The release of Google Buzz adds another new step in the ongoing evolution of online communication.  And I hope you’ve been paying attention to the evolution so far.

Buzz, along with Google’s other recent release Google Wave, add real-time communication to traditional email inboxes in ways that, quite frankly, most people will fail to grasp for some time yet.

These new Google releases are part of a long running change in the consumer side of online communications.  Looking back 10 years the average web user had email, newsgroups, and basic instant messaging, all performed on their computers.

Today we have blended platforms such as Facebook that include email-style messaging, real time chat, and broadcast communications such as status updates.  In addition to this more and more content is shared in non-text formats.  Photos and videos are exchanged between friends as often as written messages are.  Business deals are done on Twitter.  And no one ever complained that a sales pitch was too short.

Business communications are charting a similar, but slower evolution.  Email quickly replaced much of our phone and fax communications and became a collaborative workspace, albeit a highly inefficient one.

In recent years collaboration has moved out of the inbox and into document management systems and intranet workspaces.  Faxes go directly to electronic records management systems instead of being dropped on our desk.  And telephony systems are integrating with our real-time communications servers to make voicemail and presence data available to us at our desks or on our mobile devices. Continue reading What Will Email Be In 10 Years?

Email not giving up its crown yet.

Email no longer rules, declared a headline in a recent issue of the Wall Street Journal. Email has fallen from its throne as the king of wired communication, the author reasoned, because social media, like Facebook and Twitter, offer communicators a more immediate way to share their thoughts, situations and creative endeavors with others. However, while it’s true that email’s monopoly on communication is no more, that doesn’t mean it has relinquished its crown as the wallah of wired information exchange. In fact, social media, rather than snatching email’s diadem, have actually polished it.

Anyone with a Twitter or Facebook account knows how much “noise” those services generate. The compulsion by many users of those media to gush minutiae can be numbing. When email was the sole source of online communication, complaints abounded about information overload. That has only worsened with the likes of Twitter and Facebook. Email, though, as a mature technology, has developed ways to cope with noise. Filters sort messages as they arrive. Folders segregate items into bins where they can be logically acted on. Tags and categories further slice and dice clutter. Those things add value to email. By comparison, Twitter and Facebook can feel as if the postman drove a dump truck up to your house and jettisoned a year’s worth of mail on your lawn.

Continue reading Email still king despite pretenders

The leaves have barely begun to change their hues, but that doesn’t mean it’s too early to start thinking about email attacks launched by Internet fraudsters during their favorite time of year–Christmas.

Holidays, special occasions and high visibility disasters always prime malicious spam campaigns and keep corporate email filtering systems busy, but Christmas is considered prime time for Web miscreants intent on bringing joy to their underworld and misery to the holiday season of others.

Because exchanging greeting cards is a common practice during the holidays, electronic greeting card scams remain popular. The typical card con will alert a target via email that he or she has been sent a holiday greeting from a mystery sender. The combination of the season–Christmas is the only time many people have an opportunity to catch-up on the year’s happenings with some acquaintances–and the lure of “who could be sending me an electronic card” are powerful inducements for someone to break protocol. The email instructs a recipient to click a link in the message to see the card, a link that leads to a site where a recipient’s sensitive personal information can be stolen or malware downloaded to his or her machine.

Continue reading Never too early to plan for Xmas scams

The media and blogosphere is buzzing about Google Wave, and it’s inevitable that email admins will start getting asked, “Can I use it?” Or worse yet, they will start finding out that people are already using it without authorization. The hype suggests that Wave, which has not yet been released, will “redefine” or “reinvent” email as we know it. I hate to be the spoiler, but here it is: Wave isn’t going to be an email killer.

Without a doubt, it’s going to be a cool service with some mass appeal. Wave combines email, IM, wikis and forums into a sort of unified messaging platform. Google’s official blog talks about its evolution, and how the developers set out to erase the divide between different types of communication. The idea is to allow people to collaborate more freely with a combination of formatted text, photos, video, and other types of media. The rich media aspect allows it to be used for more persistent content, while the instantaneous collaboration makes it useful at the same time for less formal communication. A “wave” can be embedded in a website or blog, and it will be extensible with add-ons.

Early descriptions of the service are compelling, and it sounds great for group projects. But amidst all the hype, there has been very little said about security, or about archiving, and without those two elements covered, its use in the enterprise will remain limited. It is obviously part of Google’s cloud strategy. And just as it’s not practical to use Gmail (or any other free public email) for business use, it won’t be practical to use Wave for the same reasons—archiving and security would be problematic. Although it’s likely that Google will incorporate some sort of basic security and spam control into it, archiving far-flung, embedded Wave conversations would be almost impossible.

Mike Elgan, a ComputerWorld columnist, calls email a “pandemic disease” in a new column this week; a rather curious supposition for someone in the tech business who no doubt relies a great deal on email himself. But it’s an interesting piece that merits a thoughtful response.

Mike’s observation is that email is a time-waster that leads to “information overload” that requires too much of a businessperson’s day. He claims that the average executive spends about two hours a day on email, which is probably about right. But let’s look at the big picture and where this argument breaks down. What did executives do before email? I’m old enough to remember those days. Executives spent at least that amount of time dictating letters to secretaries, or into tape recorders for later transcription. Therefore, you had to take into account not only the executive’s time spent writing and dictating, but also the secretary’s time transcribing and typing. Then, on top of the “time spent” line item, you also had an inherent delay. After a letter got dictated and typed, the secretary would then present the letters to the boss at the end of the day for signature, and then they wouldn’t go out until the next day. Then with the snail mail factor added in, communication by letter would take three or four days–and the two hours a day Elgan says is spent on email has to be compared with what was no doubt much more than that in the pre-email days, especially given that two people were involved (boss and secretary) instead of just one.

Even communication within the same company was done with the old “inter-office memo”, which went through the same dictation/typing/signature process, and was then distributed by a mail clerk, so then, you had three people (boss, secretary, mail clerk) involved. Either way, it was inefficient.

Continue reading Is email a waste of time?

Have any of your end users asked you about using microblogging services such as Twitter, Yammer, SocialTextSignals, Socialcast or Present.ly?

If not then you should consider yourself one step ahead of your end users. We’ve all been hearing about Twitter especially during President Obama’s recent address to Congress back in February. And if you follow Twitter at all then you’ve probably heard about the “Cisco Fatty” story of the young twitterer who tweeted that she would hate her work at a job that was recently offered to her by Cisco.

These microblogging services offer a way to send messages via a real-time short messaging service that works over multiple networks and devices. On Twitter, the messages must be under 140 characters in length and can be sent via mobile texting, instant message, or the web.

Continue reading Will Microblogging Replace Email?

Does your email Inbox “runneth” over every day?

If you have emails dating back several months then you’re keeping too much information in your Inbox. And you’re probably having a difficult time trying to find what you’re looking for in the drawer full of email socks!

You need an approach that allows you to work uninterrupted by email, reply to email within a reasonable time, eliminate overdue emails and finally remove email backlog.

When you need to work uninterrupted just turn your email checking off. Turn off your alarms so that you can avoid those pop-up “new email has arrived” alerts or those noisy audible alarms. Of course if you’re waiting some important email to arrive then skip this step.

You could make it a practice to respond to emails within certain time frames. For example, you might decide to respond to your emails within 24 hours if they are not of high importance or considered confidential. And respond to confidential and high importance emails in less than two and four hours respectively.

Continue reading Managing Your Inbox

The Pew Internet and American Life Project has released a new study, titled “The Future of the Internet III”, which takes an educated look at what the Internet will look like in 2020. The results are a little startling, and makes one very concerned about security and privacy in the future. And it would seem that the email administrator will have plenty to worry about.

There will no doubt still be attackers, hackers, spammers and others who will continue to use email and the Internet in inappropriate ways for the purpose of gaining wealth. But much of the risks will be coming from legitimate sources, which will become increasingly aggressive. One of the greatest  concerns is that the study predicts that people will trade privacy for discounts. The study includes quotes from several luminaries, including Nicholas Carr, who wrote, “The Internet will have enabled the monitoring and manipulation of people by businesses and governments on a scale never before imaginable. Most people will have happily traded their privacy–consciously or unconsciously–for consumer benefits such as increased convenience and lower prices. As a result, the line between marketing and manipulation will have largely disappeared.” And I think Nick’s got a good point.

Continue reading The Internet and email in 2020

The State Government Watch blog has an interesting article on how the former head of Hawaii’s Tourism Authority netted a hefty “resignation payment” after he was caught in an ugly email scandal:

The embattled former chief executive of the Hawaii Tourism Authority, Rex Johnson, will receive nearly $300,000, including unused vacation pay, as part of an agreement with the state agency. The tourism agency, which faces significant challenges ahead in guiding Hawaii’s bread-and-butter industry through its most turbulent time, agreed to a resignation payment of $208,181 based on Johnson’s initial annual salary of $240,000 through August 2009. Johnson’s vacation pay, also based on his $115 hourly rate, amounted to $83,304, bringing the total resignation package to $291,486. Johnson resigned Oct. 8 after a state auditor flagged his email for pornography sent to friends via his state laptop. Racist and sexist messages sent during the same period surfaced a few months later.

Yes, that’s right. He was caught with porn and racist emails on his state issued laptop, yet made out like a bandit. Not exactly a deterrent againt violating email policies, is it?

Miriam Cherry over at the Concurring Opinions blog has an interesting post about email bankruptcy, which is the name Wired Magazine has given to the type of overload that comes with receiving so much email that you simply give up and stop trying to manage it. Here’s an excerpt:

I wonder though, if some of us don’t go through varying phases or cycles of email bankruptcy (perhaps selectively so). How many of us keep email open all day? Check emails from the phone? Read email only on weekdays? Read emails only during certain hours in the day? Print all their email out and mark it up (someone down the hall from me actually does this)? Check emails while on vacation? Go through a month where you answer only minimal emails only then to become very chatty the next month?

Continue reading Are you in danger of Email Bankruptcy?