adamyntium

Category: technology

  • Got a Gmail account? Here are a few interesting tricks ‘n’ tidbits

    [In case you didn’t already notice, I wrote a pretty detailed review of Gmail earlier, in which I also noted that I’m unfortunately unable to procure accounts for folks. Sorry! For those who already have accounts, I hope the tips below are useful and/or fun 🙂 – Adam]

    So, you’re one of the Gmail testers and you want more bang for the buck, eh? Try these tips on for size:

    SENDING & SHORTCUTS
    – Send mail to fellow Gmail’er by just entering their username in the TO, CC, or BCC spot. No need to include @gmail.com 🙂

    – Did you reserve .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) and now wish you had left out the darn period? It’s not too late! For whatever reason, Gmail treats that e-mail address the same as one without a period (and visa versa), so .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) works just as well as .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address). As you may have guessed, Gmail is flexible with regards to capitalizations, too!

    – Using the handy-dandy spell-checker and want to quickly Resume Checking without using the mouse? Just hit ‘R’, an undocumented shortcut key in this context.

    SEARCHING
    – “or” is not the same as “OR.” Only the capitalized version (sans quotes, by the way) will work with searches. So if you want to find mail from your friend Jen, you can use this in search: FROM: (jen OR jenny OR jennifer). Note, by the way, that the actual search terms are not case-sensitive. “jen” works just as good as “Jen.”

    – But, using the same Jen example, it’s important to realize that the search engine of Gmail (and Google, for the most part) does not search partial words. So “jen” will not find “Jennifer.”

    PERFORMING ACTIONS ON A GROUP OF E-MAILS
    – Let’s say you have 150 e-mails, listed over two pages (100 max per page), and you want to archive all of them. I initially made the mistake of clicking ALL, then hitting ARCHIVE and thinking that this would do the trick. Nope. Commands — whether TRASH or ARCHIVE or LABEL — only affect those items that are both selected and on the page you’re currently viewing.

    – And speaking of groupings… don’t forget that when you archive or label e-mail, you’re affecting the entire Conversation of e-mails by default. If you want to trash just one of the e-mails in a Conversation, you can do this by expanding that particular e-mail, clicking on MORE OPTIONS, and then clicking on TRASH THIS MESSAGE.

    ALL THIS *PLUS* A LITTLE BIT MORE
    Gmail supports “plus” addressing, which means that if your address is .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address), you can receive e-mail at maryhadda+littlelamb@gmail.com or maryhadda+longaddress@gmail.com, etc. Why is this useful? Well, Mary (or you!) could use one, er, I’ll call it a “plussing,” for mailing lists (“maryhadda+lists”), and another for shopping online (“maryhadda+shopping”) and so on, and then create filters to put useful labels on the different types of mail.

    Some have suggested that this could also be a useful spam deterrent (e.g., using maryhadda+2004q2 and then discarding e-mail sent to this address the following quarter), but I think this suffers from two key flaws:
    1) Spammers are probably smart enough to start stripping off the plussing :(.
    2) After a while, you’d have to create a LOT of filters, and — at least for the moment — we only get an allotment of 20 filters total. It’d be a shame to use those all up in a (likely futile) attempt to thwart spamjerks.

    *** Edited 4/30/04:
    Some folks had expressed concern that plussing was seemingly not working for them. However, I’ve worked with them to track down the cause: Due to the way Gmail handles discussion list mails — not showing one’s own contributions in the Inbox to avoid duplicate views — people who were testing the plussing feature by mailing themselves via Gmail wrongly assumed the mail was ‘lost’. As it turns out, the mail was indeed received, but — since it appeared to be part of a ‘discussion list’ — was not shown in the Inbox, which is what caused the confusion.

    THE BOTTOM LINE: Plussing works; just don’t try sending tests to yourself FROM your Gmail account TO your same Gmail account :D.

    * * *

    Well, that’s pretty much everything off the top of my head for now! How about you? Got some cool Gmail tips or tricks? Speak up below, or feel free to contact me 🙂

    * * *

    *** Added 4/21/04
    Uh oh! I have competition! 😀 It’s been pointed out to me that there’s already a blog dedicated to Gmail tips and tricks, called Gmail Gems. Definitely worth checking out.

    *** Added 10/11/05
    Want to read more stuff about Gmail and Google? Check out the BLADAM Google category! and don’t forget to subscribe to this blog! (see the options in the top menu!)

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  • A reminder of how meaningful Online socializing can be

    There are many times in which I’ve felt that people — myself included — would benefit from logging off and getting a life. This sort of cynicism (or optimism, depending on one’s take) is heightened when I read about people falling in love with someone else that they’ve “met” only online. Hey, I’ll admit… been there, done that. And never again.

    So, too, do I often ask myself why I continue to feel so passionate about online communities and online networking. With all the flaming and faking and fluffery and general bullshit, isn’t it all just a waste of time?

    Then every once in a while, I’m reminded why Online matters.

    Recently, in a health-‘n’-fitness related forum on orkut, a young, formerly active woman who is recovering (slowly) from a stroke posted a note expressing her general feeling of hopelessness.

    Over the last few days, many of us took time to give her thoughtful advice and warm encouragement. And then today, she just posted a followup note letting us know how much our responses have meant to her… and has promised to start being more proactive about getting her life back.

    This is just the tip of the iceberg. I’ve personally saved two women (each who ‘met’ me from a forum online) from commiting suicide by keeping them “talking” over IM, finding a local hotline number for them and convincing them to make that critical call (since I’m not a licensed counselor!). And on a less severe but also heartwarming note, a great many people have thanked me over the years for my contributions to online communities, often giving me specific examples of how my information or encouragement or even friendship has made a difference in their lives.

    In the end, I may still be a hardened cynic about falling in love online, but I now truly believe that online communities can mean the world for people, one posting and one person at a time. And I hope, despite the brutally sensationalistic Internet headlines we’re cursed with nowadays, we never forget about the real undercurrent of good humanity that flows throughout the ‘net.

  • Google’s Gmail – An in-depth look

    I’ve had the pleasure of extensively beta testing Gmail for a few days, and I’m happy to offer my thoughts about the service here. First, though, I’d like to get a few disclaimers out of the way:

    1. I don’t work for Google. I’m not a Google employee and I do not speak for Google or the Gmail team, yadda yadda…
    2. I can’t get you a Gmail account. I can’t even get accounts for my bestest friends. If you’d like to try out Gmail, I encourage you to sign the notification list here.
    3. Gmail is in BETA (not yet a finalized product). Beta beta beta beta! Things will be fixed, improved, changed, etc. Therefore, I will try to resist the impule to nitpick about specific features that don’t work perfectly because — let’s face it — this is a BETA version, and what I’d write today would likely be fixed before long.

    With that said… let’s get on with the show 😀

    OVERALL / THE BOTTOM LINE

    For those too lazy or busy to read through my long note, here’s the quick summary for you:

    Gmail is generally a delight to use. While it is not yet fit to be a substitute for client-based e-mail systems (Eudora, Outlook, etc.), nor does it yet have all the features of competing Webmail services, Gmail is blindingly fast, its ads are unobtrusive (often even informative and useful), and its label paradigm is promising. And of course, as one would expect, the search features are unparalled. If you’re not keen on seeing text ads or you prefer a more drag-and-drop GUI environment AND you don’t mind paying $30/year for a fabulous competing Webmail service, I urge you to check out OddPost. Yes, the time has clearly come to ditch Hotmail and Yahoo!.

    YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Hold the presses! Google has finally unveiled some of the best Gmail screenshots on its own :-).

    NOTE: I’ve since added in a few screen shots (each <100K) which may be of interest to those of you reading along here... - Gmail search– Gmail filter, part 1 of 2– Gmail filter, part 2 of 2 Also, you may wish to check out the screenshots posted by Kevin Fox (one of the UI designers of Gmail) and the review and screenshots posted by Sean Parker.

    PRIVACY

    Here are the facts:

    • No new ‘privacy invasion’: Google parses, stores, and backs up any mail sent to its addresses. So does Hotmail, Earthlink, Yahoo, AOL, Comcast, and every single other ISP / corporation in the world. The only two differences in this context are the amount of space Google offers (encouraging people to save their mails could lead to easier subpoenas, but you can’t blame Google for greedy divorce lawyers) and the fact that Google displays often-relevant ads next to the e-mails instead of the flashing and obnoxious “You’re winner number 481023!!!!!!!!” ad banners you see in other Webmail services.
    • Ads are limited, unobtrusive: There are no ads placed in outgoing e-mails… not even any tagline. There are no ads placed inside incoming e-mails, either, as you’ve likely noticed from various screenshots of Gmail around the Web. Just occasional ads and/or Related Sites listed on the righthand side of the Gmail screen. It should be noted, too, that — unlike with many other sites — these ads and site listings are shown after the mail content itself is drawn, so there’s no waiting for your actual mail text to load. Additionally, with Gmail there are no popups, no popunders, no graphical banners, no extra e-mails sent to you begging to have you upgrade to “Google Premium” and so on.
    • There’s no profiling maintained: We could go back and forth with arguments about “But Ashcroft could MAKE them profile!” or “Google is lying!” but I’m not even going to get into these hypotheticals. The bottom line is that Google has explicitly noted that all targeting info gleaned from the mail you receive is discarded immediately after an ad is selected and shown, end of story. If you’re still not comfortable with that, perhaps Gmail isn’t for you, and that’s okay! :-).

    OPENING AN ACCOUNT

    I was amazed at the simplicity of this process. No request for demographics, no long “opt-in mailing list opportunities” to wade through. The only required info: First and last name, and a preferred Gmail username. One thing of note: All usernames must be a minimum of 6 characters, which is a downer for the many of us who have short first names. Strangely, that’s actually irrelevant in a way, because Google apparently blocked off all common names (even of >6 characters) early on, so all the Jim Smiths and Jane Does and so on were out of luck from the get go. I’m guessing they did this to minimize the impact of dictionary and general spam attacks, but maybe they were just trying to be oddly egalitarian :D.

    READING E-MAIL

    At first, I was a bit wary about Gmail’s “Conversation” (semi-threaded) view of e-mails, but I’ve grown to really like this. Keep in mind that this isn’t true multi-level threading, and IMHO, that’s a good thing. Instead of helter-skelter indenting here and there, conversations (composed of e-mails with the same message ID and subject line) are stacked on top of each other in a single layer like cards.

    Gmail handles this part of the interface beautifully!
    When there are a few e-mails, Gmail shows the TO and FROM names and a snippet from the e-mail. When there are many e-mails in a conversation, Gmail just visually shows the stacked cards; one click then shows the TO/FROM + snippet, and another click instantly expands the e-mail to show the full text, minus quoted text from the earlier replies. In any situation, one can expand all the e-mails with a single click or open/close any individual e-mail, though as of yet, there are puzzlingly no ways to collapse an entire conversation. This is one of those aspects of Gmail you just have to experience to appreciate. Even when you’ve archived a conversation, when someone later replies to the same thread, you get the full ‘stack of cards’ again… allowing you to mentally get back into the earlier context in a heartbeat. The elegance of Gmail is evident even before one begins reading mail. The Inbox, which — as you’d expect — includes a list of the mails waiting for you, intelligently expands or contracts the length of the mail snippet it shows you, depending upon your screen resolution, browser size, and font size. In other words, everything fits perfectly, no matter how your computer is setup. Okay, taking a step back, that’s not completely true; I’ll take a (very) brief detour to acknowledge that Gmail’s not compatible with all browsers, since not all support javascript and DHTML to the level required at this point in the beta test. The Gmail team has noted that they are actively working to improve compatibility, and I trust ’em. For the 94%+ of the Internet-enabled public that uses IE, there’ll be no problems. Gmail also offers some other subtle features, like using a more muted font color (gray’ish) for signatures, along with a javascript-based hide/show option for quoted text. This latter part is especially appreciated, given how many clueless noobs have not yet grasped the concept of trimming replies. Perhaps (he says, optimistically), the eventual widespread use of Gmail and its default conversation view will encourage people to start removing the > > > > >’d text of the earliest 47 replies in a thread. One can only hope! 🙂 Lastly, Google has followed the lead of Microsoft/Outlook (!) and has disabled by default the showing of referenced graphics in all incoming HTML e-mails. This is to stymie the practice of spammers who often place “web bugs” (invisible graphics) in their mails to track who opens them, likely sending those poor saps an even greater amount of mail or selling their data on an “active e-mailer — send them more spam!” premium mailing list :|. So, on the obvious upside, Gmail is taking a successful and laudable swipe against spammers. Unfortunately, there is no white-listing of this default blocking; users must click on the “show graphics” link every time they get an HTML e-mail from even an opt-in source (e.g., a daily tech newsletter you’ve asked for).

    COMPOSING AND SENDING E-MAIL

    It’s ridiculously easy to start an e-mail. You can hit ‘R’ to reply, for instance, or even just click in the little box below an e-mail you’re reading, and it’ll instantly expand… complete with quoted text all ready for you. Additionally, Gmail’s conversation-view is maintained, letting you scroll up and see the full history of the mail or mails you’re replying to. There’s also a built-in spellchecker that’s pretty straightforward to use, though I don’t believe it yet offers a way to add words to a ‘personal dictionary.’ Addressing mail is quite a pleasure. Gmail remembers the names and addresses of people you’ve previously written to, and then pops up — in real time, as you type each letter! — names of matching recipients, ordered by the frequency with which you’ve written them in the past. So if you often write Belinda Jones, as soon as you hit ‘B’ then ‘E’, it’ll show (and have already highlighted in anticipation) “Belinda Jones ” Unfortunately, it is not yet possible to send HTML e-mail, and any received HTML mails that are replied to or forwarded will be converted into plain text. I am fairly certain that this will change before Gmail’s public release. Also, there is not yet a way to save a draft of an e-mail being written, though — once again — I expect that this will be added, since it seems to me to be a rather basic feature.

    ATTACHMENTS

    KaZaA fans, wipe that excited smile off your face. Gmail limits both incoming and outgoing mails to 10 megs in size (including attachments), so don’t plan on using your gig allotment to store ‘n’ forward bootlegged movies. Sorry 😉 For the rest of us, Google’s attachment offerings are serviceable if not particularly inspired. jpegs, unlike with other services, aren’t viewed inline, and perhaps that’s good (especially for dialup folks). EXE files are not allowed (due to virus concerns), and that’s also smart, IMHO. You can attach and remove files before sending, but you can’t remove attachments from files you’ve received. That’s a bit of a bummer when your overeager friends send you an e-mails you’d like to keep, if it weren’t for the dumb (and uncompressed) 8 meg photos or music files attached. By the way, currently Gmail is a bit coy about letting you know of attachment sizes, or even the general size of your individual or grouped mails. There’s no column or — as far as I can tell — any indication at all of how big your mail is. Gmail is clearly serious (IMHO, too serious) about dumbing down this aspect of the service to encourage people to archive rather than delete their mail.

    MANAGING E-MAIL

    Conversations It takes a bit getting used to the fact that — while it’s usually possible to perform actions on individual e-mails — Google generally acts upon all your e-mail in sets of conversations, as noted earlier. Ads targeting, archiving, and labeling… it’s all done to conversations. At first, this bothered me; what if I want to label just one e-mail in a long conversation? However, in practice, I’ve noticed that I’ve grown to like the less granular approach to handling my incoming mail, and I haven’t seemed to miss the ability to star or label or archive one specific piece of a conversation.

    Labeling Moving away from the folder paradigm is actually both a bold and smart move for Google. Given the longevity of the folder model in pretty much every other existing Webmail service and software application, I’m guessing that this may be initially a bit of a jarring change in the way people approach and think about their mail. However, I am confident that close to 100% of the people who try Gmail will learn to appreciate using labels over folders. Why? The key difference is that it’s now possible to file your mail conversations under more than one heading. When you get a detailed diary-type note from your Aunt about her travels in Costa Rica, you can now file this under “Family” and “Travel,” which in the grand scheme of e-mail filing is a lot more valuable than you might think at first glance. However, while labels do offer greater filing options, I can imagine that the current Gmail labeling system may become rather unwieldly over time. Labels are now listed alphabetically and cannot be re-ordered or stacked hierarchically, and as the number of labels one uses increases, I fear that it’ll become harder both to mark and to browse mails. Let’s say, for instance, that you’re a music reviewer, and initially you create labels for each artist or group you review. After a while, though, your label list starts to get a bit unwieldly, and it’d be nice to group labels into, well, hierarchical groups (by geography, genre, etc.) In other words, labels currently allow for nice grouping, but — as of yet — not good grouping of groups, if that makes any sense 🙂

    Filtering At this time, Gmail filtering seems rather rough around the edges… it supports filtering only of incoming mail… no editing of filters, no filtering of mail you’ve already received, and no filtering on outgoing e-mail. I expect this to be rapidly improved as the beta progresses, however. And in general, Gmail filtering is already extremely fast and also reasonably powerful. One can use OR, along with parenthetical groupings, and also many keywords (subject:, from:, etc.). Currently, Gmail users are limited to a maximum of 20 filters, but I hope and expect this limit to be lifted in the future.

    Anti-spam issues It’s unclear to me how Gmail’s spam filter works. Or rather, unfortunately in my case, doesn’t work. I’m currently having to deal with an enormous number of false positives and and false negatives. This would bother me less if I had an inkling of what mechanism Gmail uses to filter spam (Bayesian? Fingerprinting of mails marked as spam by others? Content analysis?), which would allow me to understand how this filtering might improve dramatically over time. Luckily, though, it’s a pretty simple and quick matter to mark mail as spam and not-spam, with the former even being available via a shortcut key (the exclamation point, which does seem quite fitting :D). One additional irritation, though, is that when you mark mail as spam, Google puts it into your spam bin, when it should instead place it in the trash bin. After all, unlike mail that’s been marked as spam by Gmail, this mail we’ve affirmatively noted is spam; there’s no need for us to look at it a second time. Personally, I’m hoping that Gmail ends up using Bayesian filtering. Using Outlook plus the free Bayesian spam filter called POPfile, I find that my mail is handled with greater than 99% accuracy… pretty hard to beat!

    THE ADS

    While I’m almost afraid to admit this, I rarely even notice the ads on the righthand side of the page. They’re that unobtrusive. But when I do notice them, I find the targeting to be, ahem, still in need of quite a bit of fine tuning. And here’s what confuses me: Given that the Gmail engineers are (understandably) disallowed from viewing folks’ private e-mail, how will they go about improving ad targeting? I wish there was an option (during the beta period, and with full disclosure!) to allow Gmail engineers to personally read and analyze mail we mark as having “poor targeting” to enable them to quickly improve their ad targeting. I realize they may already be sharing personal e-mail internally for this purpose already, but with their numbers, this just isn’t sufficient. With that said, I do have to note that in many cases, the ad targeting has been both appropriate AND useful. Not only am I often shown ads that make perfect (related) sense, but I also appreciate the frequency with which Google intelligently shows spot-on “related pages.” For instance, someone was talking about a particular software program in an mailing list note I received, and voila, Gmail had a link to the company that makes that product under “Related Pages.” The unobtrusiveness of the ads, while at initial consideration may seem to be a downside for advertisers, is likely not a problem in this context. This is because AdWords advertisers are not penalized for low click-thrus on content sites and in Gmail, and they only pay when people click on their ads. If the click-thru rate via Gmail is low — perhaps with people only noticing very highly relevant ads — then Google will lose out on some revenue in the short term, but advertisers won’t be harmed and may even be helped. In the long term, I think Gmail ads will be well-liked by most consumers and advertisers alike. As for inappropriate or insensitive targeting… I haven’t noticed this to a be a problem yet. I sent a couple of test mails to my Gmail account, focusing linguistically on the theme of death and dying, and Gmail “outsmarted” me each time. That is to say, when I sent e-mails about “dying to see funny jokes… man, that last one had me out of breath, on the floor, and about ready to die!…” Gmail smartly showed ads for Joke stuff. When I wrote a note (thankfully untrue!) of equal length about a relative dying (“Isn’t it funny how the doctors didn’t notice anything strange about Aunt Martha before she died?… You have to laugh at the incompetence of medical staff nowadays…”), Gmail showed no ads whatsoever. I’m sure there will be instances in which Gmail’s targeting results in ironic or even unpleasant juxtapositions, but it seems to me that this should be rare, and in the end probably no more likely than the scenario of a recently-widowed woman seeing an untargeted but equally jarring ad for “Single? Looking to date?” ad in her Yahoo mail.


    OVERALL USER INTERFACE, operations plus look and feeel
    Though, as I’ve hammered home, this is indeed still a beta version, I must admit to strongly mixed feelings about the way in which Gmail has been structured and the ways in which its designers expect users to interact with the system.

    Thumbs up:

    • Lots of useful keyboard shortcuts… “g i” lets you Go to your Inbox, “y” enables you to instantly archive a conversation and so on.
    • The interface is subtlely colorful without being garish.
    • Frames are used in a such a way as to dramatically minimize screen-redraw time. Unlike with most other Webmail systems, actions (mail deletions, labeling, etc.) are performed with amazing speed, letting the user continue working without waiting a while for the actions to take effect.
    • Navigation is simple, straightforward, and fast! Unlike with any other Webmail service I’ve seen, I can open up an e-mail (or e-mail conversation) and, hitting the back button, be back at the listing of my emails in less than half a second. Though Gmail lets one open up emails in a separate window, there’s now really no need to do so.
    • As part of all the stuff noted above, javascript is used brilliantly and effectively. Though there are legitimate concerns about accessibility, I am confident that Google will indeed work hard to make Gmail usable by the handicapped.

    Thumbs down:

    • Some of the most common tasks are not supported by keyboard shortcuts or even streamlined mousing. Labeling and unlabeling conversations, for instance, is often quite tedious. There’s no way (I can tell, at least) to select multiple e-mails without mousing it; it’d be nice to be able to quickly use the arrow keys to either select or at least navigate through an e-mail list, for instance.
    • Form elements are often used in ways that are not standard, nor necessarily intuitive. For instance, on every screen that includes a list of your mail, there is a submit-style button with a pulldown menu right next to it. Convention would suggest that the expected behavior would involve selecting an option via the pulldown menu, then clicking on the submit-style button. But this is not the case. Instead, each performs a separate function. The submit-style button performs one-click actions that are context-dependent (e.g., “archive” in the incoming mail screen), and the pulldown menu lets one perform different actions, also depending on the context. Additionally, there are no ways to access most of the pulldown menu options via a shortcut key, and — worse yet — the options aren’t in an ordered or numbered list which’d allow for quick one-button access after selecting the pulldown menu.
    • Though keyboard shortcuts are great, I wish Gmail followed the OddPost model of right-click (mouse) functionality as well… being able to quickly select a large group of emails and then right-click on “mark as read” for instance. After all, since Gmail is more of an app than a Web page (or set of Web pages), it’d make perfect sense for it to disable the traditional Web-page-related right-click options (“save shortcut” for instance).
    • Sometimes, it seems like the Gmail engineer geeks are, well, thinking like geeks and not like Joe and Jane consumer. While the Gmail folks have added in lots of wonderful little touches that make the service more convenient and easy to use, they’ve also crufted up the service in a few maddening ways… like having keyboard shortcuts be unnecessarily geek-style cryptic, or requiring “OR” to be capitalized in filter strings.

    OTHER THOUGHTS

    One gig is pretty impressive, both marketing-speak-wise and otherwise. But I am unconvinced that this is really enough to enable people to store ‘all their mail’ for many years. Google’s own writing/marketing/PR people seem to be admittedly schizophrenic on this issue, sometimes claiming that 1 gig will be all people ever need, other times saying it’ll last people for “years,” and in one of their help files, bragging that it’ll be enough for five years of storage for the average user. I know I’m likely on the un-average side of the curve, but — even without heavy mailing list traffic and with hardly any attachments — I’m slated to fill up my 1 gig allotment in 400-500 days — well under two years. What then? Perhaps Google will be offering two gigs of storage by that time, but I must admit a little bit of concern in this area. Overall, though, my biggest concern about Gmail has been Google’s surprising bungling of Gmail PR and general communications. There’s no reason why 90+% of articles about Gmail should be so negative, so speculative, so uninformed! Did Google reach out proactively to journalists on April 2nd to walk them through the coolness that is Gmail? Did Google proactively contact privacy advocates and privacy-oriented organizations to candidly address their concerns before they started screaming publicly? Apparently not. I actually could go on about the these issues (privacy concerns and Google’s handling of them), but I think that’s enough fodder for a separate blog entry, which I’ll link to here if I choose to write it in the future. Anyway, I hope this has been informative, and please be assured that I’ll read (and, in batches) respond to all comments posted below. Thanks for stopping by BLADAM, and please feel free to check out other entries here, perhaps even browsing by categories listed on the righthand side :-).

     * * *

    And in the next episode(s) of BLADAM reviews Gmail…

    Others who have provided worthwhile bloggy reads about Gmail:

  • MT+ Microsoft = … MT?!

    Wow… this is pretty surprising news. I just learned that MovableType — which powers this blog and likely millions of others — is in final talks with Microsoft!

    Without a hardcore blogging tool to call its own, Microsoft made its usual decision to buy rather than build, giving it near-instant access to the latest craze — blogging. This positions Microsoft squarely against Google (with Blogger) and AOL (with AOL Journals), and will allow it to more efficiently glean and index content for its new search engine.

    As a side benefit, Microsoft will be able to keep the same abbreviation — “MT” — though will understandably rebrand the tool “MicrosoftType” by its expected launch date in mid-to-late-July.

    Though no press release has been made at this point (at least that I’m aware of!), I have heard this first hand from two of my Microsoft employee friends, and I expect more news to be leaked, er, made public within the next 24 hours 🙂

    Remember, you read it here first on BLADAM!

    NOTE: The note above was posted on April Fools Day! For the humor-impaired, this means it was meant in a spirit of goofy fun… and specifically, MovableType is not, in any way, being bought out by Microsoft!

  • Faster page loading with gzip compression

    Ack, I just realized that, in moving my files to a new server, I messed up one of my files, and my sites were no longer being sent ‘compressed.’ (For you geeks out there, I no longer had gzip compression enabled)

    What this means is that… now my pages should load two to four times faster for most folks, especially dialup users!

    Just thought I’d share 🙂

    P.S. — Oh, and for Webmasters: you can add this to your htaccess file:

    php_flag zlib.output_compression On

  • Online social networks — encouraging sharing in the face of greed

    [Below is a note I posted on orkut in response to a fellow who noted that he was erasing his entire friends list, which he viewed as a commodity not appropriate to share with others freely.]

    One thing we might agree on as a concern is the issue of freeloading.

    Basically, what to do against those who scrape data, use and/or abuse data in the aggregate or individually on orkut, or — less sinisterly — simply take much more than they give (e.g., someone who lists only 1 friend, but networks with or even asks something of countless others in a social network).

    It’s a social networking tragedy of the commons… a few voracious grazers who don’t “replant” ruin the network for everyone else.

    Then again, isn’t this simply like real life?

    In any given city, 1% of the people do the volunteering / civic planning / cultural/infrastructure/political contributions, often for little or no extrinsic compensations. Being on the school board, contributing to citizens’ input meetings, etc. And the other 99% get a free ride (theoretically better-planned schools, more robust local economies, and so on).

    The challenge, however, becomes one of preventing “leeching” (of others talent, good will, connections, etc.) while not punishing those who — for one reason or another — don’t have much to offer initially but are intent on working their way up and contributing later, or in different ways.

    You may have fabulous connections, but someone may also have something you want. That someone may find your friends list valuable, and may (optimally) in return offer you something of value.

    But if you don’t present the initial offering… if you don’t show up on the radar screen, then you become shut out of the social networking currency exchange. You’re not even ‘listed’ so to speak.

    On a related note, take the example of your earlier offer to do paid consulting for orkut/Google. From this alone, the folks there may have little reason to understand or trust your knowledge, and thus little reason to hire you. But if you give too much feedback or assistance early, your help may be taken for granted.

    The key, then, is in the balancing of threats and opportunities.

  • Flickr — Yet another (but a cool!) social networking service

    I’ve had the pleasure of playing with a relatively new online networking service called Flickr, and — especially after reading Melanie’s thoughtful review — I thought I ought to chime in with a few thoughts of my own.

    What is flickr?
    It’s a service, based largely on the flexible-and-powerful Flash, that lets people interact, meet, link, chat in real time, post on message forums, and share pictures with one another. It’s free, it’s fun, and it’s pretty darn easy to get the hang of after just a few minutes. I recommend that you give it a try.

    So what’s to like about it?
    – The use of Flash brings familiar drag-and-drop, a fine live chat interface, and real-time built-in instant messaging / presence features. Entertaining and functional!
    – The staff members of Flickr frequently interact with everyone in chats, and they’re both friendly and funny.
    – The members of the service are also a delight to interact with… the complete opposite of cliquish.
    – Unlike most other social networking services, Flickr lets you designate links as ‘acquaintances,’ ‘friends,’ and ‘best friends’… which is both smart and helpful!

    But it’s not perfect.
    – Frankly, I don’t get the emphasis on photo-sharing. The interface in this area isn’t robust and feature-rich enough to make it particularly worthwhile (you can’t upload more than one photo at a time!), and you can’t even upload a photo directly into a chat conversation; you must upload it to your “Shoebox,” find it in your Shoebox, then drag and drop it into a chat room and hope it’s still relevant and interesting by that time.
    – The boards aren’t very active yet, unlike with orkut, which — hugely popular even after just a week or two — had some pretty active boards even early on.
    – Some of the language on the site and in the default invite text could use some major tidying up.

    If I were in charge…
    I would have ditched the whole photo idea (at least to start), and instead extended many more features into the message forums and chats. Real time alerts when someone mentions a ‘watched’ keyword on the boards or in a chat. Rich-text editing in the forums. Better search and categorization of forums. And so on.

    —

    With all that said, I think Flickr is pretty cool, and I have no doubt it will continue to be a welcoming, friendly, and fun place for a long time.

  • Social Networking Services — Excellent recommendations

    Christopher Allen gets it right. Rather than simply noting what orkut and other social networking services are doing wrong (which has been hammered by so many others), Christopher details what social networking services should do to succeed.

    And rather than blather on about how much I agree with his points, I think I’ll just invite you to read his entry yourself 🙂

  • Privacy, paranoia, and Plaxo

    For those of you reading my blogs and primarily interested in the TIPS category, I’ll get the useful / utilitarian part of this post out of the way first:

    The Plaxo service is pretty darn cool. Despite some annoying quirks, it’s useful, it’s fun, and it’s free. I definitely recommend giving Plaxo a try.

    What is it? Well, in a nutshell, Plaxo is a service (with optional software) that allows you to:
    – Keep your addressbook up-to-date pretty effortlessly.
    – Send out contact-info changes to your friends easily.
    – Access your entire addressbook securely on the Web from anywhere.

    Read on for my detailed thoughts about Plaxo.

    The Plaxo Controversy

    First, the boring ‘legalese’:

    DISCLAIMER:
    I’m not affiliated with Plaxo in any way except as a generally happy user of the service and software.

    Okay, now with that out of the way… 😀

    Since Plaxo’s inception, there’s been a bit of a firestorm on the Internet about privacy, trust, and the evils the service could and might do with your personal info.

    After all, they have your e-mail address, full name, and possibly company name, job title, phone numbers, and more. What a treasure trove for telemarketers and other sleazoids, right?

    Well, sort of. Plaxo vehemently insists, via their privacy policy, that they’re not going to do any of that nasty stuff with your info. And you know what? I believe them. I also like and respect how they prominently feature both a plain English summary of their privacy policy and also a longer, more detailed version for those interested.

    Personally, I think lots of people on the Web are far too paranoid for their own good. Of course, everyone is and should be free to make their own judgement calls about what services and people they trust, but what bothers me is the foaming-at-the-mouth invective and often outright nastiness that’s been flung at Plaxo and other companies like it. “They could sell all our data!” some scream, and “If they get bought out, they’ll betray us!” Many of these people have loudly lumped Plaxo into the category of spammers and virus-makers and worse… IMHO unfairly tarnishing Plaxo’s reputation and unfortunately dissuading many from making an informed opinion about the service.

    Do those folks who are angrily ranting about the ‘threats’ of Plaxo realize what data is ALREADY widely (and sometimes freely or cheaply) available about them via their banks, their health insurance company, the department of motor vehicles, the Direct Marketing Association databases, and so on (all of whom are, without a doubt, FAR more palpably evil than companies like Plaxo)? And unlike Plaxo, most of these companies have actively resisted disclosing, much less openly inviting people to check out their privacy policies.

    Plus other online entities already have demonstrated the concept of trust. Amazon.com not only has my personal contact info, they also have several of my credit card numbers and my purchase history. What if Amazon.com got bought out, huh, bub? ;-). Strangely, I don’t see too many people flinging epithets at Amazon in their blog entries, speculating about how all their data’ll be sold to the highest bidder if Amazon gets bought out.

    * * *

    Personally, I’m much more worried about my credit card companies’ policies (especially since they STILL persist on trying to sell me crap over the phone!) than I am about Plaxo. For that matter, I also think there’s a zillion-times greater chance of my personal data being stolen and sold by a waiter who has my credit card number in a back room for a few minutes.

    Comparative risks, people. Intelligent weighing of risks and benefits. Plaxo offers what I think most would agree is a useful and interesting service. The tradeoff, in my mind, is a no-brainer. Or, in a more direct / less-eloquent way of putting it: get a grip.

    * * *

    LEGITIMATE PROBLEMS WITH PLAXO

    Despite my defense above, I should, in fairness, point out that there are quite a few problems and annoyances with Plaxo.

    1) Privacy issues
    There actually is one argument I’ve read from privacy advocates that I can respect. Unlike with services such as Amazon.com, for instance, where each person has the choice of whether or not to submit his or her personal data, with Plaxo, it’s not really up to each individual. In other words, because I have Jim Smith in my addressbook and I send a query to him via Plaxo’s servers (AND I store his data on Plaxo’s site so I can access my addressbook on the Web), Jim has effectively had his data shared without his consent… and possibly even without his knowledge. Of greater concern, if Jim is particularly concerned about Plaxo ‘n’ Privacy, he really has no recourse for getting his name OFF of Plaxo’s servers, short of demanding all of his friends to remove him from their personal addressbooks.

    2) UI issues
    Plaxo is pretty darn user-friendly, but there are quite a few UI niceties that its engineers have overlooked, and cumulatively, these issues are rather frustrating. For instance, when I’m looking through any large Plaxo list of my contacts, I can’t simply jump to a name by hitting the first few letters. I have to first sort, then scroll. With 600 names in my addressbook, that’s damn annoying, especially if I want to select more than a couple names.

    3) Not very customizable
    While I can change and add to some of the language in the “please update your contact queries that get sent to friends, far too much of it is fixed — and overly formal. The cringe-worthy closing is “Thanks, Adam Lasnik.” What friend signs off with a closing like that?! And while one can save the (partially) customized mails sent out for future use, they’re neither named nor editable nor deletable. It’s issues like this that suggest that Plaxo has been “dumbed down” er, simplified at the expense of customizability, and frankly, I don’t believe that having a highly customizable (power-user) and user-friendly UI should be mutually exclusive.

    * * *

    Okay, with all that out of the way, let me explain why I think Plaxo kicks ass and why I’m pretty excited about it.

    WHY PLAXO ROCKS

    1) One-button sync with secure Web version of my addressbook
    This option, included as part of the free service, is wonderfully handy! Had I been using Plaxo when my Palm Pilot was stolen during a trip throughout Europe a while back, I would have had a much easier time (pop into an Internet cafe, log into Plaxo, access the handy PRINT version of my contact list, print it… voila!). Plus, it’s impressive and useful how the Web version offers nearly the identical (and in some cases, actually superior) functionality to the desktop/Outlook/Outlook Express front-end.

    2) Support for FoaF (Friend of a Friend) standard
    Granted, I’ll admit that I don’t quite yet grasp how this works, nor know if it will end up being widely adopted over time. But the fact that Plaxo has listened to and worked with pioneers in this realm suggests to me that the Plaxo folks are committed to a reasonable amount of interoperability and openness.

    3) Good documentation, admirable interactions with customers
    Though in the past Plaxo has been criticized for some slowness with customer service responses, I’ve actually been pleased with my experience so far, and also impressed that Plaxo representatives have intelligently and actively participated in multiple forums and even posted on blogs. Plus the Plaxo Web site is pretty informative, with a searchable knowledgebase and multiple ways to contact customer service (even an “emergency” form).

    4) Plain English promises and reassurances
    As mentioned earlier, Plaxo has admirably taken steps to be a responsible and ethical player in the Internet contact-sync space, and has also clearly articulated their stances and promises on their site.

    5) Robust feature set and ease of use.
    While Plaxo occupies a pretty busy space (with, among others, GoodContacts and AddresSender), it seems to have the edge in features and makes them nicely accessible via a number of different ways — both via client software and the Web.

    and most importantly…
    6) Strong usefulness!
    When you start having many hundreds of contacts like I do from all over the world, something like Plaxo is a Godsend! I haven’t yet used it to do a full scan, but when I used the similar GoodContacts software a couple of years ago, I found myself instantly provided with literally dozens of critical contact info updates from friends, and also some friendly catch-up notes from people who hadn’t written me for a long time. I also got quite a few bounces, which saved me from writing long letters to people whose contact info was long since out of date.

    * * *

    THE RESULTS SO FAR IN MY TESTING…
    I have tested out Plaxo on a handful of friends and personal test accounts so far, and the responses and results have been generally positive.
    – All said the process of responding was straightforward and easy.
    – In every case, the info they input was added flawlessly to my Outlook addressbook.
    – In my own tests, Plaxo requests weren’t viewed as spam either on my Yahoo or Hotmail accounts. Unfortunately, one friend at Cornell found my Plaxo request in his spam folder. 🙁
    – One friend was reluctant to supply his address, due to privacy concerns; he sent that to me separately via my Web forum, whereupon I mercilessly teased him about being a hypocrite :D.
    – And one other friend was angry that I had disclosed his “personal” e-mail address to a third party, but that doesn’t say anything about Plaxo in particular.
    – I’ve noticed a couple of minor bugs, such as an improper date stamp in one area of my Plaxo reports, but the engineer I corresponded with has noted that this should be fixed promptly.

    After I square away a few things, I plan on doing a much larger test with Plaxo (over several hundred contacts), and — if there’s interest — I’ll report my findings back here in my blog.

    In the meantime, I encourage you to post your Plaxo concerns, kudos, and questions below if you’d like, and I’ll do my best to address what I can and – within reason — test specific stuff out for you. Of course, if you’re as geeky and curious as I am, you’ll want to download and play with Plaxo yourself :-). I say go for it!

  • Personally quantifying the spam mess

    I let my spam folder fill up over five days and — stopwatch in tow — I just forced myself to face the mess and clean it up, checking for miscategorized mail and so on.

    Here are the stats:
    – 1203 e-mails I had to sift through (241 e-mails a day) from which I had to save 9 non-spam e-mails which’d been incorrectly tagged.
    – 21.5 minutes of my time
    – That’s 26 hours of my time wasted yearly
    – At an approximate $75/hr worth of my time, that’s $1,613 dollars.
    – For a company of 1,000 employees, that’s 1.6 million dollars just in lost time (doesn’t count bandwidth or storage costs).

    But our government finds it more important to chase after naked breasts instead of really applying firepower to the war against spam. Wonderful.