Following tech with the consumer in mind » email

Firms Battling Information Overload

techconsumer — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 08:00:21 +0000

Due to the growth of emails, instant messaging, and cell phones, multiple surveys have described that work productivity has been negatively affected. It may appear ironic but some of the corporations responsible for the above technologies are now trying to find the solution.

The big technology companies such as Microsoft, Intel, Google, and IBM have created a non-profit group, the Overload Research Group, to examine the problem and come up with cultural and technological solutions to help workers.

Based on many employers, comprehensive solutions are needed for the reduction digital interruptions. For instance, RescueTime, a company which researches computer habits, discovered that a typical IT worker who sits at the computer all day, checks his email 50 times, uses instant messaging 77 times, and visits 40 websites. The study of 40,000 people used a tracking software installed on their computers.

The research company Basex estimated the business cost to be more than $650 billion annually in productivity lost due to unneeded interruptions. Much of the cost originates from the time it requires people to focus again.

There are basic software tools currently being developed to reduce distractions. Google recently developed “E-Mail Addict” which allows a workers to cut themselves off of their email for 15 minutes. However, users can cheat simply by hitting the escape button.

Intel initiated 2 studies last year with 300 engineers and other employees from a microchip design group to examine this problem. The first study looked at employees who were encouraged not to use digital as well as in-person contact for 4 hours on Tuesday mornings. Laminated cards that said ‘quiet time’ were posted in the workplace to remind the workers of this. After a few weeks, employees found the conditions too strict, but it did have an impact. Almost 75% of participants supported extending this approach for the all employees.

In the second study, named “zero e-mail Fridays,” employees were encouraged to use face-to-face but not digital communication for that day. 30% of employees favored this approach, and 60% recommended that it would be used throughout the company.

MySpace: Emails My Password But Says “Keep It Secret. Keep It Safe.”

Bob Caswell — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 19:39:17 +0000

I picked on search engine Mahalo as an example of a company emailing its customers passwords. I mentioned how having your password floating around openly on mail servers can defeat the purpose of having a password in the first place. Mahalo’s founder and CEO, Jason Calacanis, joined the discussion and some good thoughts were shared from both sides of the issue.

Today I found out that MySpace is on the list of companies sending out passwords through email. I finally signed up (that could be a separate conversation, why I’ve ignored MySpace till now) and promptly got a welcome email with my password staring back at me. MySpace, though, takes it one step further and adds insult to injury by saying “Keep it secret. Keep it safe.” right below my visible password. As if I had a choice at that point, MySpace, you just made it less secret and less safe.

But, of course, I used a I-don’t-care-as-much-if-others-know password that I wouldn’t use for other “important” sites. And I’m sure that the hundreds of millions of MySpace users do the same (yeah, right). In all seriousness, though, I can see how certain sites don’t need the same level of security as others. As an example, there is an obvious difference between MySpace and your bank in terms of security.

In reality, though, there’s a wide spectrum of sites and services protected by passwords. It’s not black and white with only “banks” on the one side and “social networking” on the other. So who should decide which service deserves what level of protection? Well, in this case, it’s my opinion that it’s in the best interest of any company protecting your information with a password to avoid sending that password insecurely over email.

But assuming a world where there will always be companies that send passwords in emails, the very least they could do is tell you this before you decide on your password. That way, you’d know to what degree a company values the protection of your information before you decide on what password to give them.

One very simple implementation of this is that of a company showing you your password as you choose it. You’d then know that this should be a less important type of password. In fact, I’m not sure why asterisks are necessary to “hide” your password as you’re typing it the first time if 30 seconds later the same password previously hidden by asterisks is visible on screen in your email.

However the “less secure” message is conveyed before you create your password, is it too much to ask for this kind of disclosure from companies?

Note: This article is cross-posted at BobCaswell.com.

Twitter Review: Waste of Time or Extremely Valuable?

Bob Caswell — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 15:41:51 +0000

So I finally gave in and started using Twitter this past weekend (if you’re on Twitter, follow me at twitter.com/bobcaswell). What is Twitter? It’s a mix of instant messaging, email, Facebook, and text messaging. It’s a network of users that follow each other. Here’s how it works:

It’s quick and easy to sign up; you just need a username, password, and email address. Once in, you can have it scan your email contacts to see if you know anyone already using Twitter. Or, it allows you to quickly send invitations to anyone you’d like. One way or another, you need some friends before getting started. The whole point of Twitter is to answer the question “What are you doing?” in 140 characters are less. Your friends instantaneously see a trail of your answers, and you see a feed of their latest answers as well.

If none of your real life friends are using Twitter (which is mostly the case for me), you can start making friends by following anyone who seems interesting. For me, it wasn’t hard to quickly find and follow 150 or so pseudo- friends (that is, people who I already know from their blogging online even if I don’t know them in person). And each time you add someone to your following list, they get an email from you. If you don’t know where to start to find friends, check out the Twitter public timeline, which is a running list of all “tweets” (messages) updated every four minutes.

Some people like to keep their following list limited and won’t follow you just because you follow them (which is just fine). But others will add you as a friend (i.e., follow you) after you begin following them (like entrepreneurship celebrity Guy Kawasaki who added me within minutes of me adding him). So, in short, Twitter relationships can be summed up as follows:

I can follow you, and you can follow me.
I can follow you and you don’t follow me.
You can follow me, and I don’t follow you.

Twitter can also be setup easily for your cellphone. In fact, that’s what it’s designed for (the tweet limit of 140 characters is so that it works well with cellphone text messaging). This makes for a lot of tweets that read something like, “bored, waiting in line at…”

So what’s the purpose of Twitter? The Twitter FAQ states it as, “Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co-workers to communicate and stay connected.” But from what I’ve seen, people use it more for other reasons. Marshall Kirkpatrick explains how he uses it to find the latest breaking tech stories. NBC, CBS, ABC Family and MTV are using it as a marketing platform. And of the 150 friends I’m following so far? A good chunk seem to use it almost exclusively for alerting everyone when they have a new post on their blog.

Not that there’s anything wrong with any of these uses, mind you. In fact, I’m inclined to be one of the users that adds most anyone who either seems at least mildly interesting or has already added me. I don’t think Twitter should be confused for email (i.e., a service where you generally scan/read every message). I’m inclined to use it as more of a zeitgeist or snapshot of the latest happenings of those I follow. Overall, I like it and will likely contribute / check others’ contributions frequently.

But it’s interesting for me to see how some have already claimed it to be a wasteful addiction that should be bridled. Well, true, but couldn’t that be said of anything used in excess? If you need it, here’s a 12-step program for email addicts that can just as easily be applied to any technology addiction. Incidentally, Twitter is already popular enough to have had a third party (Twitterholic) create a list of the top 100 most popular Twitter users.

Overall, I think I like Twitter. Is it a waste of time? Maybe. Is it useful? Maybe. However you’d like to classify it, it’s at least an interesting experiment in communication.

Bad Form: Companies Still Send Passwords via Email

Bob Caswell — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 15:06:26 +0000

Let’s face it; we all reuse the same password for login accounts all over the Internet. At best, some of us create a few passwords through which we rotate.

So why is it that some companies still insist on sending me my password via email right after I create my online account? The reason I have a password in the first place is so that it doesn’t flow back and forth openly in cyberspace only to reside peacefully on multiple mail servers.

This type of action, to me, is a sure sign of amateurs at work. In fact, it’s the lazy man approach for me to give (or take away) initial credibility to any company, startup or established: see how they handle the process of creating an online account.

So who gets picked on today? Search engine Mahalo, which is too bad, really, since they otherwise have plenty going for them. In their own words: “Mahalo is a human-powered search engine that creates organized, comprehensive, and spam free search results for the most popular search terms.”

It’s a fairly useful site and doesn’t require an account for much of what you can get out of it. But there are certain features and functions you do need an account for. So I signed up without hesitation and trusted the site subconsciously by using one of my “real” passwords. When I received the subsequent welcome email, there my password was, staring right back at me.

My only workaround to this all-too-common problem is to sign up with any new service with a token I-don’t-care-if-you-know-my-password password only to change it to a real password after a) I receive that initial “thanks for signing up, here’s your account info” email and see that the password was not included and b) find that I am interested in using the service for longer than just my first time of messing around.

But even then, I’ve seen some companies send out a “thank you for changing your password” update email which shows both your new and old password. (I’m not sure how Mahalo handles this; I haven’t gotten that far with them.)

What can make it even more of an eye roller is when the situation is thick with irony. I remember last year: An otherwise reputable affiliate program I signed up for wanted to make sure that my password was at least eight characters long and included both numbers and letters. It was then promptly sent out to my email. Wow. Thanks for making sure it was a good password!

Now, Jason Calacanis, the founder / CEO behind Mahalo seems like a reasonable guy. I’ve emailed him to ask for this to be changed (or an explanation). I can already give you the generic explanation I’ve heard before from other companies: “If you forget your password, you can just look it up in your email.” Here’s a better solution:

If I forget my password, I email support at mahalo.com (or whatever appropriate address) saying as much. Mahalo then should email me (only to the email registered in my account) a randomly generated temp password that only works for a limited amount of time. But it’s enough to get me into my account and allow me to change my password.

Is it a perfect solution? No. Just the first simple solution that comes to mind (that I’ve seen implemented elsewhere). There are other methods, too, like asking you for your mother’s maiden name / third grade teacher / favorite animal, etc. at the time of account creation. The site then asks you one of those questions if you’ve forgotten your password. Even then, though, it shouldn’t just let you in. Again, it should send a temp password to the email address on file.

I’m no security expert. But I do know that most any solution is better than automated open emailing of passwords.

*Update* Thanks to Jason Calacanis for responding (see comments below) and opening up for discussion via Twitter. For anyone interested, feel free to follow me on Twitter here.

Note: This article is cross-posted at BobCaswell.com.

How Much Is All Your Email Worth? Answer: $50

Bob Caswell — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 15:32:52 +0000

This past week a national cable and high-speed Internet provider by the name of Charter Communications accidentally deleted all the contents of 14,000 active email accounts. A spokeswoman for the company explained that there is no way for them to retrieve anything that was erased. The spokeswoman offered this explanation and apology:

“We really are sincerely sorry for having had this happen and do apologize to all those folks who were affected by the error… During this maintenance we erroneously deleted active accounts along with the others. It’s never happened before. They are taking steps to make sure it never happens again.”

As a result, the company has decided to give every affected customer a $50 credit on their bill. So there you have it: according to Charter, at least, your online email account and data is worth about $50. The company, which has around 2.6 million high-speed Internet subscribers, could have done worse than taking a $700,000 hit. But the irresponsibility of the situation shows that they could have done much, much better.

Indeed, how can a multi-million dollar company with millions of subscribers not have any sort of data backup? But then again, who’s really to blame here? Charter offers this “free” email account to any of its customers who pay for Internet service. And it’s likely to have the same terms of service as all the freebie email accounts available online: you know, the “we provide no guarantee and accept no liability, use at your risk” type of agreement no one actually reads.

The point is that, in many ways, $50 is quite generous even if obviously undervaluing most anyone’s personal value of all emails. But imagine if this was Google (Gmail), Yahoo, or Microsoft (Hotmail) making the mistake. Would they give you anything? Answer: No.

So the moral of the story is just how much we take for granted products or services we pay nothing for. Perhaps I’m alone here, but I would actually pay something reasonable for an online email account if the repercussions of a screw up valued my collective emails at a price well above $0 to $50. But that reality doesn’t exist and is part of the reason I still use a desktop email client (Thunderbird) to download and save all my emails locally.

Email Signatures with Famous Quotes: Amusing or Annoying?

Bob Caswell — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 18:40:00 +0000

The popularity of adding some sort of quote as part of your email signature is on the rise (see discussion here and here). But some can be taken differently than intended. For example: “Too often we underestimate the power of a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around.” Quotes like these can come across as a bit preachy by presuming readers are insensitive and complacent.

But some emailers claim these types of quotes can add personality to otherwise dry business emails. Aaron Dragushan likes such quotes so much that he has put together a collection of 4,467 quotations on his site Coolsig.com. Some examples: “A friend is someone who knows the song in your heart and can sing it back to you when you have forgotten the words” and “If I ever get real rich, I hope I’m not real mean to poor people, like I am now.”

The first example above falls prey to a similar presumption as the “underestimate” quote, that of picking something cliche (in this case, defining “friendship”) and referencing it in a supposed unique way to awaken the reader into realizing how to be a better person through a profound way. At least, this is a possible interpretation. The second quote, being a Jack Handy, is funny, at least to this reader. But is it for everyone?

Some emailers have resorted to automating quote rotation so that no particular email signature gets stale with time and over-usage while others explain that “the foot of an email might not be the best place for self-expression.”

Here are few more examples:

“Work like you don’t need the money, love like you’ve never been hurt, and dance like you do when nobody’s watching.” (Yet another ready-to-be-interpreted-offensively stating how one should live to be a better person.)

“In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But in practice, there is.” (This one is clever but could definitely get old if seen on a daily basis every time you email with a coworker.)

“‘Keep on Truckin’ — Winston Churchill” (The classic I’ve-lost-all-credibility email signature mismatching quote with quoter.)

So are emails becoming the next bumper sticker or personalized t-shirt? Is this a good thing or a bad thing?

Note: This article is cross-posted at BobCaswell.com.

TC News: Yahoo & Google Changing Email, Wal-Mart Sells Out of $200 PC, More Ways to Pay Online

Bob Caswell — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 15:59:55 +0000

div>TechConsumer News is a feature we started out of a hobby of tracking the latest happenings within the consumer related technology sphere. The goal is to provide a concise, compiled overview of the most intriguing stories from the last few days. Feel free to give us feedback or send us tips. If you like what you find, you can subscribe via email or RSS.

Here’s the latest in TechConsumer news:

Brad Garlinghouse, who runs the communication and community products for Yahoo, spilled the beans on something Yahoo is working on that he calls “Inbox 2.0.” The idea is to combine aspects of social networking with email. For example, messages are displayed more prominently from people who are more important to you. “The inbox you have today is based on what people send you, not what you want to see,” Garlinghouse said. “We can say, here are the messages from the people you care about most.” Yahoo Mail will soon have other info about your friends as well that can be linked to a profile page. Google wasn’t as forthright with its plans but eluded that it was working on something similar.

Wal-Mart recently put on a sale the first mass-market $200 desktop PC (pictured above). The spec of the system is low, of course, 1.5 GHz VIA C7 CPU embedded onto a Mini-ITX motherboard, 512MB of RAM, and an 80GB hard drive. But it does everything you can do with a regular computer: surf the web, send and receive email, use a word processor and spreadsheet program, chat with friends, edit photos and pictures, even burn DVDs, etc. But it can’t really play games and uses Linux instead of Windows. Regardless, the first 10,000 units available were sold out in two weeks.

Consumers who worry about identify theft and fraud from online purchases can take comfort in the fact that retailers are using more alternative payment systems. Online retailers on average accepted 2.6 different payment options this year, up from 2.1 in 2005. Among those payments that don’t use credit cards directly:

•Bill Me Later sends customers a monthly bill and lets them pay by check or money order.

•Google Checkout and PayPal Express Checkout let customers sign up and provide financial details only to them rather than giving personal information to retailers.

United States Responsible for 5x More Spam Than Any Other Country

Bob Caswell — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 15:16:15 +0000

div>Sophos, an internet-security company, released numbers on the amount of spam sent per country between this past July and September. And the United States is responsible for about 30% of it (see chart below). Despite legislation such as the CAN-SPAM Act, the U.S. hasn’t been able to do much to stop spam. And spam is getting more complicated: fake e-cards, virus-infected PDF attachments, and worthless MP3 files or ringtons are the latest methods. In fact, according to anti-spam company MXSweep, nearly one in ten spam e-mails attach MP3 files or ringtones.

I guess I wouldn’t know much about this. I use Google’s gmail and rarely see any spam.

New Gmail Interface Coming? See Screenshot

Bob Caswell — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 13:22:42 +0000

div>My brother Tom noticed a difference when using Gmail yesterday. When he moused-over a certain email in his inbox, a popup-like box appeared with a preview of that email. It seemed pretty cool even if apparently not ready for prime time. Google pulled the plug on the new feature just minutes after he played around with it but not before he got a screenshot! See image below and click through for full screen version:

*Update* From the comments: “Sorry. False alarm. I just realized that this is a feature of “Better Gmail,” a firefox plugin I started using a few weeks ago. I must have right-clicked by accident on my laptop. Still, it’s a pretty cool feature for those who want it. Better Gmail also allows you to add your Google Reader onto the same page, if you want to.”

*Update 2* See this post over at Google Blogoscoped for screenshots of what’s being called Gmail 2.0.

Erasing or Changing Emails Even After They’re Delivered: Good Idea?

Bob Caswell — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 17:40:21 +0000

div>BigString is a company set on eliminating “email sender remorse” by allowing you as the email sender to control emails even after they’ve landed in the recipient’s inbox. I was intrigued both from a technical perspective (i.e., how does it work?) and from a sociological perspective (i.e., what does potentially needing this technology tell us about ourselves?). The company even hosts a weekly contest where it asks for your worst emails (sent to wrong person, reply all mistakes, email while drunk, etc.) and awards the most embarrassing ones with cash prizes. So, first off, here’s how it works:

When your email account is setup with BigString, it appears that your emails are actually sent out as images that are hosted off of BigString’s servers. But the recipient can’t really tell the difference. This kind of system allows for BigString to track how many times the image is viewed, how long it’s been there, and whether it’s viewed by people at different computers.

So the recipient can’t copy and paste very easily (it’s not text) and can’t really forward the email without your permission (you see when it’s received anywhere and can block it from being sent out again). When you as the sender decide to destroy the message, BigString just removes the image from its server, and the message disappears from the inbox of the recipient. The email is still there in the inbox but only the “from” and “subject” lines remain (so be careful with your subject lines, I guess); the body is empty.

But is this something you’d pay for? Do you really need it? Does anyone really have this problem often enough to merit restructuring how they use email? Answer: maybe.

If I email someone with information I’d rather not have them share with the rest of the world, I’d like to think I could trust that person without monitoring how they handle that email. And I wonder too, if this service takes off, what it might mean if you find yourself frequently receiving a bunch of empty emails… I think it’d be a very unique conversation starter, “So, Bob, I got another blank email from you. What’s up?”

I’m not saying it’s a bad idea, I guess I’m just saying I feel sad for anyone who has to consciously use it / think about it on a daily basis when sending email.