reDesign

I was at the Wright Brothers National Memorial a few weeks ago and struck by the telegram that Orville Wright sent to his father announcing the success of the first machine powered human flights. The message was kept short, probably to keep down costs. It was likely dictated to a telegraph operator, hence Orville’s name is misspelled on the document marking the important occassion.

With all of our new ways of communicating, we’re constantly evolving the language. And despite communication being virtually free — there’s pretty much no additional cost for sending a longer email or chatting with your friends on the phone — the language has gotten more concise. We write as little as is takes to get the message across.

The difficulty of text entry on cell phones is one of the culprits. Short cuts like “r u there?” and “k” save us valuable thumbstrokes. This shorthand has made its way to IM and email.

Even T9, the predictive text entry system on many phones, is a factor. I received a message from a friend saying “Going to beans morgan for a bday party you are more than welcome to john if you want” I knew she meant adams morgan and join. She just kept typing and used the first word T9 guessed.

I often get lazy with T9 and if I think a word isn’t going to be in its dictionary, I use one that I think will be. My friend Patricia Tricia isn’t happy about this. I’ll type “are you there?” because the T9 dictionary doesn’t have textese of “r u.”

I’m also resorting to picture messaging more to make sending messages even easier.

What would the Wright Brothers message look like today? It’d probably be something like: “success 4 flights thu am against 21 mile wind from level w engine power alone. avg spd in air 31 miles. longest 57 secs. tell press. o” Of course there’d be a link to a YouTube video.

And Engadget would be liveblogging the whole thing.

One of the things I love about Facebook is that I don’t get any spam through the system. Sure, I get some friend requests from people I don’t really know and periodically get asked if I want to become a Zombie or a pirate.

I was quite surprised to get a friends request from “Sun Startup Essentials,” a fictitious profile setup to promote Sun.

Clicking on Sun’s name leads to a profile page touting free software and discounted hardware:

It doesn’t seem to be a VAR looking to drive traffic. At the same time, I find it hard to believe that Sun would do something so stupid. But the fake account is in Sun’s Facebook network.

John McKinley, former AOL CTO and now VC, asks “Who will be the first major (Google/Yahoo/Microsoft/AOL) to break ranks and apply a fundamentally new metaphor to email?” There’s been a proliferation in ways to communicate — IM, Facebook, Twitter, blogs, Wikis, SMS, comments.

People have more compelling, more contextual, more effective, and more convenient options to share and interact than ever before, and incumbent forms of communications will be the losers here.

Email as we know it has changed little since the mid-90s. Most of the features have been incremental. The biggest breakthrough was Webmail instead of client-based mail — and that happened in 1996.

John has some great thoughts. Here are my additions, in priority order:

Spam control - One of the reasons I like Facebook messaging is that I know that messages are much more likely to be real — no Viagra or stock pitches. I’d say more than 70% of the mail I get in my Gmail account is spam. I also have had numerous cases of false positives with important personal mail getting sent to the spam folders. As a domain owner, I also get to deal with the bounces from spammers forging my domain name. We need to move to a model where we focus on identifying the good email. (See my blog post on Picture ID for one example.) If the big four would work together to secure email sent among them, it’d be a big step forward.

Security - This strikes me as a business opportunity for the big 4. It amazes me that this far into email, it is less secure than paper mail. I’d love to sign up for e-billing with all my credit card companies and utilities, but it’s a pain. The lack of email security requires that I get an email reminder (hope that the email doesn’t get spam filtered), log into their site and then view a PDF. I just want them to send me a copy of my bill that I can view, store and search. You could probably charge for this - 1 or 2 cents per bill is a lot cheaper than the post office. You could also provide the ancillary service (which is becoming even more important) of authenticating the emails to prevent phishing.

Smarts - I wrote a blog post about smart email a while back. Many of the emails I get are from computers - banks, credit card companies, airlines, etc. They’re all generated off templates. Understand them and do the right thing. Put my bill due notices on the calendar, along with my itineraries. Show me when that package from Amazon is going to arrive. Automatically archive all the sales and deals that have expired. I don’t think entity extraction is good enough for this. Google has been trying for a while with Gmail and the results have been fairly poor. It will likely require the mailers to follow microformats and append the data in machine readable form. But if the Big 4 were to agree on a framework for the formats, it would take off. You could start with vCal and work from there.

Recommended reading:

• Why Private Messages Suck

There was a comment in Paul Kedrosky’s blog last month asking about the real value of social networks:

Facebook, MySpace, I don’t get it: personalize a webpage template and exchange links, I mean friendships, with people.

Since I responded to the comment, I thought it was worth expanding on and posting here. Here are some of the key reasons I believe people have taken to services like Facebook.

People like to talk about themselves. (Including me.) The explosion in blogs is just one example. But blogging is a lot of work. You have to pick a blog platform, pick a name for the blog and write posts. Each post is a fair amount of work to assemble. (I spend 20-45 minutes on a post, depending on how much research is involved.)

At AOL, I talked frequently about microblogging — allowing people to quickly and easily express their thoughts without all the overhead of blogging. Lowering the bar increases participation.

That’s exactly what social networking sites do. I can go into the Flixster Movies app on Facebook, search for a movie, click a star rating and write out a one-paragraph review. The actors, title, summary and movie picture are pre-populated. By contrast, every time I come to WordPress I face a blank screen. It’s like the difference between a fill-in-the blank test and an essay question.

People want to feel connected, but they don’t want to do a lot of work to be connected. Social networks allow us to keep in touch with many more people than we could ordinarily keep track of. I have many former colleagues, college friends and other acquaintances who I want to stay in touch with. I want to know what’s going on in their lives, but I don’t have time to call and email everyone. One of my favorite applications is the slickr screensaver; it taps into flickr and lets me see the latest in my friends lives when my computer is idle.

These networks also help me discover common interests with people I know. When I visited Carl Kasell’s profile on Facebook, I found that six of my friends are also Carl fans.

There’s also the value of persistence: with changing email addresses, phone numbers, jobs, it’s not always easy to find someone. On LinkedIn and Facebook, I’m connected to the person, not the specific contact address.

Email today is a disaster. With all the spams, scams and other nasties, the closed environment on Facebook is a godsend. I know when I get a message on Facebook that it’s most likely not spam. There’s no chance that the message will get trapped by an overly aggressive spam filter (I get way too many false positives) — you’re more likely to reach me through a comment on my blog or a Facebook message than by email.

Discussions elsewhere have gotten out of hand. Pretty much any blog post or discussion that gets more than a few commenters on most sites devolves into personal attacks. When conversations involve real identity the discussion is usually (though certainly not always) more civil.

As the song goes, sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name, and they’re always glad you came.

More on: social networking, Facebook

Email. I use it everyday and I mostly hate it. We’re stuck with a system that was designed decades ago in the kumbaya days of the Internet when most people who were connected to the Internet meant well and getting an email was exciting. In several ways, email today is worse than even postal mail. It’s less secure. You get more junk mail (there’s little economic disincentive to spam).

Because email is processed by computer, your email application could do a lot of things for you automatically. Most of the email I get is computer generated:

• Travel reservations, including flight, hotel and cars.
• Payment reminders from your banks and credit card companies.
• E-commerce order receipts and shipping confirmations.
• Account registration confirmations.

All of this information arrives in your mailbox without context, making it difficult to sort through it. Need to find a travel reservation later? I searched on “united airlines” in my mailbox and got hundreds of results, including frequent flier statements, e-check in reminders, weekly promotional emails. Even searching on “united itinerary” brought up 60+ emails since the beginning of the year. (Most of which weren’t either United or itineraries.)

I try to add some context to messages when they come in through a series of filters. These include cryptic rules like IF SENDER = “UNITED- CONFIRMATION @ UNITED.COM” then add labels “Travel” and “Receipts”. I’ve created more than 40 of these rules.

Most people, of course, won’t do this. Nor should they have to. United should be able to differentiate among itineraries, frequent flier statements, promotions and other mail in machine readable form. Whether you want to call them tags, labels or something else, email should support this kind of context.

I’ve written before about email and calendar data. With this type of context, your email application could keep the most relevant information top of mind. Upcoming trips could be separated automatically from past itinieraries. Sale emails from retailers could be sorted into “ongoing”, “expiring soon” and “expired”.

It’s time to turn the daily fight with spam on its head. Mail services should try to identify the mail I should pay attention to, instead of trying to just identify the junk.

One way to do this is to implement picture e-mail ID. When you log into your email, you’d see a strip of pictures of people you know who have sent you new mail.

On my cell phone, I have pictures associated with my most frequent contacts. A friend once asked me, “Why do you bother with pictures of your friends on your phone? Do you need help remembering what we look like?”

The answer is that people process pictures much faster than text. It takes me less time to determine who is calling from a picture than from just the name. Reading my newsfeeds, it’s very quick to get through Engadget - I can get the gist of a post and make a read/no read decision based on the picture.

Gmail has picture support built in to its Contacts, but you can see the pictures only by clicking on a contact record or rolling over the name. This is useful in case I forget what someone looks like, but it doesn’t help in filtering or prioritizing which messages I should read.

Buddy icons could be used in place of pictures. AOL’s new Cayman email beta uses people’s buddy icons, in a similar way to Gmail. If you rollover a name in the contact list, it will show the buddy icon. The buddy icon is also shown at the top of a message once you click on it. Again, this isn’t helpful in choosing what I want to read.

More on: aol, email, google, spam

Every week, I get an email from United Airlines telling me about their e-fares for the coming weekend. Almost every week, I ignore this email because the information isn’t relevant to me. This week’s email includes fares from Burbank to San Francisco, Wichita to Denver and White Plains to Chicago.

United knows that I live in the DC area. United also knows (from having years of my frequent flier history) the places I go to frequently. If they used all that data to only send me relevant offers, I’d be more likely to read their email. If they highlighted deals to San Francisco or Seattle, there’s a very good chance I’ll bite.

Despite all the talk about companies using mass stores of data to provide laser-targeted offers, the reality is far from it. United isn’t alone. American Express has 14 years of my purchasing history, yet not one of the six “CustomExtras” offers on my last statement was relevant.

I’m even willing to give United more data than they already have. I’d be happy to fill out a form listing all the places I want to go. Have a last-minute bargain to Prague or Istanbul or Sydney? Sign me up. I’m glad to help you fill those empty seats. United doesn’t even have the challenge of developing custom creative — all they need is the city and the price.

I got an unpleasant surprise today - an avalanche of spam in 90 minutes. And technically, I was the one sending it. Or at least that’s what the mailservers thought.

Our current email system was created in a time when there was a lot of trust — if you sent an email saying you were Rocky Agrawal, the other computers assumed you were. They still do. You can be anyone @ mydomain, just by claiming that you are. And that’s exactly what spammers are doing. They’re sending messages claiming to be from Paula547@ Tarnowski@ etc.

Those messages made their way across the Internet to mailboxes that have been deleted, never existed, or were full. Beginning at 2:24, my mailbox filled with a torrent of bounced mail notices, vacation replies and mailbox full notices.

And there’s pretty much nothing I can do about it.

There is at least one initiative that would help end this scourge, but it has seen little adoption. The Sender Policy Framework allows domain owners to specify which mail servers are authorized to send messages for a given domain. I have my SPF record set to allow only gmail.com to send messages on my behalf.  If a mail server checks the incoming message against the SPF record, it knows that the message is forged. It should also know not to respond to the message. Unfortunately, many mail servers don’t bother to do this check. A few did the check and then sent me messages saying that the message (which I didn’t send) failed the SPF check. Gee, thanks.

I’ve been using Gmail for about two years now. For my needs (read: search and wireless), it’s the best email product out there. Paul K. pointed at Better Gmail, a Firefox extension that makes it even better, solving a few nagging issues.

The extension is really a collection of a number of scripts that improve Gmail. There are 18 options total. My favorites:

• Attachment icons. In the list view, it shows different icons for files that are attached to messages based on file type.
• Filter assistant. Filters are the bastard stepchild of email. They’ve been around for decades, can make managing your mail much easier, yet they’re typically so complicated that even power users like me don’t bother creating them. Filter assistant makes it a piece of cake.
• Label colors. Puts bright, bold chicklets in place of Gmail’s labels. I use this in conjunction with filters to identify different types of mail in my Inbox. I can easily scan the list and figure out what needs attention.
• One click conversations. Adds in an icon next to the names of people who send you mail. Clicking on the icon brings up all recent conversations with that person.
• Secure. This forces Gmail into secure mode. I highly recommend this if you frequently use Wifi. I recommend it even if you don’t.

These are must-have features that really should be part of Gmail itself.

Attachment reminder, date search and signature float are also nice add-ons, especially if you use your Gmail account for business purposes.

One of the key ways I get around the spam scourge is to use a separate email address for close friends, family and important business contacts. I don’t use this address for anything else. As a result, the people closest to me don’t have to worry about their messages getting caught in spam filters and I can easily zero in on the most important messages.

I’ve started getting spam to this address. It’s a complex address, so it’s not really prone to dictionary attacks. As far as I can tell, someone entered my address on a third-party site.

A lot of sites are pushing users to email a link or to invite their friends as part of the sign up process. Some even go so far as to offer to import your address book from Outlook, Gmail or AOL.

Please just say no. When you’re signing up for a service, you often have very little information about how that site will use the data. If you want me to read a story or sign up for something, just shoot me an email or IM the old-fashioned way.

You wouldn’t write your friend’s email address on a bathroom wall, would you? Giving it to a Web site operator is even worse. You don’t know where that address will end up.