Social Networks Will Kill Email?

Skimming a Forbes Insights report, and this popped out:

The @Work State Of Mind Project via Forbes Insights (download here):

Social networks are important for conducting business. About two in three respondents (67%) said that such work-related networks play a significant role in business, and 56% said that personal social networks influence their determinations. But business- related networks are clearly more important than ones more focused on personal life. “Highly focused tablet/smartphone apps with closed social media built in will replace email,” says Warren N. Bimblick, senior vice president of strategy and business development for Penton Media.

First, I followed Bimblick on Twitter (@wbimblick).

Then I thought about this prognosis. One of the aspects of email that has made it universal is that anyone can can send anyone else a message given their email address. It’s open at a fundamental level.

A social network like Twitter is both open and closed: anyone can mention me — send a public message — but only those that I follow can send me a private message (a direct message in Twitterspeak). This is a powerfully subtle aspect of Twitter: the only means for the unfollowed to reach me is through public discourse.

I think there is a place for a Twitter client that fronts as an email client too, as a transitional stepping stone away from inbound email, and also to deal with the reality that not everything worth being said can be compressed into 140 characters (see Liquid Email). I wonder if Twitter is going to build this, or not?

30 April 2012 15 Permalink

Sparrow’s Dropbox Integration: A Security Nightmare

I have been using Sparrow as my email client instead of the web-based Gmail interface. It is a productive experience, and with a few caveats — I wish they had an undo button, and a way to access all my mail aside from search — I’ve been happy.

Since I use DSropbox extensively I was interested to see that Sparrow supports a Dropbox interface. However, after exploring it I have turned off the option, and I think others will want to as well.

The bottom line: Sparrow’s integration with Dropbox rellies on use of the Dropbox public folder, which means that any attachments that are shared via the Dropbox integration are accessible to anyone. And this is a dangerous option for most business users, who’d like more security than that.

The biggest problem is that Sparrow’s team aren’t very explicit about what’s going on. If you read the two short descriptions they provide online, no mention is made of the use of the public Dropbox folder (see https://www.dropbox.com/help/179, and https://sparrowmail.tenderapp.com/kb/starting-with-sparrow/dropbox-in-sparrow).

I only discovered this by seeing the URL of a test attachment go by, and then by asking their support about this:

The alternative approach would be complex but useful: creating a unique Dropbox for every sender-recipient pair, and automatically inviting the recipient’s to share those folders. That was my hope, but that’s not the way they pursued it.

How would it work? Say I sent mail with an attachment to my pal, Gerd Leonhard, who (hypothetically) uses both Sparrow and Dropbox. Sparrow would create a folder called stowe-boyd-and-gerd-leonhard in my Dropbox, and share it with Gerd. The attachment would be placed there. And when he opened the mail on his side, in Sparrow, clicking on the link would open the file from the corresponding folder on his hard drive.

[Note: this grow more complicated when multiple recipients are involved. Perhaps the Dropbox folder would be the name of the initial subject line, or the sender could provide the name of a Dropbox folder they wanted to use.]

The various problems in this pretty picture arise when the recipient of my email doesn’t use both Sparrow and Dropbox. Sparrow would have to deal with all the messy use cases by creating URLs that could be resolved by them, yielding attachments as needed, after confirming that the requesters have access rights, but this would require retaining active access to the Dropbox. The simplest way to do this is to direct recipients to claim a preconfigured Dropbox account, possibly.

So maybe the Sparrow team will take another pass at this, once they think about it.

There is a wonderful simplicity to the idea of a light weight email client relying solely on Dropbox for attachments, so long as Sparrow’s team steps up and builds something more secure.

5 April 2012 10 Permalink

A New Etiquette For Modern Communication

Frank Bruni spun up a good piece about modern communications confusion. A funny set of anecdotes about the thoroughly modern mess of communications: which way to get in touch with people?

Frank Bruni, Sorry, Wrong In-Box

Recently, I missed an interview because I was 20 minutes late and the subject assumed I was a no-show. I’d been texting her about my delay because we’d communicated that way before. But it turns out that she has two mobile phones, and was monitoring the one whose number I didn’t know. Meanwhile, she was sending me e-mails, but it didn’t occur to me to look for those.

But Bruni doesn’t make concrete recommendations: he’s just scratching his head and saying aw, shucks.

So here’s my recommendations for a new etiquette of modern communication:

1. Never call a person’s phone (or Skype, etc.) without arranging a time first. Talking is a lean forward, rivalrous medium, and requires people to dedicate a block of time to that purpose, which is, generally, already allocated to some other use. The arrangement for a time to talk should be handled through a lean backward, non-rivalrous medium like texting, Twitter, or email. Many people (like me) simply never answer their phone unless they have a call scheduled, since it generally entails talking to someone who lacks modern grace, like someone from your cable company trying to sell you an upgrade, or your mother-in-law.
2. Never presume that since someone has an account on a social network, like Facebook, that they regularly check it. Even if they have recent posts there, those could be coming from some automated connection. In my case, I never post to Facebook, but things float through from other apps. Just because it’s your favorite inbox, don’t assume it’s mine.
3. Don’t use voice mail if you have any other alternative. Like a phone call, voice mail is a lean forward, rivalrous experience that requires the user to dedicate time to listen attentively to your message, and to write down any pertinent information with one hand while holding the phone to their ear with another. An imposition. I often don’t even have a pen with me. And many young people simply do not use voice mail. My son, Conrad, has never configured his voice mail, which at least has the benefit of informing callers that it is inoperative. In my case, my voice mail tells people to contact me by email, and I have configured Google voice to send voice mail to me as email, as well, just in case. Just don’t rely on voice mail, at all.
4. To the degree possible, let people know your preferred mode of communication, rather than giving them a list. One mode of communication. If you don’t want people to call without arranging it first, don’t give out your phone number until you’ve made an arrangement to talk, for example. I took my phone number out of the signature in email, for example, but I left my Twitter handle. I have my phone number on my business cards, but I think I will drop that practice that in the next batch, for simplicity.
5. If you want to initiate communication with someone, use their preferred mode of communication. I text with my kids, because that works best for them. I communicate with most of my closest friends via Twitter, but use email with my cousins. And I talk to my mother-in-law by phone because she worked at AT&T for a hundred years. Be flexible. The initiator has the obligation to take the time to work out what is best for the person at the other end of the communication.
6. Don’t presume that since you have initiated a communication with some random person, that they are obliged to respond. In the context of work, some companies have policies that employees will respond to all calls or emails of an official nature within some prescribed period of time, like 24 or 48 hours. Fine. But outside of that context, and especially in the personal realm, no one has an obligation to call you back or respond to your email, today, tomorrow, or by the end of the month. Get over yourself. Most people, especially those of us living and working out loud on the web, have just too much going on and far too many requests for our time to guarantee any response cycle. It’s best to think of an email or a tweet as being like a comment on a blog: maybe it will elicit a response from the blog post’s author, and maybe it won’t.

I know that a lot of people will disagree with all or some of these recommendations. In particular, I expect that some folks will assert that it is rude to not respond to communications from others. My response is that these are new times, when communications cost the sender nothing. They don’t have to lick a stamp to send their junk to me. Everything I receive that is potentially spam, or an annoyance, or a request for unwanted involvement can be deleted and ignored, because I owe the senders nothing.

Of course, if I have a personal relationship with someone, then other considerations apply. My close friends get a fast turnaround, while others I know less well get a somewhat slower response. But don’t think that since I met you at a conference two years ago, and you are now selling some new software product missing a few vowels, or have some scheme you’d like to discuss, that I am obligated to get right back to you to set up a time to talk. There is a great deal of spammish behavior in quasi-personal communications, and I don’t feel the need to go along with the pretense of false camaraderie.

If you want to rise above the noise of the howling world all around us, be concise and clearly explain why you are contacting me, and what would be the best and single way to get in contact if I decide to. If it is interesting, I’m likely to respond, and eagerly. I’m not a misanthrope, I’m just crazy busy.

And don’t get your feathers ruffled if I don’t reply. In these modern times, it’s not an affront, it’s just how things work.

1 September 2011 33 Permalink

Google Unveils Three Pane Gmail Interface

Typical.

I started using Sparrow this week — a Mac OS X lightweight email client — partly to get a three pane email view.

Then today, I read that Google announced a three pane display on Gmail, similar to what they did on the iPad.

So, I am out the $9.99 for Sparrow, I guess.

Sparrow is a reasonably good email client, but I was a bit misled by the positioning as a ‘social email client’. What’s the social part? It’s just email in a slightly more fluid UX.

There is a place for social email — as I wrote about in Liquid Email in July — but Sparrow isn’t it. And neither is Gmail.

So I’ll go back to Gmail. mostly because I can have a more-or-less similar experience on all platforms I use.

5 August 2011 7 Permalink

Looking Ahead Into The Past

I am pulling my thoughts together for tonight’s panel at The Podio Store, on the topic of Tools For Work. I will be on the panel with Eugene Kim, David Skult, and Jon Froda, and we’ll be talking about works tools of the past.

We can learn a lot about email and its impacts on work. Most today don’t recall the time prior to widespread email adoption in business, or the transitions involved. We have internalized email to such an extent that for many it is impossible to envision business without it.

One thing we DID learn through the adoption of email is the underestimation of the costs of transition, and the enormous impact of second order effects once the technology has been ubiquitously adopted. Most large businesses required a return on investment analysis to demonstrate direct cost savings prior to adoption of email; in over 70% of the time, no subsequent analysis was performed to see if the expected efficiencies had been achieved. Insteda, the second order effects took over, and companies realized that their businesses had changed so fundamentally post-email that there was no practical way to remove email even if it in fact cost more and led to inefficiencies.

We can anticipate that the same second order effects (as identified by Sproull and Kiesler in Connections) are at work in other techonologies like instant messaging and the streaming collaboration tools that are emerging today, like Podio.

Stowe Boyd, The Business Case For Streams versus Email

How Is This Different From Email, And Does That Matter?

Email is not predicated on social networks, except to the extent that the users of email are networked. The premise is that there is a universe of individuals (and perhaps named groups) to who messages can be directed. And they can send messages to you, if they know your email address.

Like streams, email has sending and receiving contexts, but there is no notion of writing an email message without addressing it to a specific list of people.

Email is addressed, stream posts are released.

Email is private, and the distribution of messages is determined by the author at the time of writing. Individuals may decide to block my messages, but they can’t opt to see all of them. This means that the effective use of the information in the message is based on the premise that the author knows who should read it.

Streams are public (within some defined ‘public’), and the distribution of messages is determined by the actions of all the members of that public. Individuals decide who they will follow, and the collective streaming of information is the result of the affiliation of all the members of the public.

In the context of business, this means that email is selective: the author selects who should read the message. Streams are elective: the eventual recipients of messages elect to receive them. And this election is principally based on the individual, not the topic, per se, although different tools may implment that very differently.

Relative to email’s selection orientation, streaming is based on the premise that individuals might be more effective if they can elect to receive information flows that are potentially useful to them, and therefore, they should be able to make the determination for themselves as to what are the best sources of information.

Looking at this as a ‘wisdom of the crowds’ sort of issue, it is more likely that information will be best distributed within any given group if each person can decide what information sources are likely to provide good information for themself, rather than leaving it up to the sources of information to decide who should have access to it. This is the argument for openness in open societies, as well, and it has an immediate and obvious analog in the workplace.

So, whenever the discussion comes around (once again) about how we already have email, and that all this streaming malarcky is nothing new, please remember that the models are quite different, and at least in some ways are an inversion of each other. Email is inherently more centralized and top-down, while streaming is inherently more distributed and bottom-up.

When we hear arguments against streaming in the business context they are often the same arguments that are made against distribution of decision-making and the value of top-down controls. I won’t go into the counter to these arguments here — they are out of scope — except to point out that bottom-up and distributed business organization is often linked to agile and resilient businesses, ones that are more likely to thrive in challenging and fast-changing circumstances.

Last Thoughts: What We Can Learn From Corporate Email

We are at a juncture in the rise of streams which is similar to the rise of corporate email. People today don’t recall the controversy about adopting corporate email in the ’70s and ’80s, and then again, web-based email in the ’90s.

One lesson to learn is that ROI studies will be asked for prior to roll-out. However, later on, when the entire company and then the world has shifted to email, senior management will realize that there is no return to a pre-email or pre-stream world, and therefore most companies will simply opt not to calculate whether the return was realized. It will be moot. (See Lee and Sproul, Connections, for a detailed examination of this around corporate email.)

The second lesson is interoperability and standards. Corporate email led to a a Cambrian explosion of email products that were largely non-interoperable. It took years to get different systems to intercommunicate, so large companies often had three or more unintegrated email solutions, based on acquisitions, or different groups in different countries making differently local decisions.

We need to start thinking about interoperable streams, from the outset. For example, I have been advocating interoperability of the tumble blog model for some time, which is a specific subset of the more general streams model. Since we have some much innovation going on, this is likely to turn out to be like the SQL standard, which was the intersection of the leading implementations of the SQL model of databases. At any rate, businesses looking to roll out streams in their companies should definitely put pressure on the vendors to commit to interoperability in the next few years, before this gets away from us.

23 March 2011 3 Permalink