Business needs a solid infrastructure, folks. Used to be I could make a phone call and be reasonably assured it would work. This creaky interweb thing with no non-repudiation or predictable response/availability is gonna come crashing down.

As far as all the new stuff, eventually everyone is going to realize the key to personal stress reduction/productivity maximization is being able to control the rate and volume of information. At one extreme, there’s the Cuckoo’s Egg guy, who simply turned off all access. At the other extreme there’s twittervision. In between we have email bankruptcy, various techs-of-the-moment that come and go, and hucksters. Trust is the essence of all business, the sociobiologists even think it is hardwired into us. So what are you going to trust, email? Meatworld face-to-face salespeople? Your own personal Jesus in the video booth? People you got high with when you were a teenager? [A-Z,0-9*]logs?

Business needs a solid infrastructure, folks. Used to be I could make a phone call and be reasonably assured it would work. This creaky interweb thing with no non-repudiation or predictable response/availability is gonna come crashing down.

As far as all the new stuff, eventually everyone is going to realize the key to personal stress reduction/productivity maximization is being able to control the rate and volume of information. At one extreme, there’s the Cuckoo’s Egg guy, who simply turned off all access. At the other extreme there’s twittervision. In between we have email bankruptcy, various techs-of-the-moment that come and go, and hucksters. Trust is the essence of all business, the sociobiologists even think it is hardwired into us. So what are you going to trust, email? Meatworld face-to-face salespeople? Your own personal Jesus in the video booth? People you got high with when you were a teenager? [A-Z,0-9*]logs?

I found a case study here at Oracle, a guy 2 years out of college with a robust network of college friends. He doesn’t care about work creeping over into Facebook. He’s not as active as before, but he uses it to stay in touch with college friends. I need to ask him about his thoughts on email.

Anyway, work is already all over Facebook. It’s become a way to maintain professional relationships too. It’s a communication medium for millions of people. Facebook has designs on being an interweb within the interwebs, and they’re leading the charge right now. LinkedIn and MySpace are following the platform approach.

Dunno looks like q.e.d. to me. But I’m not above making a wild prediction just to get your attention
Jake

I found a case study here at Oracle, a guy 2 years out of college with a robust network of college friends. He doesn’t care about work creeping over into Facebook. He’s not as active as before, but he uses it to stay in touch with college friends. I need to ask him about his thoughts on email.

Anyway, work is already all over Facebook. It’s become a way to maintain professional relationships too. It’s a communication medium for millions of people. Facebook has designs on being an interweb within the interwebs, and they’re leading the charge right now. LinkedIn and MySpace are following the platform approach.

Dunno looks like q.e.d. to me. But I’m not above making a wild prediction just to get your attention
Jake

I know all of you remember the beginning of the Bubble, about 10 years ago. I was right out of college, full of great ideas, wanting to share interweb goodness. Then I hit the corporate wall.

Oracle’s 10.6 SC was the rage then, but guess what? In the next year or so, 10.7 NCA replaced it as we embraced the interweb. So, maybe I have a bleeding edge job, but still, I think social networks will take over business communication.

They are really easy, and you can pre-populate them with all your employees. Plus, there are other benefits.

Dunno, I hope we can do a check in 3 years from now. So I can say “told you so”.

Jake

I know all of you remember the beginning of the Bubble, about 10 years ago. I was right out of college, full of great ideas, wanting to share interweb goodness. Then I hit the corporate wall.

Oracle’s 10.6 SC was the rage then, but guess what? In the next year or so, 10.7 NCA replaced it as we embraced the interweb. So, maybe I have a bleeding edge job, but still, I think social networks will take over business communication.

They are really easy, and you can pre-populate them with all your employees. Plus, there are other benefits.

Dunno, I hope we can do a check in 3 years from now. So I can say “told you so”.

Jake

Email as a mode of communication is a relatively young thing, but it has been incredibly successful because is is/was so much better than the alternatives and so simple. But the email mode was invented at a time before all of the content uploading/publishing came to be. Bringing us to a stage now where we are starting to feel cramped by the artificial walls between these different facilities, and forced to do really stupid things by convention (like mail MB files to 20 collegues, who then change and mail back to the group).

Which makes me feel that this we’re not seeing a “battle of modes”, because that assumes the modes are somehow fixed. I think what we’ll be surprised by in the years to come is how some smart cookies bend and morph the modes into something new and better.

In other words, I’m sure I’ll still be using gmail in 5 years time …. but it won’t be a “mail client” in the sense we understand it today.

Perhaps another interesting question is whether I’ll still have a _corporate_ “mail” facility in 5-10 years time..

Email as a mode of communication is a relatively young thing, but it has been incredibly successful because is is/was so much better than the alternatives and so simple. But the email mode was invented at a time before all of the content uploading/publishing came to be. Bringing us to a stage now where we are starting to feel cramped by the artificial walls between these different facilities, and forced to do really stupid things by convention (like mail MB files to 20 collegues, who then change and mail back to the group).

Which makes me feel that this we’re not seeing a “battle of modes”, because that assumes the modes are somehow fixed. I think what we’ll be surprised by in the years to come is how some smart cookies bend and morph the modes into something new and better.

In other words, I’m sure I’ll still be using gmail in 5 years time …. but it won’t be a “mail client” in the sense we understand it today.

Perhaps another interesting question is whether I’ll still have a _corporate_ “mail” facility in 5-10 years time..

Keanu love the pithy observation. Funny too, considering the future me email service reminded me of your namesake in Bill & Ted’s. “Remember a trashcan.” Good stuff.

Jake

Keanu love the pithy observation. Funny too, considering the future me email service reminded me of your namesake in Bill & Ted’s. “Remember a trashcan.” Good stuff.

Jake

If we took an example where there was a “XYZ Supplier” network who were trying to sell product FGH to customer ABC then how will the communication work and be filtered? Visibility is the big problem here because if it’s done wrong then either XYZ Supplier would get to see all of ABC’s internal messages, or perhaps even worse might then be considered “within” the network and so could talk to anyone in ABC.

It doesn’t mean that this is impossible, it’s just that the movement of information across “untrusted” domains and relationships is a “hard” problem and it might take 3-5 years in order to get something that many business communities will actually put their trust into.

If we took an example where there was a “XYZ Supplier” network who were trying to sell product FGH to customer ABC then how will the communication work and be filtered? Visibility is the big problem here because if it’s done wrong then either XYZ Supplier would get to see all of ABC’s internal messages, or perhaps even worse might then be considered “within” the network and so could talk to anyone in ABC.

It doesn’t mean that this is impossible, it’s just that the movement of information across “untrusted” domains and relationships is a “hard” problem and it might take 3-5 years in order to get something that many business communities will actually put their trust into.