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

A blog entry on Twitter yesterday confirmed that an outside party gained unauthorized access to Twitter. Although the blog entry notes that no account information was altered or removed, there were at least ten individual accounts that were viewed.

A more detailed report on Information Week provides a little more meat to the issue. Apparently, it began when a Twitter product manager’s Yahoo! mail account was hacked, using the same password recovery hack that was used to compromise Sarah Palin’s email account. Shortly after, someone known as “Hacker Croll” posted screenshots of Twitter’s administrative console on the Web, including admin information about Barack Obama’s  and Britney Spears’ accounts. The attacker explains on his post that access to Twitter was gained through the Twitter administrator’s Yahoo! account by resetting the secret question. The mailbox contained a message with the Twitter password, which gave the hacker access to Twitter. 

This is just one more example of why you should never use public email like Yahoo! for official or sensitive business of any sort.

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?