook needed more than, well, Facebook. Rockmelt is a very good start toward a better answer–not only to the limitations imposed on Facebook by browsers at present, but to the general problem of social activity stream integration.

Gmail has already shown that the browser can compete and even improve on the experience of old school mail environments like Outlook/Exchange. Rockmelt aims to show that the social experience — twitter, RSS, Facebook, etc — can thrive and improve within the browser.

Just as Facebook redefined “friend,” I expect that Facebook Unified Messaging and its competitors will be redefining “email.” You might be using the same word, but it won’t mean the same thing and you won’t interact in the same ways as before. email in name only is #noemail and that’s a good thing too.

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