DISQUS

YOU'RE lame and inconvenient.

Um, the Snuggie is clearly and obviously awesome, and anyone who can't see that must be completely retarded.

Re: point 1 - So you hate efficiency and progress?

How did you identify them? Were they all speaking Greek?

Robert, great answer. FWIW, I think a post about why you are a human and what that means to you would be a more positive post than this one, and would have just as much impact.

Or, put another way, do you think your post is more being part of the problem or being part of the solution?

Robert, I think it's very easy and a bit of a cop-out to write what you're not. I'd be much more interested in the answer to the question, OK if you're not an American, what are you?

Robert, have two minutes to watch a video? http://www.clearcontext.com/pro/ - in two minutes the video there shows our latest product that is helping solve the enterprise email crisis at companies around the world ranging from freelancers to huge corporation.

A few important things we tackle are:

1) Automatically get rid of all the clutter in your inbox (notifications, newsletters, irrelevant threads)

2) Convert email from something where you deal with individual messages on a one-by-one basis to something where you look at and deal with whole groups of information related to projects/activities.

3) Intelligently file and organize email for people so past email becomes a usable archive of information.

We have lots of data on how we are saving time and increasing productivity for individuals and organizations, as well as some very cool new products coming up based on the next level of solutions that companies have been asking us for. I'd be very happy to share this info with you.

This is getting long, but here's a blog post on where I think email needs to go: http://www.emaildashboard.com/2008/04/three-nex...

And in addition to the great Defrag conference Eric mentioned above, many of these issues are also being tackled by the Information Overload Research Group: http://www.iorgforum.org/

This is definitely a huge impact area, and we agree that it's one that is going to continue to be of critical impact to enterprises.

A shorter version of this post could have been "I posted a sorta generic looking crappy picture of the Bellagio and didn't promote it, then posted a very cool picture of a prominent web person and promoted the hell out of it. The second one obviously got way more views."

I was just about to write what Aaron said. Next week take a standard postcard-like picture of the Golden Gate bridge or some other place like that. Then take an interesting picture of Leah Culver or some other web20/blogger female personality like that. Promote the bridge one like you promoted Hugh's and then see how the results turn out.

"I also mostly fly United because I’m a long time frequent flier there" I was 1K on United multiple years. Then one day I couldn't get a reasonable last-minute ticket to JFK and flew JetBlue. That was the last time I flew United on any route that JetBlue or Virgin fly. Their tickets are usually cheaper, their rate structures are simple and straightforward, their exchange policies are better, their websites are better, their planes are newer, and they have a personal tv w/ a bunch of channels (jetblue has better channel lineup by far, virgin has overall better entertainment offering), and the overall flight experience start-to-finish is just nicer and better. For domestic flights, I prefer flying JetBlue or Virgin in coach than United in business. Give them a try.

Ouch!

I did a little comparison of last year's crop here: http://www.emaildashboard.com/2008/09/techcrunc...

Maybe you should do a "% sucky websites at launch" comparison/analysis on Monday for this year's group!

Robert,

I'd love to come talk to you about what we're doing at the Information Overload Research Group (http://www.iorgforum.org/). We just officially launched the organization a few weeks ago and will be having our first IORG conference in a couple of weeks in NYC. We're bringing together academics, corporate researchers, solutions providers, analysts, and end-user companies to share and collaborate on solutions to help improve productivity and reduce information overload and stress.

Excellent post. One comment, though: "So the point is this. Social web services need not fear data portability. They need to fear others providing a better experience." - while I agree with that in a big picture sense, I think that social web services can give themselves more time to improve their experience by limiting the portability of data. The more portable the data is, the easier it is for the provider with the better experience to shift the flow over to their site.

As I wrote when you mentioned this feature a couple of weeks ago, this really feels like they are moving head-on towards LinkedIn's core offering: http://www.emaildashboard.com/2008/03/facebook-...

Happy Birthday!

Nick, I think the next step from this will be Facebook Introductions, putting them truly head-to-head against LI: http://www.emaildashboard.com/2008/03/facebook-...

Steven, excellent post. You're preaching to the choir. I've written my broad thoughts on the topic here: http://www.emaildashboard.com/2008/01/my-email-... . One point I wanted to clarify is that at ClearContext we agree with you that while email provides a lot of great opportunities for social networking related stuff, the things that are really broken are core information management, categorization, and processing issues. Everything we do is focused around utilizing the context available within the email messages itself to provide users with ways to effectively process the incoming information at a higher level than simply a message by message individual basis.

I've written more detailed thoughts on my blog, but one simple point I wanted to make is that many people will get a large chunk of the benefit of these strategies simply by limiting the number of times they check email throughout the day to a handful of predefined blocks of time.

Well, at least you made it back from the Calabar Carnival. Let me know when you can pay me back the $3500 I sent you. Hope you're not feeling too bad after that bout with malaria. Be more careful with your belongings next time!

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NEED YOUR HELP URGENTLY
Shawn Morrissey

Hi , how you doing today?. hope all is well at your end, i am presently in West Africa for the Calabar Carnival/Christmas Festival which is taking place in Nigeria. It as been a very sad and bad moment for me, the present condition that i find myself is very hard for me to explain. I am stranded in Nigeria because I forgot my bag in the Taxi where my money, passport, documents and other valuable things were kept on my way to the Hotel am staying, I am facing a hard time here because i have no money on me. I have just been discharged from the hospital, i had malaria but i feel better now, i really need you to help me out with some money, so that i can settle my bills and find my way back home , i promise to pay you back as soon as i get back I am now owning a hotel bill of $ 1550 and they want me to pay the bill soon else they will have to seize my luggage and hand me over to the Hotel Management. I need this help from you urgently to help me back home, I need you to help me with the hotel bill and i will also need $1600 to feed and help myself back home so please can you help me with a sum of $3500 to sort out my problems here?. Please get back to me as soon as possible. Thank you and God Bless.

Ashish,

Stumbled onto this blog post. That is a really well thought out list and mirrors a lot of what I've been working on for the past few years.

At my company, we've focused for a few years for prioritizing and ordering the incoming emails in your inbox. We also bring together related information such as email threads, calendar items, and tasks based on the context of that information. Another thing we've spent a good amount of time working on is various ways to automatically classify information both in terms of content and what type of device/medium the information is best suited for - should a response be an email, IM, or SMS, for example? Automated followup notification is a very useful feature that we've had in the product for quite some time.

Check out our site at www.clearcontext.com for more information and read more thoughts on future stuff on my blog www.emaildashboard.com. I look forward to hearing more from you on this topic.

I actually went and read a ton of privacy policies and terms of use statements at sites I use. Across a number of major sites, there’s a pretty wide-ranging set of policies. Results posted here: http://www.emaildashboard.com/2007/11/how-priva...

I actually went and read a ton of privacy policies and terms of use statements at sites I use. Across a number of major sites, there’s a pretty wide-ranging set of policies. Results posted here: http://www.emaildashboard.com/2007/11/how-priva...

Making another Facebook isn't the opportunity. Doing things that leverage all of the information stored within email to figure out how to enable more relevant and powerful interactions - that's a huge opportunity. People already know who they are connected to within their email contacts. Providing profiles for those people is much less interesting than understanding things about the nature of your communications with them. More here: http://www.emaildashboard.com/2007/11/inbox-20-...

"Will you want your email to be the center of your social network?"

A lot of these articles use "email" "contacts" "inbox" and other very different concepts interchangeably. I don't think email is going to morph into some social networking as we know it today. However, using the content and relationship data stored within email to provide more powerful applications of existing social networking platforms and concepts makes a lot of sense. More in this blog post: http://www.emaildashboard.com/2007/11/inbox-20-...