Accept no substitutes

Category: #noemail (Page 9 of 10)

Bottom Line: #Noemail Meets #LessFacebook

Ed Cone

Ed Cone

Ed Cone at Ziff Davis’ Bottomline blog gives #noemail some attention as he writes “#noemail Meets #LessFacebook”.

Ed discusses how he manages his time and activities and privacy — especially as regards to Facebook — then confesses:

Email I need to keep for a while, although practically the only reason my own kids still use it is to trade messages with their parents, grandmother, and other aging authority figures. UPDATE: I’m not crazy about some of the alternatives, either. Paul tweets that we might talk via blog posts, Skype, or IM — but blogs are public, Skype is a hassle, and IM is annoying.

Paul and I are feeling different parts of the elephant. We’re not going Luddite, or moving to Walden pond in search of some more authentic experience, we’re trying to figure out the best way to communicate and to stay productive as technology continues to change. If your company isn’t having some version of this conversation, it should be.

Ed nails it in the final paragraph. #noemail, or in Ed’s case #LessFacebook, isn’t about leaving emerging technologies, but about exploring emerging technologies.

And Ed, I didn’t say you had to use Skype; only that it is one option that some people like. ;->

I reply to some confused commenters about technology and social differences between email and others, supposed email privacy, and becoming a file clerk for email ephemera.

What’s worse that Email for productivity? Not #noemail nor #lessfacebook

Ed Huff comments on Facebook that–as my image caption to the graph posted in the article below also points out about the harmon.ie report–Phone calls are more distracting than email or social media. In fact, phones (28%) plus emails (23%) account for most of the workplace distractions with “toggling between activities” is tied with “talking with co-workers” at 10% each.

But harmon.ie spins the data this way: “The majority (57%) of work interruptions now involve either using collaboration and social tools like email, social networks, text messaging and IM, or switching windows among disparate standalone tools and applications”

Yet while most companies (68%) and an even higher percent of individuals (73%) have each added techniques to help maintain focus and minimize distractions, there is little evidence that the same policies attack telephone distractions — the worst.

Reminds me that I’ve always found these final lines of Philip Larkin’s poem Aubade especially chilling:

Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

The Office Phone

What’s the biggest time sink Email or other social media?

What the data say - phone and email are tops

What the data say - phone and email are tops

No question about the answer. Take a look, a close look, at these findings from an harmon.ie commissioned survey run by uStamp (n=500). Despite the co-mingling of the results at harmon.ie’s own site’s cover page for the report, the survey shows there is a giant difference in the amount to time and effort wasted on email than on all other social practices on-line. harmon.ie also commits the sin of mislabeling online behaviors as addictive: “The increasingly common addiction to web-based activity – which psychologists call ‘online compulsive disorder’ – is pervasive in the workplace.”

Still the survey provides interesting data that tell a tale of differences in distractions and their management. Let’s sample a few from harmon.ie’s press release to Yahoo! Finance and elsewhere:

Users reported getting sidetracked in email processing (23%), switching windows to complete tasks (10%), personal online activities such as Facebook (9%), instant messaging (6%), text messaging (5%) and Web search (3%).

Two out of three users will interrupt a group meeting to communicate with someone else digitally, either by answering email (48%), answering a mobile phone (35%), chatting via IM (28%), updating their status on a social network (12%) or tweeting (9%).

The user’s email inbox is the #1 location searched, with 76% of respondents reporting email as the first place they look. Other locations include the desktop (69%), file server (52%), shared workspace (34%), portable storage device (18%) and/or cloud storage (9%).

The average user emails two or more documents per day to an average of five people for review, increasing email-based document volume by up to 50 documents per week. The fact that these attachments are stored on multiple local computers complicates the challenge of finding the latest document versions as well as merging feedback from multiple reviewers.

Individual users are more aggressive than even their employers in taking control of their own time and managing distractions:

68% of respondents reported that their employers have implemented policies or technologies to minimize distractions, while 73% of end users have adopted self-imposed techniques to help maintain focus.

It’s not too hard to see where the problems are. Email and worse the misuse of email for document sharing are by far the biggest waste of time and effort.

I am aware that harmon.ie does have a commercial interest in these results. They say of their company: “The harmon.ie product family brings enterprise collaboration to every business user by transforming the email client into a collaboration and social workspace, called ‘social email’.”

Fast Company features a good summary of the results — but keep in mind that the author, David Lavenda, is an executive with harmon.ie. David clearly discloses his relationship to harmon.ie in the course of the article. +1

Rules and Charters for Email and #noemail

Seth Godin's head

Seth Godin's head

Seth Godin reposts his well thought out Email Checklist inviting folks with no clue to get one or two or thirtysix from the list.

36! Yes 36 items on the list! “Before you hit send on that next email, perhaps you should run down this list, just to be sure” Seth, you really don’t expect the folks who commit the minor and major crimes that you describe in the checklist to read this list every time they send a message do you? Before this I thought of Seth as someone who was especially wise and brief and amusing. Down to the last one on this post. Seriously, Seth is always worth a read, but I see unintentional irony in this post.

Chris Anderson of TED

Chris Anderson of TED

Chris Anderson of TED fame (not to be confused with Chris Anderson of Wired and The Long Tail) proposes an Email Charter with an initial 16 points on his UnTweetable: When 140 Characters Is Not Enough blog. Chris has even reserved a URL and put up a holding page at http://emailcharter.org/. Chris’ final point is “Switch off the computer!”

That’s a nice idea, but better just to go to #noemail If you do that, there are few other rules that you need.

Living in a World Without Google – #noemail scheduling w/Gcal

Google Doodle for Les Paul's 96th Birthday

Google Doodle for Les Paul's 96th Birthday

Living in a World Without Google (instead of #noemail or #lwwe ): Joshua Romero swears off all things Googlish, thereby missing out on this past Thursday’s great Les Paul tribute doodle, as described at length in IEEE Spectrum called “How I Learned to Live Google-free. A quest to quit the most pervasive company on the Web” (Thanks to @shivaviad Googlization of Everything author).

IEEE Spectrum has a great special issue, “The Social Web,” (June 2011). Authors including Robin (150 friends) Dunbar, Siva (Googlization) Vaidhyanathan, Jeff Jarvis, Bob Garfield, and others look at the current state of the Social Web through the lens of Facebook vs Google for the most part.

If you like me have stuck with Google and love Google Calendar — especially as an intelligent scheduling service –, you’ll be delighted to learn that the Calendar now supports Appointment Slots, that is times when you will agree to meet with people, instead of just any open times. Now you don’t have to mark large amounts of time as “Busy” just to get some serious reading, writing, research or sleep done. You can have actual office hours!

One more nail in the email coffin. Scheduling with me; don’t send email.

Misc #noemail : RSS for Groups, USENET, Why email was once used

In a comment below, Tanner asks about RSS in Google Groups and Yahoo! Groups. Both support RSS. For Yahoo! Groups, there is good support for RSS. Help here.. Google Groups seems to handle RSS well as well. Help for Google Groups and RSS here. Mailman/pipermail = Ugh! After many years of code sitting out there and all other modern services providing RSS.

Jim Ellis one of the fathers of USENET circa 1979

Jim Ellis one of the fathers of USENET circa 1979

Nassib Nassar and John Reuning reminded me of how USENET News was once the cesspit that email now is. In the past year, the two universities where USENET was first implemented, UNC and Duke, both turned off that service after 30 years of useful networking. Why? Basically the same reasons that I’ve started #noemail :

Duke didn’t decide to terminate its Usenet server based on piracy. Instead, the relic will be laid to rest thanks to low usage and rising costs. Applications such as Twitter, blogs, RSS feeds, Facebook and more have made communication a bit more user-friendly since the days of Usenet, making it obsolete.

Colleague Rob Capra reminds me what email displaced and why as seen back in 1988 in a paper by Mary Sumner titled “The impact of electronic mail on managerial and organizational communications”. The results showed that electronic mail was used extensively to displace phone calls and memos particularly for “organizing” activities, such as scheduling events, asking questions, and providing feedback.

I note that email is now one of the worst tools for each of these activities. Scheduling is better done by shared calendars or services like Tuggle and Doodle. Questions better answered directly in IM or chat, more widely asked by Hunch and Quora, or generally discovered by search engines. Feedback on documents and presentation slides by Google documents or other collaborative environments.

Robbie Hedge writes about spam and who handles it how. By “who” he means which email service provider like AOL, Hotmail, Gmail etc. Nice quick charts and some explanations and some good questions raised. But many of those questions are answered nicely and wittily by The Oatmeal in “What your email address says about your computer skills.”

What does “Please don’t email me, but use most anything else.” say?

RSS toward #noemail whilst keeping Lists under control

Yesterday, I dug through the ancient Lyris documentation and translated the rather vague instructions on how to access RSS feeds for the various UNC lists that I subscribed to — before June 1, 2011.

Previously I had either let the list swamp my inbox where the messages were often skipped, deleted, or just lost and unread. For a few lists, I created folders and filter rules — which mostly worked okay — so that the messages were clear from my inbox but once again mostly unread or read too late or over-read as I had to check the folders more than I prolly really needed too.

Time sinkage and information untimeliness were the curse of the lists.

Now I subscribe my RSS reader — I’m rediscovering BlogLines, but there are plenty of others — and the lists are handled much better. In something close to a folder in concept but better presented easily to manage and in general better presented and better (I hope) dealt with.

Yes the items in the reader as articles are email postings, but for the most part they are really articles, School announcements, and the like that happened to be turned into mail messages as if by some evil force. RSS turns them back in to articles.

Now to get Mailman/Piperman archives to use RSS in a sensible way. Previous implementations that I’ve seen on the net so far are: 1) about 5 years old or greater 2) kludges that scrape the archives. Ideas on doing this in a better and more modern way would be greatly appreciated.

Other lists, many to which I subscribed many email identities ago, won’t even let me unsubscribe easily. There’s been too many years, too many passwords and too many email identities for me or the lists to understand who I was back when I started reading then ignoring the messages from those sources. Solution: Mark as spam.

For those asking, Gmail tells me that it makes about 150+ messages to me as spam daily.

Cracking #UNC Lyris RSS for #noemail

I finally posted this to Quora this afternoon:

As part of giving up email aka #noemail, I need to get off of a lot of email lists that are important to me.
I had, as you are about to suggest, used Gmail filters to send lists to various folders where I mostly ignored the postings unless something urgent was going on there.
But I am more diligent with my RSS reader and I can scan it more easily. I keep seeing old postings about getting RSS from various mailing list programs like Pipermail and Mailman, but they really seem dated and abandoned.
To make matters worse, several campus lists are on Lyris which doesn’t seem to have much to offer in alternative reading styles. It’s either in your inbox or through a difficult to use web archive page.

Then I started poking into the UNC Lyris documentation for help. After pointing me to an unusable URL form ( http://example.com/read/rss?forum=forumname&rev=0.92 don’t even bother), I found this bit which looked promising and with a little improvisation worked! I apologize for the UNC-centric-ness of this post, but I hope it will be useful to others here in Chapel Hill.

RSS Access

ListManager’s RSS function supports authentication and authorization. The same settings controlling access to the Discussion Forum Interface controls RSS access.

RSS will only be available if your list is set to keep archives. Without archives, no messages will be displayed.

If the list allows visitors, then non-members will be able to subscribe to the list’s RSS feed without actually subscribing to the list. If not, members will need to log in to proceed to the About page and get the RSS URL. The login information will then be included in the RSS URL on the About page, and will be formatted to include your email address and password (encrypted).

Only those IP addresses granted access to the Discussion Forum Interface in Utilities: Administration: Server: Server Settings: Security: Web: TCP/IP for Discussion Forum Interface will have access to the list via RSS.

ListManager will return messages from the past 14 days, up to one hundred messages.

Translation:

  1. Go to http://listserv.unc.edu
  2. Login using the mail address to which you used to subscribe to the lists that you would like RSS feeds from.
  3. Choose “My Forums” on the right side bar
  4. Choose the listname by clicking on it under “Forum Name”
  5. You’ll see recent messages to your chosen list (aka forum)
  6. Click on “About” on the right side bar
  7. The 3rd line should read “RSS Feed: RSS 0.92”
  8. “RSS 0.92” is a link! (but notice that RSS 2.0 is the current standard. Nonetheless 0.92 will work on most readers)
  9. Copy the Link
  10. Paste the link into your RSS reader of choice adding it as you would other links

“Sounds like an article in The Onion.” #noemail

I’m ending my first week without email aka #noemail. It’s been much less painful that I would have thought. I really appreciate that so many good people have been such good sports about trying other ways to contact me. Not that all have.

At least one person reported that he took time to decide whether to send me a link on twitter instead of email. It was a very helpful link to a paper by Shelly Farnham and Elizabeth Churchill of Yahoo! about Faceted Identities and communications styles online “Faceted identity, faceted lives: social and technical issues with being yourself online”.

Another shared my away message with his wife who responded, “Sounds like an article in The Onion.” It may sound like that but the articles so far have been at ReeseNews.org where we’ve passed over 2000 views and about 30 comments including my responses and a two parter at OpenSource.com where we’re up to 26 comments including my responses.

Let’s face it, Facebook — and Twitter and Google and whoever, some people just don’t want their communications to be owned by The Man. This passion for being unowned results in an over-estimate of email’s privacy and security. I say that is little of either in the case of email and much more of both in other services if that is seriously your concern. But this points to one of the four factors that influence communications choices — the psychological.

Occasionally, I run into a wannabe lawyer who explains that all email dealing with students, health, whatever must not leave a supposedly locked campus network. Of course it is a self-deluding fantasy to think that such a network could be created and sustained or that people would even use it as designed. But for a moment, let’s assume that you could eliminate all forwarding and copying and photographing and thumbdriving etc of email. Or that you could create a policy that an entire campus would faithfully follow to the letter. You can’t but if you could, then that would point to the second of the four factors that influence communications choice — policy.

I’ve also heard, on Facebook, that “I keep my friends and family on Facebook, my co-workers (I assume past and present) on LinkedIn, etc” or ” Somehow I end up with…” or “I’m on Diaspora, but no one else I talk with is there.” This is an expression of the third factor — the social.

Finally, there have been several people who just don’t want to add another service or to whom the technical barrier to entry is too much. “I’m happy with email; I don’t want to learn X. I tried by I never got it going.” or “X doesn’t let me do Y.” This is an expression of the fourth factor — the technical. The services don’t do what’s needed in an integrated way — Is there a decent alternative to Listserv? say — or they are inconvenient to join.

Some policy expressions are merely psychological excuses in drag. The same with technical complaints. People like to do what they are doing unless they are restless, curious and looking for change. Those restless ones are likely to be seen as potential subjects for Onion articles.

#noemail – Kindred Spirits and papers

#noemail has an international Facebook predecessor. We Quit Email has a lot of members and posters from .NL out of 175 members (or more properly Likers). There folks seem to be good spirits and like me interested in things that are faster and more social. They use the hastag #wqm

Founder Kim Spinder sounds a lot like me in this article:

Don't press send!

Don't press send!

Why #WQM?
First of all, e-mail takes a lot of time and effort and delivers a lot of frustration, everyday! Second: we want to change and innovate the world. E-mail and paper does not change the world and does not move people. Third: It’s not the best tool for knowledge sharing and collaboration. Louis [sic Luis Suarez actually – PJ] says: “It’s a storage where everything goes, even your knowledge.”

My UNC School of Information and Library Science colleague, Jeff Pomerantz, inspects his own communications habits in light of #noemail on his PomeRantz blog in an article simply titled “email Stats”.

Just down the hall, colleague Rob Capra points to two studies of email use (from his strong background in Personal Information Management):
Voida and Mynatt “It feels better than filing: everyday work experiences in an activity-based computing system”
and
Farnham & Churchill “Faceted identity, faceted lives: social and technical issues with being yourself online” in which he sees data that says that under 25s use email and Facebook for about the same amount of time daily. I have not yet read this paper, but I note in passing that the research was done by Yahoo! scientists.

In the meantime, Peter Honeyman of Michigan says that he is a fan of #noemail even if it means abandoning his profession then points to his important work “Parsing ambiguous addresses for electronic services”

Honeyman (in public conversation on Facebook) says in part regarding email:

now i find the situation so hopeless that i abjure my erstwhile discipline† and declare my allegiance to the #noemail hashtag (which is trending, dontchaknow).

† http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/spe.4380170106/abstract and http://www.uucp.org/papers/pathalias.pdf

Old BITNET pal (also in Michigan) Ed Vielmetti writes (here on this blog) and at ReeseNews “Email was great back in the day, but there really has to be something better to replace it for some subset of the tasks it is shoehorned into taking on.” As Ed goes off email for the weekend, he provides a nice list of notable email-quitter/hater articles on his blog.

Other references and discussions can be found in the ReeseNews.org and OpenSource.com articles mentioned in earlier #noemail entries at this blog.

#noemail Q&A with Bascha at OpenSource.com

Right now, #noemail is about 10 times more popular at ReeseNews.com than “Exploring female sexual pleasure”. This is a sure sign of the End Times.

In the meantime, Part Two — the Q&A segment — of the discussion about #noemail at OpenSource.com has been posted.

#noemail interview: Paul Jones abandons his inbox (QnA)

#noemail interview: Paul Jones abandons his inbox (QnA)

Open Source folks are rightly concerned that there are only a few FLOSS alternatives in the activity streams area and no good, as far as I can tell, hyperaggregators for social media done in FLOSS. I’m hoping that we’re wrong and that someone will respond with some good ideas and suggestions.

Luis Suarez and Peter Weller suggest using RSS as a way of dealing with mailing list and notifications, but I haven’t seen or come up with a good way to operationalize that yet. It seems doable though and it makes more sense than filtering email into various unread folders.

Although I’ve been aggressively unsubscribing to listserv lists, some decades old, I’m still seeing about 100+ new messages, post-spam filtering, hit my inbox every 12 hours.

From the OpenSource.com interview:

The point of the #noemail project is to engage more deeply in specialized and inter-operative tools for communications and planning and social engagement. So yes, Google apps for document sharing (like now); Dropbox or Box.com for larger files; Facebook, Diaspora, Hunch, Quora for somethings; Gtalk, AIM, Jabber, FB chat, Skype, etc. for quick communications; various approaches to location; Google calendar–as I’ve used it for several years; etc.

What I’m after is an approach that will allow my friends and co-workers and students to sort out which apps to use and to drop and how to form the usage of each. We’re in a very dynamic moment in these areas, and I expect to see a lot of new apps, a lot of changes to existing ones (big changes for Google and Facebook in the past few weeks for example), and a lot vanishing for various reasons (almost lost Delicious, or is it gone?).

Interoperability and hyper-aggregation rather than any unitary solution is more likely to be successful in the long run. I’m betting, as many are, on some sort of intelligent solutions for dealing with activity streams–some of those streams, like location a few years back, not even collected as yet–to help make sense of the world of communications and cooperation. Even if I just set up an instance of Firefox with a bunch of tabs to all of those services, I’m ahead of the jury-rigged mess that is email.

Reese News on #noemail and current state – more or less

Reese NewsMeredith Clark‘s first Reese News article is “Professor quits e-mail for social media” about the #noemail project. Meredith covers the bases and talks to some good UNC folks including my social-phobic email-loving legal colleague Anne Klinefelter (Anne, I’m easy arrange a coffee meeting with. See my calendar. Add a meeting. No email needed. Peace out, Paul) with whom I have some basic disagreements about how privacy and email work. Meredith has done some good research and the article is worth a read for non-UNC folks as well.

In the meantime, only 36 hours into #noemail, my inbox which had grown to just over 100 messages in 12 hours now reads 1 – 25 of hundreds! I’ll be unsubscribing to lists for days! One important message offers “Unlimited Pole Dancing Classes”; well LivingSocial and Groupon seemed like good ideas at the time.

Luis Suarez and Peter Weller and I have been exchanging Tweets about how to deal with lists. Luis has replaced his list subscriptions within IBM with RSS feeds. A very sane idea. But the UNC Lyris Listserv doesn’t offer an RSS alternative that I can see.

Dear UNC ITS,
Could our next listserv implementation please offer an RSS alternative?
Thanks,
40K campus inboxen

#noemail in OpenSource.com & midday 1 report

#noemail on OpenSource.com

#noemail on OpenSource.com

Basha Harris and I completed an interview/discussion about #noemail using Google Docs the first part of which is now up for reading and commenting on OpenSource.com as “#noemail: Are technology’s early adopters abandoning their email?”.

It was painless to write together on GDocs and fast and introduced me to the new comments feature which is a real plus for collaborative work like an interview.

A little over 12 hours into the first day of #noemail, I peeked into my inbox to see over 100 new messages. None of these were spam — thanks Gmail — but then only 2 of them were useful or required a response. This being the first of the month, there were several messages reminding me that I’m a member of various mailing list (I’ll unsubscribe and look for RSS feeds this evening). Many were nice general messages that I could have picked up in the hall and in most cases had.

The UNC campus and areas of Chapel Hill and Carrboro lost power this morning for several hours. The one computer that needs attention after an outage did need attention after this one. Naturally there had been some changes and my colleague and I needed to find either our great sysadmin who is on vacation or another former staff member to supply a little help getting it live. I read messages from our sysadmin. But the real help came in the form of IMs here on campus. So I didn’t really use email so much as grasp it in desperation and in the end didn’t need it afterall. WCPE is live and in high quality MP3 and OGG again!

The Place of email and of #noemail

In the 70s and early 80s when I was a great email evangelist and a half-assed email application coder and a not too bad email systems admin, there were no cell phones (1983 was the first commercial cell), there were no truly mobile computers (Osbourne 1 in 1981 and Kaypro in 1982), telephone answering machine were still mostly tape decks. There were some video text projects; none really succeeded.

Portable phone of the past -- could they do email?

Portable phone of the past -- could they do email?

Now wonder email looked so fantastic!

And as a utopian popularizer, I was happy to predict that email would change everything in communications. It did and for a while was quite wonderful and even freeing and at least it enhanced productivity and even built relationships.

I was reminded of this separately by two folks who organized talks around the UNC campus to promote email, Libby Evans and Byron Howes. But as we reminisced about those heady times, I could only think of what a complete mess email has become. All that we had said email would do is better done by apps — and email never adapted to a truly mobile world.

One look at Blackberry users and their construction of use says so much to this. A special purpose device that just does constantly trickling email has had a phone stuck on it in an ungainly way, a web browser plunked on a too small of a screen for the target users, etc. It’s an email reader made worse.

Phones went through the same identity crisis — save Apple’s iPhone which has always been less phone that computer with phone back up.

Now the market is settling down on multipurpose, location aware, multimedia producing and receiving devices. And email looks even more clunky, more like a communications oddity than a solution. More like a 50s console stereo system than a 70s component or like a digital system that you carry with you and stuck in anywhere. It cannot be dressed up and taken out.

As much as I loved being a part of email’s development, evolution, adaption and acceptance, I’ve been wondering when and where to stop the madness. Not to check out as a Luddite might, nor to take an email vacation, nor to declare bankruptcy, nor to just hand it over to a secretary to do for me, but to really commit myself to seeing if the nacent concepts of activity streams, of open social, of hyper-intergration, of emerging and sinking social communications apps can do the jobs given to email and do those jobs better.

That’s the #noemail project and it begins at midnight tonight.

LDL is the new Shhhhh!

Virginia Heffernan writing on the NYTimes Opinionator blog in an article, “The Trouble With Email,” makes a perhaps unconscious but very appropriate reference to one of my favorite Star Trek episodes “The Trouble With Tribbles.

Up to his chest in Tribbles

Too Much Tribble for Kirk

Heffernan notices that EEEEEEEK! email is discoverable, persistent, leaves a long footprint, and often embarrassing if not incriminating. The safer alternative is, ssssssh!, LDL — not as defined in the Urban Dictionary where some definitions may be NSFW nor the more common “Let’s Do Lunch,” but “Let’s Discuss Live”.

From whence comes “LDL”? According to Heffernan:

Goldman’s Jonathan Egol is the first known master. When a trader named Fabrice Tourre described a mortgage investment in e-mail as “a way to distribute junk that nobody was dumb enough to take first time around,” Egol shot back: “LDL.”

While one can wonder about the morality of Egol, Tourre, the use of LDL and even of Heffernan for spreading notice of the practice, LDL brings back one of the first email lessons that I, writing as Emily Postmail, tried to teach new users, that is, “email is not so much mail as a post card that cannot be easily retrieved or revoked or removed.” Ollie North found this out the hard way in the Iran-Contra Hearings.

This applies to most all electronic communications. But email seems more like Tribbles than most other activity streams: it seems so warm and attractive, it seems harmless but needs some attention, it needs more attention, it seems like the Tribbles to reproduce at will, but unlike the Tribbles there seems to be no end to it — no poisoned grain. No Trouble With Harry or even Trouble With Angels here.

Bones: They reproduce at will. And brother, have they got a lot of will!

Privacy vs Secrecy is another matter — this is what LDL is really about. The folks who got in trouble were mostly relaying illegal information in what they thought was a secret way. Most people are upset about violations of their privacy, their legal but none-of-your-biznez behaviors

Undeliverable!

John Robinson of the Greensboro News and Record posts this on Facebook:

I get an unsolicited email. My out-of-office Outlook message bounces it back. I get an out-of-office email from the sender. I love this internet thingee.

I check my inbox — sorry, still do do this til June 1. I have a dozen instances like this. In fact, I’ve been unsubscribed from one list I had forgotten about because of “too many bounces.” On inspection, the bounces weren’t caused by my own away messages, but from the list service malforming their own mail headers.

The battle between “away/out of office/I quit email” messages points out one thing that email despite being over 30 years old cannot do very well–email interoperability is terrible. Like a dancing pig, it’s a miracle that it happens to work in the first place.

Thanks email, for taking another 15 minutes of my life managing bounces.

And while I’m at it, the worst of the bounces, “Email undeliverable because the recipients inbox is full,” was one of the stacks of bounces. The original message began “Please let me know …” Sorry I can’t let you know anything until you clean out your lame underprovisioned inbox or change your email service.

My point is that situations like this should never happen at all. And with the right services, those other than email, they don’t. Smarter services including Facebook chat, Gtalk, AIM, Skype, etc let you know before you begin the conversation whether the person you want to communication is available or not. If not, there are provisions offered for asynchronous messaging.

Activity streams and hyper-integration help you communicate effectively.

email doesn’t deliver.

Talking #noemail with Michael Tiemann

Yesterday just after my open source post, I rode out to the Miraverse, the incredible recording studio in Chatham County to visit with Michael Tiemann. In addition to overseeing the studio with his wife Amy, Michael Tiemann is Vice President of Open Source Affairs at Red Hat Inc, as well as President of the Open Source Initiative.

I expected to get a kind of FLOSS lecture about #noemail, but instead I ended up brainstorming with Michael who immediately grasped what I’m after in the project — perhaps better than I do.

Michael reminded me of a Red Hat created open source Facebook challenger called, Mugshot, from back in 2006. Mugshot was more developed in my memory than Diaspora is now, but the project didn’t take off for whatever reasons. Parts of Mugshot are in Magnetism and maintained by Personas.com. Mugshot was a hyper aggregator and very nice and easy to use and accepted communications from most known social sites as well as a place you could hold a conversation about say a website or even a TV show.

In many ways, Mugshot would have been exactly what I’m looking for to deal with my activity streams.

Modern Times

But our talk quickly turned back to email. Michael sees email as a “enterprise service bus” that connects many applications via a common messaging format into a central processing unit. That CPU is YOU. You, dear human friends, are the processor that sorts out To Dos, Meeting Scheduling, Queries, Complaints, Referrals. In a fact, we probably spend more time sorting email than actually answering email. This is exactly the opposite of what one would like technology to do for us; we’re suddenly like Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times

What Michael and I are saying is not that communication has gone wrong and enslaved us, but that the wrong technology implementation is in place. Moving email out of the picture or at least away from the center toward the edge of our activities, moving the sorting operation out altogether, integrating existing apps and allowing for the integration of new and developing apps — open source or not — via open protocols, APIs, embedding and even referrals, how that might be done is one of the main goals of the #noemail project.

Open Source problems with #noemail

For years, I’ve been an advocate of FLOSS aka Free/Libre and Open Source Software. The nearly 19 year old sunsite/metalab/ibiblio project is a testimony to my work in Open Source and Open Information. I’ve not give that up.

Open Source dot Org

Open Source dot Org

How to explain then giving up something that appears to be open or at least have some strong open options like email for options that provide an activity stream but that are closed or worse (according to some) walled gardens?

First I would argue that most email isn’t free and open so much as interoperable. I think interoperablity is a good thing, but many of the activity stream applications are interoperable as well. To say that, “I like my mail open and not owned by The Man” when you have just sent me email from Outlook, GMail or HotMail hosted accounts isn’t very convincing.

I’m convinced that net neutrality and open protocols and as far as I can manage it open source software will be what works out in the long run even for the #noemail project. To that end, I don’t see unitary solutions that might work on an intranet solution to work well in the open internet — Sorry Yammer and Lotus Connections and your pals. Instead, I see some sort of shifting and developing network of interoperable applications that will be formed by the interactions of technological, sociological, psychological and business constraints and opportunities.

Many of the current attempts at activity streams see email as central to the effort, I don’t. In fact, I see the persistance of email as a mistake like an investment in horse collars as Ford expanded his factories or in typewriters as truly personal and popular computers were hitting the market.

It’s my hope that open source options will be essential to the creation of an evolving activity stream ecosystem.

Help me by suggesting some good FLOSS and Open Information options. One obvious project is the Open Social Project; any experience with that?

One new reason why #noemail project exists: “Please reply this e-mail, if you don’t want to recieve any more e-mails from Turkish Ear Nose Throat Society…”

Informal Demographics of #noemail Angst

One week before the #noemail experiment begins on June 1 and already I’ve been noticing some very different coping or lack of coping mechanisms in the responses to my “Divesting in Email” away message.

Email email email
Briefly, I began entry into #noemail first by talking to folks informally about what life would be like if instead of making email the center of communications that I removed that part entirely from my life. I wanted to have this work less like Donald Knuth and more like Luis Suarez. That is not just bailing on electronic communications, but divesting my attention and time investments from email and placing them in a variety of social media.

My message in my email responder was and is brief but direct and offers a good number of alternatives for reaching me, scheduling a meeting with me and keeping up with me. And it announces the cut off date of June 1.

First the angry responses, the how-dare-you-do-this, the how-will-we-ever-speak-write-or-communicate, came in. They came most strongly from a single demographic, people who only occasionally write me who are also over 55. Most of these folks assaulted the alternatives — “I would never make a YouTube video to communicate with you” (err no but if you chose to that would be fine), “[Twitter, Facebook, etc] is an absurd waste of time; email makes sense.” “I only use [LinkedIn, Facebook, IM, Skype] for [family, business] not for anything else.”–and several tried to convince me of email’s great utility at least two of these were people to whom I had used the same arguments to convince them to use email 20+ years ago. This last was like an odd echo across time. I appreciate the irony.

The second group said “I wish I could do that.” Then largely they would contact me by Skype, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc and we’d link up there. These folks were almost entirely between 25 (or 30) and 55. A couple were closer to my age (61) but were very involved in social media. These folks were more likely to say, “Sure I use use [LinkedIn, Facebook, IM, Skype] for [family, business] so it’ll be simple to contact you in the same way.” There will be some sorting out here, but I expect to learn a lot from these folks.

The final group never got my away message. They don’t use email all that much. It didn’t occur to them to contact me by email when there were other ways to do so that worked better for them. Largely these folks were under 25 or 30. They use txt or IM or Gtalk or Facebook — and if they were or are in the Journalism School or in the biz– on Twitter. They are already where I hope to be.

In the future, I think that we’ll be doing more and more with activity streams that integrate several appropriate and focused applications some of which are highly interactive (Gtalk, im), some self-serve (calendars and the like), some collaborative (Google Docs, Doodle), some for sharing (blogs, Flickr, etc), some highly specialized (Audioboo, maps, Tripit), all easy to integrate and to allow to interact. Email will be the glue or the roadkill. After watching email attempt to be the glue, I’m pretty sure it will end up roadkill.

Twrestling with Twitter

For me, twitter has many good uses: trusted news referrals, light touches with friends, hyperlocal and international doings, wit in the hands of the better tweeple and with DMs a mutual opt-in private message sharing service. Twitter always returns more value for time spent for me than email.

The Twitter Trap - NYTimes by James Joyce

The Twitter Trap - NYTimes by James Joyce

Nonetheless, Bill Keller writing in the NYTimes Magazine can’t wait to rehearse his parent’s anxiety about something that he doesn’t do or understand as soon as he sees his teenage daughter behaving like a teenage daughter. “The Twitter Trap” quickly becomes a Parent Trap as Keller ratchets up the Moral Panic in a New York Times style guide sort of way.

Before Keller’s article even saw Sunday distribution, Nick Bilton writing on the New York Times Bits blog had out a responce (that I was referred to by Twitter) “This is Your Brain on Twitter”. Nick hits the points without getting at the underlying Moral Panic issue. He does notice that Twitter is an activity stream of highly mixed activities and mixed values. The point is the stream — that’s way it’s a good alternative to how some use email for some functions and activities.

Cathy Davidson of Duke and of HASTAC essays from the thesis of her forthcoming (in August from Viking) “Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn” in her response to Keller called “It’s not the technology, stupid”. She rightly sees that the problem is less tech and more psych. She sees the irony of reading something like: “My own anxiety,” Keller writes, “is less about the cerebrum than about the soul.” as a rational defense of his position. It’s a bright red flag shouting “Moral Panic!” (more so than “tech is bad” I’d say).

Note that #noemail isn’t about saving my soul from the satanic email and delivering it instead to Twitter, Facebook, etc, but to divest in a crappy technology and reinvesting in a number of better more efficient and effective technologies. I expect to consolidate my investments over time, dropping some and adding others, as I better understand and observe how you and I sort them out.

« Older posts Newer posts »

© 2025 The Real Paul Jones

Theme by Anders NorenUp ↑