Twitter: Just Try It March 6, 2009
Posted by Chuck Musciano in Technology.Tags: Communication, Email, Technology, Twitter
5 comments
I spent ten years in a research group at Harris Corporation, back in the 80s. Our purported focus was on the development of large-scale parallel processors, but the real impact of our work was to introduce the technology and culture of Unix into a traditional mainframe-minded company. Part of that culture was email, and we spent a lot of time expanding the use of email throughout Harris.
As we set about our work as email evangelists, we went through the same process, again and again. When we initially approached someone about using email, we got the same set of general reactions:
- “What a waste of time.”
- “If I need to tell someone something, I’ll write a memo.”
- “If someone needs to tell me something, they can send me a memo.”
- “If I need something sent out, I’ll have my secretary type it up.”
In spite of this, we would cajole and prod until they grudgingly started using email. Remember, this was in the days of old-school email, when reaching anyone outside of the company was difficult. Even inside the company, not everyone had accounts and the email systems were difficult to learn. Nonetheless, we persevered and got people using the system.
After a few months, we would check back in with our users to see how they liked using email. We always got the same reaction: “You’ll take away my email when you pry my cold, dead fingers off the keyboard.” From the outside looking in, email had no apparent value. Once experienced, email became indispensable.
Twenty years later, I am seeing the same reaction to Twitter, especially among my executive peers. When I ask people if they use Twitter, I get the same reactions:
- “What a waste of time.”
- “Who cares what I am doing, every second of the day?”
- “Why do I care what others are doing, every second of the day?”
- “Twitter is for ‘young people,’ not real working professionals.”
To these Luddites, I offer the same challenge: try it for three months. Really try it. Twitter may have started out as a stream of minutiae, but it has evolved into a vast flow of real-time data from everywhere on earth. If you want it to be about little details of your life, fine. But if you want it to be a useful stream of information that is pertinent to your work and life, if can certainly be that, too.
The trick to Twitter is to become one with Twitter. It isn’t email. It isn’t instant messaging. It isn’t blogging. It isn’t text messaging. It’s… Twitter. Figure out how it works. Connect with your friends. Follow useful sources. Find the client that suits your needs. Experiment with hashtags, direct messages, and @replies. Push some streams to your phone, or don’t. Figure out how to extract value from Twitter, and use that value to expand your world and your value to others.
I’ll check back in three months. If you did it right, I’ll find your fingers once again clenched around your keyboard.
Tools That Work: Xobni December 10, 2008
Posted by Chuck Musciano in Technology.Tags: Email, Tools, Xobni
4 comments
In their quest to build social networks, most people ignore a mountain of data at their fingertips: email. If you are like most people, you have years of old email squirreled away just in case you might ever need it. Well, now you do, and Xobni is the key that will unlock the treasures in your mailbox.
Xobni (“Inbox” backwards) installs as a plug-in to Outlook. Once installed, it indexes all of your email and begins extracting relationships and statistics that you’ve never been able to see before. It presents all this cool information in a sidebar that changes context as you manage your email.
Click on an email and Xobni shows you everything it knows about the sender. It starts with the basics: how many messages they’ve sent to you, and how many you’ve sent to them. But then it goes further: who was copied on those messages? What discussion threads can be teased from their historical message stream? Which files were attached? What time of day do you generally correspond with this person? With a few clicks, you can explore the social cloud that surrounds this person in your email, or find every attachment they’ve ever sent you.
It gets even better. Xobni will also find and present profiles for this person from LinkedIn and Facebook. Invariably, it finds a photo as well, if you don’t already have one in your address book. Based on their domain name, it will find information about the sender’s company from Hoovers and present that as well, with company phone numbers, addresses, headcount, and annual revenue at your fingertips.
Going beyond individuals, Xobni analyzes patterns in your mail behavior as well. Who do you respond to most quickly? Who do you ignore? Who replies to you quickly, or not at all? Which hour, or day of the week, are you most actively emailing? Which folders get the most traffic? The analytical data is endlessly fascinating.
Finally, as almost an afterthought, Xobni provides lightning-fast search atop all your email. Forget the tedious searches in Outlook. Xobni finds results in a fraction of the time, with much greater accuracy.
In short, Xobni is the business intelligence layer that has long been missing from all email clients. Download and install it now. It’s one of those great, cool tools that make you marvel at how you ever got along without it.
Old School Email November 19, 2008
Posted by Chuck Musciano in Technology.Tags: Email, History, Software
2 comments
Technology matures, and expectations change. Email, designed to be a slow, reliable messaging system, is now expected to be instantaneous. I’ve seen people send an email and then pick up the phone to call to see if it had arrived!
Twenty-five years ago, email was a hodge-podge of technologies, linking wildly different systems using all sorts of connections. Getting a message from here to there often required knowledge of your system, the recipient’s system, and all those in between. Email might take days to arrive, and never made it in just a few seconds. A well-connected site could get a message in a few hours, which was considered really good performance.
Our modern person@place.com addressing scheme masks a huge amount of complexity. Your message may actually travel among many nodes on the network to get to its final destination, and individual pieces of your message may take different routes before being reassembled at the end. You don’t worry about all of this, of course; you just click “Send” and magic happens.
This simplicity didn’t exist back then. Instead, your email address changed depending on where the message originated. In essence, your address was the route your message would take to get to where it was going. Each stop along the way was named, separated by exclamation points (known as “bangs”). Thus, the “bang path” for my email back in 1984 looked something like this:
...!gatech!mit!trantor!chuck
When the message arrived at the Georgia Tech server, it would be sent to the MIT server, which sent it to my server (trantor), which delivered it to me. The “…” was important; you replaced it with whatever you needed to get from your machine to the Georgia Tech server.
You were expected to know what to put in place of that “…” and if you didn’t, tools existed to help you figure it out. A vast database (ahem, “flat file”) listing every node in the network was sent around every so often. For each node, you could see what other nodes they would connect to, and from that list you could construct a route for your message. If your path to Georgia Tech was through kremvax and wustl, your address for me would be
kremvax!wustl!gatech!mit!trantor!chuck
You may wonder why every node didn’t just connect to every other node. Another historical fact comes into play: phone calls used to cost money, charged by the minute and varying by the length and distance of the call. Given tight budgets, each site would only call to other, nearby sites. Cross-country calls were rare, especially for lengthy data transmissions. Sending email overseas was almost unheard of. Instead, you built a route of short hops, constrained by local phone charges, and hoped for the best
To further reduce costs, sites only dialed out every so often, and sometimes only at night. After your message arrived at a site, it might sit for a day before the next scheduled transmission. If that transmission failed, it would sit for another day before a retry occurred. Mail moved, but it moved slowly.
As the modern internet began to grow, addresses began to merge. You might use part of a bang path after sending to an internet host:
trantor!chuck@mit.edu
Networks were not completely interconnected, so you might route through a gateway between two networks:
chuck%trantor.harris-atd.com@gatech.edu
It was confusing, constantly changing, and not for the faint of heart.
In comparison, email today is easy. Back in the day, email had to go uphill, through the snow, both ways, all the time. But when mail got through, you felt like you had accomplished something! So be thankful, and be patient. Try to wait at least ten minutes before calling to check on your latest urgent message.
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