Tag Archives: email

Google Groups New Interface Looks More like Email

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If you use Google groups, you might have noticed the switch to the new version. It is a little more colorful, using html5 and integrating into the other Google properties.

Google Groups Interface
Google Groups Interface

Google Groups is Google’s answer to message boards. Just like with Yahoo! groups, you can create a new group and invite friends to it. They can then read the messages, or interact (depending on how you have the group set up). For example, Todd uses groups to message subscribers of Geek News Central podcast.

Switching is not that difficult. Just choose to use the new Google Groups interface, then (when comfortable) select the button on top called “Switch to the new Google Groups”.

It’s got an email feel to this new version. The left pane is the groups you are in. When you select a group, the list of messages show up on the right. At the top, you are asked to adjust your profile – either update your name or attach this group to your Google profile. Then you can message away!

Does it change the email version?

So you don’t go to this interface. You end up emailling to [whatever]@googlegroups.com. You get emails and respond that way.

So far, nothing has changed there. You can still email to google groups and get messages either when they come out, on a daily digest or never.

Time for Yahoo to Close Groups?

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It’s another Monday and seems to be another day of inbox Spam. However, I’ve noticed recently how more and more spam groups are being created on Yahoo! and joining me. They basically say the same thing:

I’ve added you to my akljsdfklj group. a free Yahoo! Group to send and receive group messages.

Description: asdflkhasdf

To gain access, click the link…

This is another reason that Yahoo! just doesn’t care about their product. I use Google Groups all the time and don’t get any spam messages like this. Yet, every week I am removing stupid posts like in the image.

Where is the confirmation? I really have to click on a link and tell them this group is spam? Why not have some protocols in place to avoid me getting annoyed like this?

Here are some ideas that anyone running a group website could implement:

1. Multiple fields on form

Make them fill out more information than your name and small description. Make them enter in some contact information. Require a description field to be 20 words or more (not just characters). Have an algorithm determine if the description is jibberish or actually says something.

2. CAPTCHA

It’s annoying, but in a way, it’s meant to be annoying. That way, you know someone is human. Yahoo! does have some CAPTCHA algorithms that they could use in this group. It also kills the bots attempts to register groups.

3. Confirmation

Email confirmation means they have to register an email address first. That might also stop some bots from creating groups.

These are not revolutionary ideas. They have been used before and can be used again. The more we can stop spammers and bots, the less phishing scams and malware can be created. When that happens, people and companies save millions of dollars.

So Yahoo! – If you’re just going to let it continue, then why not shut down YahooGroups and get out of the business. It’s what you’re doing anyway…

What Makes A Tech Success?

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It seems in the world of computers and the Internet there is always a steady stream of new things on the horizon, as well as a steady stream of new products and services. It’s been this way for many years at this point.

There are always winners and losers. Winners can win big, and losers at worst fail to make any marketplace splash or even a ripple and end up in the tech dustbin of obscurity with few people ever knowing that the product or service ever existed.

What is it that makes for a successful product? Why is it that some products and services that seem very similar to other products and services end up becoming household names, while others end up being cancelled domain name landing pages?

It’s obvious there are a variety of factors that come into play. If it were easy to predict these things, we would have a lot fewer losers. Why did Twitter become a household name, whereas similar services such as Plurk and Jaiku languish in the shadows? What enabled Facebook to steal most of the MySpace thunder?

New products and services that end up being successful frequently incorporate elements and principles of previously-existing successes, but package them in more compact and useful forms.

Initially when Twitter came along a couple of years ago, I heard people talking about it, but I was a bit resistant to sign up. I felt like I had plenty of ways to communicate with people, so why did I need to add yet another account to a service that would steal away time I already had filled, only to ultimately let yet another account go dormant? I finally signed up for Twitter, and after I began using it I began to understand the value of it. With a service like Twitter, the more people that are using it, the more valuable it becomes.

About the same time I signed up for a Twitter account, I also signed up for a Plurk account. After a few visits to the Plurk website over a period of a month or two, I haven’t been back to the site since.

I believe what is valuable about Twitter is that 140 character limit per Tweet, forcing people to be succinct with their wording. Twitter and Tweet are cute names. The site design is simple, the blue bird logo pleasing to the eye, and the developers kept the API and name open to other developers, allowing an entire ecosystem of ancillary products and services to develop around it at the same time it was rapidly increasing in popularity. Twitter is very much like chat, which was already well established, but it had the added value that it either could be in real time, or not, able to be accessed from a vast array of devices beyond the Twitter website. Twitter also allows you to subscribe to just the people you want, and ignore or even completely block the rest. Twitter also allows you to reach out and touch people, and it allows you to monitor what others are up to whose lives are at once very similar to your own, yet often radically different. You can spend as much or as little time as you wish interacting with the service. Another thing that turned out to be incredibly useful with twitter is the vast 24/7 real-time data stream that it generates. Real-time Twitter data mining has proved to be quite valuable to many people.

To be honest I have always thought that many MySpace pages were often monstrous, unbelievably cluttered messes that often took a long time to load. Nonetheless, MySpace became popular because it obviously served a need with a younger demographic.

I’ve always thought Facebook’s interface is somewhat confusing, though allowing for far less cluttered and confusing-looking profile pages. I still don’t quite understand what got Facebook to the level of critical popularity – perhaps the less-cluttered, faster-loading profile pages gave it the critical edge over MySpace.

It should also be noted that Facebook allowed for an open API, allowing a myriad of interesting and often useful applications to be plugged in to its interface.

However it did it, Facebook managed to get to a critical mass of users where it became THE thing to sign up for and THE place to be to stay connected with family, friends and business associates. Something interesting has happened with Facebook that has never happened before – everyday, non-geek people who had never built website profiles in all the years they had been doing email and web browsing were suddenly signing up for Facebook in unbelievable numbers. Mothers, dads, aunts, uncles, grandmothers, etc. were suddenly showing up on the same service with their kids, nieces, nephews and grandkids. Once the ball rolled, Facebook became an incredible success.

I started noticing a while back that many people were starting to use Twitter and Facebook to communicate with each other in lieu of email. At this point I find myself getting pulled into that trend myself. These services don’t offer the relative privacy of direct email, but they allow for easy, frequent public conversations and easy sharing of personal media such as photos between friends and family on a global scale.

What I take away from the success stories versus the less-successful competitors is that oftentimes the differences in design and implementation can be slight, but those slight differences can offer real, tangible advantages to the end user. If those often-slight advantages can somehow help get the product or service to a critical mass threshold, they can find themselves catapulted to the point of planetary awareness.

US Relays Most Spam

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The USA is the worst country in the world for relaying spam, according to Sophos’ latest report on spam.  The US was responsible for 13.1%, followed by Brazil and India at 7.3% and 6.8% respectively, with the UK, Russia and Italy tied in 7th place.  In a further twist, China has completely disappeared from the top 12 and now relays only about 1.9%.

The full hall of shame is below.

1. USA13.1%
2. India7.3%
3. Brazil6.8%
4. S Korea4.8%
5. Vietnam3.4%
6. Germany3.2%
7=. United Kingdom3.1%
7=. Russia3.1%
7=. Italy3.1%
10. France3.0%
11. Romania2.5%
12. Poland2.4%
Others47.3%

Given the amount of attention that China receives as the “Country of Cybercrime”, the table shows that US and Europe ought to be looking a bit closer to home when it comes to spam.

Sophos estimates that 97% of email received to business servers is actually spam and only 3% is legitimate email.  Frankly that’s a both scary and a disgrace.  The level of resources needed to cope and the subsequent cost incurred by business shows that spam ought to be much higher up on the agenda of our lawmakers.

Perhaps they could take a break from the usual “digital rights” arguments and do something that would help everyone. That would get my vote.

Wear Your Email Safety Helmet

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Whenever I want to feel fearful and depressed I usually visit one of the news websites. Earthquakes, murder, war, theft, snoops, kidnappers, recession, depression, corruption, and all other sorts of horrible news. When I read the news sites I’m reminded of how unsafe the world is. Soon I tire of the bad news and move on to investigate the net for news on tech and design. Today Foxnews.com had the audacity to remind me that I am unsafe even on the web. The site highlighted the news from Microsoft that thousands of Hotmail passwords had been exposed. It scared me to death. I nearly jumped to my Hotmail account before I even finished the article. Reading on I discovered that Microsoft had deactivated all the affected accounts until true control could be restored. Why do I care? Hotmail only collects my spam from sites that demand an email address. Hotmail lets through all the other spam anyway! But I digress.

email icon The point of all this is: we are never safe. Their is no safe haven in the world or the web.  Every company does it’s best and so must we.  Yet, sometimes problems may come. If we live with that understanding we can truly do our best to protect ourselves. When we react in panic there is not a clear path of thinking. So with this reminder of our web-identities fragility, what should we do? Let’s refresh four basic email and online account rules:

  1. Always use a secure password. Your birthday, name spelled backwards, address, mothers name, dog’s name, middle name, favorite food, and initials hardly qualify. Use one of the many free random password generators on the web or if you insist on an easier to remember one then create a mixture of information that you can remember. For example and purely fictitious: !S1eP99t9 This could be a combination of the month and year you and your spouse were married. Now while I would only call this a basic password it sure beats “Fluffy”. Of course if you want your bank account to be protected by Fluffy, then more power to you.
  2. Never use the same passwords for multiple accounts. For that matter don’t do what I did at the start and use the same password with just the last letter different! Why would you want someone to have a free-for-all with all your accounts? Use different passwords and find an open-source or free password vault. I personally love 1Password for the Mac.
  3. Change your passwords periodically. I must admit it takes the misfortune of someone to remind me to do this.
  4. Don’t use a public computer. Many public computers are not adequately protected against the installation of malicious password key logging applications. Just don’t log in on a public computer. Just say no. And certainly don’t buy something online with your credit card information! Browse the web on it, read the news, just don’t give any information.

I understand these are basic tips, but sometimes we just need to be reminded to stay alert and on guard.  Kind of like reminding our kids to wear their helmet when they ride a bike.  Resist the urge to become lazy online. I don’t want to read about you on Foxnews.com.

Tabbloid – Your Website Magazine

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Many people are still very simple in their use of the internet.  They check email and a handful of websites on a regular basis.  They are not users who follow large numbers of RSS feeds or use an RSS reader.  For those people let me give you an option that I have used on occasion.

tabbloiddotcom

I follow maybe six or eight tech sites on a regular basis.  My brother recommended Tabbloid.com.  Tabbloid delivers you a daily electronic magazine composed of the RSS stories from your chosen favorite sites.  You put in the website addresses you desire and Tabbloid does the rest.  An easy to read PDF document, Tabbloid, is delivered to your inbox at the chosen time. For me that is in the morning.  With a quick easy glance I can read through the headlines and stories from my favorite sites.  Maybe you have a certain type of web content you don’t check every day, Tabbloid is like the newspaper and magazine that waits for you.  No more looking way down the list of titles or sifting through the archives of sites.  Just open and read.

tabbloidsample

This is not for the power RSS user, but for the basic user it may be perfect.  Registration is quick and easy using the email address you want it delivered to.  Everything is so easy and slick you may be astounded that its free.  The site does one thing and does it well.  It is website content delivered to the common man.

Do you read ALL of that email?

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In this day and age, it’s easier to send a message to someone across the world than ever. I remember watching my mom write a letter to someone back before I knew about email. She would be meticulous in what she had to say simply because she knew that she had only one shot to get all her information in. After all, she wasn’t going to write an snail mail that said:

Hey. How are you?

Could you imagine the timeframe of those postal transactions?

August 24, 1978 – Sent “Hey. How are you?”

August 30, 1978 – Received “I am doing great. How are you?”

September 5, 1978 – Sent “I am doing great. Did you catch Led Zeppelin last night?”

September 20, 1978 – Received “Yeah.”

September 21, 1978 – Sent ” How was it?”

November 11, 1978 – Received “Sorry. Got busy. What were we talking about again?”

Now let’s flip that. Today, I might send an email like this:

Hey Joe. I am writing to talk about that thing #1 we discussed last week over coffee. I really enjoyed the conversation and would like to proceed further on that. What is a good time to sit and discuss it?

Also, what is the time frame for that thing #2? I am looking for new people to research to see if this is going to be a hot item.

I would get an email back saying:

Hey Jeff. The time frame will be by September 1st.

What happened to thing #1? Why did thing #1 even get skipped? Wouldn’t you instinctively respond about thing #1 and not thing #2?

I am not sure if anyone has done a study on this, but it would be really interesting to see how you process an email in your head and respond. It is definitely not like the days of yore. Then again, when I responded to a snail mail, I would have the original letter next to me – in which I have highlighted the important items to talk about.

Do we have short attention spans on email?

I would believe not. I think it’s more about organization. For instance – my desktop is a dual monitor system with a resolution of over 1600×1200. My laptop is a single monitor with a resolution of 1280×800 (and to respond to those who are surprised on the notebook resolution: no, I am already legally blind – at least that is what the eye doctor says).

Still, I have more real estate on my desktop between 2 screens. I can move one item over to screen 2, then respond on screen 1.

There have been past reports saying that people with dual monitor systems get more work done. Imagine what I could get done if I had 4 – 32″ monitors on my desktop at a resolution of 3200 x 2400? Imagine the suntan I could get, too.

You can always organize your email

There is a very useful tool out there called “Highlighter”. It’s a Firefox application for when I use Gmail, and there is a highlighter option in Office that I can use as well. I can mark out the key points so I remember to respond to them.

If I have an important email to respond to (especially one that will cover multiple paragraphs), I will look at it, then – depending on urgency – close it. I will open it back up an hour later and start my response. When I am done I will save it as a draft and come back to it in no less than 15 minutes later. With the “Fresh Eyes” I will paruse and make changes.

Don’t fall into the Twitter approach

Email doesn’t have to be 140 characters or less. In fact, I always hated an email – or SMS for that matter – that would be 2 letters – “OK”. It’s not even punctuated correctly, so I sometimes think “Oklahoma”, which then puts me into a rousing verse of the musical (It’s my MTS – Musical Turrets Syndrome – kicking in. I have done a thesis on this condition. Something I have to live with).

I am reminded of an important email I sent a while back. I inquired on 3 points and marked urgent. I got this for a response:

Yes, No, No in that order.

Am I bothering you?

I don’t expect a dissertation on each point, but come on: let’s be real here. Especially since I only have a short attention span to begin with. I don’t remember what the Yes, No, No could even mean. So I make things up:

Yes (I am cross-eyed), No (I don’t have a million dollars), No (I dance naked in the rain) in that order.

I’ll tell you, I get a little annoyed when I get those very short responses. I try not to take it too seriously, of course. I may eventually stop corresponding if I feel that I am wasting your time.

We don’t write like we used to. We know that whatever we miss we can send in another email a couple minutes later. No 40 cent stamp required (or whatever it costs to send via snail mail). The art of communication is blindsided by 140 character tweets. Not to say that 140 character tweets are not an art form of their own.

Don’t use the Mobile Device to respond

A screen of 240 x 120 cannot be any better than 1280 x 800. Add to it a smaller keypad, and in some cases, a numeric keypad used to respond. I seem to still send email responses on my iPhone that are a couple paragraphs, but other times want to just send out a fast reply. No “O.K.” response though.

I suppose any email response is better than no email response (Gus, do you realize I send you email on a business nature? Tell me if you are alive at least). Then again, I might just send out a snail mail for old times’ sake.

Anyone have an address I can send a letter to?