Month: September 2008

The benefits of having push email on your blackberry or iphone are simple and obvious.

But that comes with a price. It means that people expect you to read their email sooner than later. It also means it’s tempting to read email when you deserve or need some downtime. Or it can be distracting at best. Read an email that makes your mind wander and even if you don’t send off a reply pronto it will keep your mind busy. Not effecient and not healthy.

I want smarter email.

Here are a few things I want:

0. I want a “weekend setting” mode on my iphone or blackberry. Let me define a group that I can receive. All other email would be available on my desktop or webmail. In my case “weekend” mode would include family members, close friends, CEOs of our portfolio companies and probably some fellow board members.

1. Vacation mode would be a subset of the weekend setting mode.

2. Traveling is a killer for keeping up to date with email. I was in back to back meetings in SF last week all the way until my red eye flight back home. I probably responded to 10% of the inbound email. But I missed some important messages until late the next day. That’s not helptful. I need an alert for urgent messages. But I should define who is urgent not the sender. That’s key.

3. I don’t have a good system for following up on old email. I know some people use the task manager on Outlook but that doesn’t work for me. I need something much better.

4. I also need some kind of system to remind me if I don’t hear back after I send someone an important email. Maybe they missed it because they don’t have smart email either :) I would ping them again if I remembered to do that.

5. Email needs to also solve the never ending problem of scheduling meetings. The constant back and forth right now with various parties just sucks. It seems silly that no one has nailed this one yet.

I’m probably listing off things that have already been solved but I don’t know about or it doesn’t work for me yet. But I’m all ears!

There are many different ways that people are using Twitter these days. Just like blogging, I don’t think there is a right way or a wrong way to use the product.

Some are promoting their website and their brand. Jack was on Fox News today talking about how politicians are using it. Companies are using Twitter as a new type of customer care. Some people only use Twitter Search to see what people are talking about any given topic in real time. Some use Twitter in as public, always on messaging service. Thrid party developers integrate Twitter with their apps (I saw an interesting one this morning).

And of course, many people use it to answer the question: “What are you doing?”

For many folks that don’t use Twitter, the idea of answering that question publicly is confusing. Why do my friends want to know that I’m drinking coffee or going out for a run?

The Sunday NYTimes magazine has an article about Twitter & Facebook (and a Tumblr mention too!) and the idea of ‘ambient awareness’.

This is the paradox of ambient awareness. Each little update — each individual bit of social information — is insignificant on its own, even supremely mundane. But taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends’ and family members’ lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting. This was never before possible, because in the real world, no friend would bother to call you up and detail the sandwiches she was eating. The ambient information becomes like “a type of E.S.P.,” as Haley described it to me, an invisible dimension floating over everyday life.

That’s how it works for me too.

Read the full article here.