Inertia and Separation Anxiety Drive Design
This article about reluctance among users to give up Outlook as their mail client of choice underscores an issue that everyone in product design/development faces. People hate change, especially at work. When it comes to computers, most people have a very low tolerance threshold for failure, even if the service or web app is free. [...]
You Know You Love Email
Everyone loves to complain about too much email. But face it, you know you love it, or at least, you have a love-hate relationship. Email is today’s busy meter. You know, that measuring stick that shows how busy you are. By the way, is it uniquely American to brag about how much work we do? [...]
What’s New in Connect 4.0?
As I mentioned last week, we’ve released the 4.0 version of Connect, which includes a boat-load of new stuff. Our main goals for this release were: Put the focus on people, not on objects. Make it dead simple to share anything. Aggregate information by supporting multiple sources. Provide intelligent filtering for easy viewing. Consolidate output [...]
Reply-All RIFF’ed
When I read this one, I had to wonder if April 1 had come early. “Nielsen Deletes Reply-To-All Button” But it’s true. Nielsen’s CIO sent a memo alerting all Nielsen employees that that they “Reply to All” feature from Microsoft Outlook, their corporate email client. Oh, the irony if the memo had been an email. [...]
My Favorite Reply-All Storm Yet
Not much content here, but I had to share this story because it’s one I’ve discussed in the past. The headline from the AP: “Reply-all e-mail storm hits State Department“ If you don’t feel like clicking through, this is one you’ve probably experienced. Someone sends an email (in this case, a blank one) to a [...]
GMail is a Platform, Have You Noticed?
I can remember back in 2004 how geeked I was when I got my invite to Google’s brand-spanking new web mail, GMail. As promised, it was a) different (email threads), b) fast (AJAX-fu) and c) big (unlimited quota). You’re all familiar with GMail, right? If not, why not? Anyway, GMail has been my primary personal [...]
Email: A Love/Hate Relationship
We all use email, like it or not. Even Gen Y uses email to communicate with “old people“, despite their preference for SMS, IM, and social networks. How many accounts do you have? Probably at least two, one for work communication, one for personal mail. Boston College has recognized this trend, announcing that incoming freshmen [...]
Let’s Take a Legal Break
Something has been bothering me for years about our (American) legal system. Pause for snarky comments. As a longtime reader of Slashdot, I’ve followed the legal aspects of technical lawsuits passively for years, especially court decisions that affect overall precedent, e.g. RIAA and MPIAA decisions as they pertain to P2P, cyber-bullying, spamming, anti-trust in tech, [...]
Email Pain Point Solved by Social Network
Stop me if you’ve heard this one. Someone sends an email to a distribution list. Someone replies to all, and people start asking for removal, also replying to all. Snarky comments ensue. Inbox is stuffed with replies to all. You know the drill. So, yesterday morning, someone sent an innocuous request to a sales distribution [...]
Back to Work
So, I’ve returned from my staycation officially, and thanks to scheduled posts, it was almost like I never left. Everyone wins. I’ve made it through several hundred emails; incidentally, would you take a job that had in its description of responsibilities: To send and receive thousands of emails each month. Just wondering, since we all [...]
What’s Left to Murder-Death-Kill?
You know it’s a good day when you can drop a Demolition Man reference. It’s a weird time right now. Intertubes-based communication is crowding older, established methods, and as digital natives (i.e. Millenials) enter the workforce, their preferred means for communicating are at odds with what we’re all used to using to, you know, do [...]
Do You Zombie Reply to All?
I’ve mused in the past about whether spam is really a problem or not. I find it a minor annoyance that I can easily ignore, like ads, but I can see how it would be both annoying in some situations and in others, a major problem. Spam in my work inbox is limited mostly to [...]
Does Spam Still Work?
I got a 419 email today in my work inbox. This is pretty rare, since I guess Global IT does a great job catching spam, especially compared to my webmail accounts. Normally, in my webmail, I’d just delete an move on, but since this is so rare in my work inbox, I read the mail, [...]
