I don’t get gmail - am I missing something?

A bit of a confession here - I’m not sure I get the excitement over gmail.

It seems to be a perfectly well-designed online mail system, and the search facilities are neat - but why does this make it so different and wonderful? I use an IMAP-based service - Fastmail - and it gives me the best of both worlds, online access and offline replication. There just doesn’t seem to be a killer advantage to gmail in comparison - so am I missing something??

Out of control

If you’re plugged into UK news, you may have heard some back-and-forth over the last couple of days about the ever-rising cost of the IT projects within the National Health Service - depending on which source you’re following, the cost is variously £15bn, £20bn or even £30bn over the 10 year lifetime of the project. That’s more than it cost to dig the Channel Tunnel.

Not that this is coming as a surprise to anyone - the normal budgeting process for IT projects in the UK public sector seems to be think of a number, double it and then add a nought to get the final cost - which is irrelevant anyway, because the project gets cancelled two-thirds of the way in before any actual use takes place. Anyone remember the runaway catastrophe that was Read Codes?

I can think of several reasons for this, not least the approach being taken by some consultant acquaintances of mine - to hear them talk about the NHS IT programme, you’d think that it had started raining banknotes. There certainly seems to be a rerun of the Millennium bonanza taking place in certain sectors of the industry.

But it seems that the main problem is simply that it’s the type of monolithic supertanker of a programme that’s doomed to fail because it’s just too damn big. Certainly some of the intentions are laudable - electronic patient records for example, or on-line booking of hospital appointments - but the impression that’s being create by much of the press coverage is of a programme that’s taken on a life of it’s own through the sheer scale of the undertaking.

Which is ironic, given that the prevailing trend in technology at the moment seems to be “small pieces, loosely joined”. Rather than vast, complex, all-singing, all-dancing applications, we’re instead looking at a world of discrete applications performing specific functions, glued together by standards-based services and APIs. Instead of the HokeyCokey 2000 system being the single behemoth of functionality, it’s about specific tools being deployed for specific purposes.

And what’s also intriguing is that the real breakthroughs seem to be coming not from the corporations with their million-dollar R&D budgets, but small groups of hackers who are in it for the challenge rather than the reward. Steve Bowbrick goes as far as suggesting that we should hand over to the job of the NHS systems to the same people who brought us MySQL and Linux. And it’s a very valid point - after all, it’s difficult to see how it could be possible to do a worse job for more…

How to remember good passwords

It seems like the average person has about a billion user accounts these days, and remembering the passwords for even a small fraction of these is usually beyond the grasp of most people. So we either a) use the same password for everything, which risks affecting pretty much our whole lives if it it compromised; b) writing each password down somewhere - which is hardly much of an improvement; or c) muddling along and forgetting most of them. Not so bad when all you need to get a new password is clicking on the “I’ve forgotten it” link and awaiting an email; less convenient when it’s the kind of online banking account that required a blood sample and a written excuse from your mother before they’ll deign to change your access details.

So this article on macosxhints.com is worth a look. It has some very useful - and more importantly memorable - tips for creating passwords which are not only easy to remember, but also secure.

Unfortunately it doesn’t have anything to say about memorable account names - one of my abiding pet hates are sites that force you to use their format for account names - particularly if they’re of the timxyz423 variety. But a useful set of tips, nevertheless.

(For Mac users, macosxhints.com is definitely a site that should be in your bookmarks - or better still, your newsreader. A lot of the information is fairly technical, but gems like this one aren’t unusual.)

The Anecdote Blog

I’ve been meaning to mention this one for a while, but a post from Johnnie Moore has finally prompted me to get on with it. John Strande, the Business Evolutionist (how’s that for a job title?) has set up StoryBlog - a sort of clearing house for anecdotes and stories that you can use in presentations and so on. There’s a small but growing collection - not all are necessarily going to sound right for a non-American audience (some are a tad on the shmaltzy side), but there’s a number that would be quite good to use in that awkward opening stage of a presentation.

Of course, if you’re completely stuck for presentation inspiration, then a browse through the archives of Beyond Bullets could be what you need…

Roll your own news in RSS

Courtesy of Steve Rubel, here’s an ingenious way of turning non-RSS enabled news sources into RSS feeds, using GoogleNews and Gnews2RSS. Exceedingly useful for keeping up with those sites that haven’t got around to smelling the coffee and turning on their RSS feeds.

A similar way of achieving the same ends is through NewsIsFree, who have taken a portal approach - they claim to monitor 13,166 sources (currently) and offer a range of premium services. Interestingly they’re also including advertisements interleaved with the actual news items, something which I’m finding suprisingly unobtrusive. Effectively I just scan over the ads in much the same way as I would an article that doesn’t interest me - so it’s not entirely clear what kind of CPM metrics could be used to work out the ad’s payback.

But this type of ultra-personalised news is most definitely the future - now if only electronic paper would hurry itself up and arrive…

A del.icio.us of managing bookmarks

I’ll confess that it’s taken a while, but I’ve finally clicked with the concept of del.icio.us. In case you’re unfamiliar with the site, del.icio.us is a combination of bookmark filing and group metadata - that’s to say, it’s a site where you can store links to web resources, and provide ‘tags’, or keywords, to describe what the link is all about.

Although that’s neat on two counts - it’s quite useful to have your bookmarks stored online so you can get at them if you’re away from your main system; and being able to ‘tag’ the links means that it’s easy to provide some detail about why you’ve bookmarked the site in the first place - it’s not particularly revolutionary until you consider the social aspects of del.icio.us.

Go back to the concept of the tags for a second. Let’s say I come across a site which appears to be the definitive resource on three-toed ringtailed lemurs, and I want to bookmark it for future reference. Using the del.icio.us bookmarklet, I capture the URL and save it to my del.icio.us account. There’s a couple of fields for a free-text description, so I add a little bit of detail about the site and why I’ve saved the link. Then I add tags.

These are simply one-word keywords that describe my classification of the link - so in this case, I’m going to give the three-toed ringtailed lemur portal the keywords of ‘lemurs‘ and ‘animals‘, and then because it’s a personal interest of mine, ‘personal‘. So now the link is not only saved, but classified - I can filter the thousands of links that I collect over a period of time to see only those that relate to ‘lemurs’ or ‘animals’ or ‘personal’, and so on.

What makes del.icio.us really clever is two additional things that happen in the background. Firstly, the system can search all the links that it stores - so anyone else saving a link with the word ‘lemur’ will be able to see the site I’ve just added if they search on that word. So in effect it becomes a meta-search engine - I’m able to search across links that other people have already decided are worthy of bookmarking.

Secondly, del.icio.us provides an RSS feed of all the links in each tag category. So if I use a tag called ‘follow-up’ to classify links that I’m going to revisit with a view to blogging about, anyone who subscribes to the RSS feed for that tag will see a posting for each new site that I tag with that keyword.

Putting the two together makes del.icio.us potentially extremely useful in a collaborative working environment. For example, as there are two of us who post to this blog on a regular basis, we can easily share links that one of us thinks we should mention in a posting. And if we use similar keywords to tag links, we can aggregate our individual links together into a combined pool of all things lemur-related, for example.

And there’s also the hours of endless amusement to be had from watching the links that others are contributing - because there are feeds for each tag, it becomes very easy to keep an eye on the lemur-related links that other people are coming across. Of course, what you do with all this additional information is another matter - but it’s a great example of how a technology like RSS can be used in every-more ingenious ways.

Reports of the death of email have been greatly exaggerated

It seems that the meme-of-the-day is predicting the demise of email as a communications medium - those that know lots about this kind of thing, such as Stowe Boyd and Chris Pirillo, are clear and vocal in their belief that email is the tool of the devil and should be consigned to history forthwith.

I certainly won’t deny that email has its problems - from spam to overload and more - but I can’t help but feel that to misquote Mark Twain, reports of its death have been greatly exaggerated. Despite the downsides, there doesn’t appear to be anything waiting in the wings that can deal with what I would consider to be some of the major advantages of email as a communications tool.

Email is a de-facto lowest common denominator

With few exceptions, when I send an email I know that the recipient will be able to open and read the contents. There are a few plain-text extremists around who will refuse to accept HTML-formatted messages, but these are the online equivalent of non-smokers who would put out your cigarette with a fire extinguisher if you lit up in their presence. Individuals without email addresses are few and far between - we seem to have progressed past the point where access to email required the justification of a business case - so it’s become an assumption that it’s a valid way to communicate. That’s taken a long time to develop - so to expect that we’re all going to switch any time soon to RSS, or instant messaging, or whatever alternative technologies exist - is optimistic to say the least.

Email is asynchronous

Something that instant messaging advocates often ignore, I think, is that email is an asynchronous medium - it doesn’t matter if I’m not logged in at the time when the message arrives, because it will be stored for me to deal with later. While this might not be a problem for those who spend their days wholly online, most of us spend more time away from a screen than not - and if I’m not there, an instant message will go unanswered.

To be sure, email has an unfortunate latency for quick queries that would be better resolved through a swift face-to-face interaction, but this ignores the fact that a lot of the time, people don’t actually want to be interrupted. Closing an email client and ignoring the ‘new message’ flag is a valid way of scheduling your interactions in way that makes best use of your time, rather than being forced to respond at the behest of your interrogator.

Email is cross-cultural

As a straight-laced Brit, I’m not all that comfortable with pinging an IM to a complete stranger, or someone that I don’t have a particularly strong relationship with already (and I’m probably more laid-back than most of my fellow Brits, given that I’m a hair-trigger geek with a different messaging account for every day of the week.) And if we Brits are straight-laced about this, Asian cultures are even more averse to this kind of interaction - it would be considered actively rude to engage in an interactive, unsolicited communication in many Asian cultures, for example. Despite the scope for misunderstanding and miscommunication, email provides an acceptable sense of distance to allow for a relationship to develop - the language of messages can casualise over the course of the interaction, whereas it’s far more difficult to be as formal in an instant message.

This isn’t a problem if you’re working within an coherent organisation that can override these kind of cultural imperatives, but if you’re interacting with individuals from different cultures and backgrounds, it’s a mistake to assume that what works in Armpit, Nebraska, will work in South-East Asia - or even Europe.

Email is auditable

This point came to me in a conversation with a senior manager in a project management role, who related a horror story of specifications evolving over the course of numerous IM interactions - only for the changes to become the source of a “my word against yours situation” when problems started to occur. In an ideal world, these situations wouldn’t arise in the first place - but we live in imperfect times, so there’s sometimes a valid place for a communication tool with a built-in audit trail.

I don’t deny that email has its fair share of problems - and I don’t seem to suffer unduly from spam, so I have to be careful about drawing conclusions from my experiences alone. There are technologies around, such as RSS, which would appear to solve some (if not all) of the more serious flaws of email. But I do wonder if in their eagerness to move to the Next Big Thing, the earliest of early adopters aren’t in danger of leaving the rest of us behind?

An interesting article on mindmapping in project management

Here’s an interesting article on the use of mind mapping software for project management purposes.

It’s a pretty useful site in general - to quote their blurb, it’s

a focused, growing collection of the best resources on business innovation, creativity and brainstorming.

And as a bonus, here’s a link to their RSS feed!

Free wifi and margins - why I pay more for orange juice than airtime

Monday’s posting about the offline wifi directory seems to have started me off on a bit of a theme. For various reasons, I was over in Leeds for most of the day today, and needed to get web and email access several times. Depending on where I am and what I’m doing, this could involve a GPRS connection from a PDA, or wifi using my Powerbook. The first can happen pretty much anywhere, while the second needs (obviously!) a hotspot.

The last few times I’ve been in Leeds I’ve ended up using a T-Mobile hotspot in Starbucks, mainly because it’s the least-gouging of the prices that are available. This morning was no exception, so I duly laid out £6 for an hour, drank one grande Americano and moved on.

Then later in the day - by pure chance - I happened to be in a large chain hotel on the other side of the city needing web access. I was about to grit my teeth and pay another £5 or so when to my utter astonishment I discovered that the hotspot was open - free - no payment required.

The net effect of this was that I stayed in their cafe for a little over two and a half hours, drank two coffees, and an orange juice and ate a sandwich. It cost me far more than it would have done in paid wifi time, but the hotel was way ahead in the deal - they’d just sold a number of high-margin items from their catering outlet at a time when it would normally be virtually empty. If I’d been charged for the wifi time they would have been lucky to sell me more than a coffee, and they might have made a few pennies on the wifi charge if they had a particularly good deal with the hotspot provider.

Which got me wondering. The marginal cost of my using the wifi for that length of time was precisely zero - the bandwidth would have been there regardless of whether I was using it or not. The cost of the hotspot hardware is virtually negligible in the grand scheme of things, so all-in-all it cost absolutely nothing for me to use the service. Yet the hotel will have made a substantial margin on what I ate and drank, and will make more the next time I head back there with others in tow. So why is free wifi so unusual in the UK? Why are hotels, cafes and the like not realising that they stand to make far more by giving away the service than they could ever make by charging? After all, supermarket retailers have been using loss-leaders like petrol to pull in additional marginal gains for years, so why is the hospitality trade so different in their outlook?

Could IM take over from email?

The subject of email cropped up a number of times at the STES symposium this week - mainly in the context of it being broken, with the signal-to-noise ratio declining under a tidal wave of spam and other email junk. And this was an opinion that some participants felt very strongly about - Stowe Boyd is running a “Just Say No To Email” campaign, for example.

There was a lot of talk about instant messaging being the obvious alternative to email, and to an extent I’d go along with this line of reasoning - it’s inherently more robust to spam-type communications for example. It’s also a great deal more immediate, although depending on what you’re doing at the time, this can also make an IM message even more intrusive.

But I think where IM fails to win out over email is when you consider that email is inherently an asynchronous medium. Because of it’s store-and-forward nature, the communication will still get through (spam filters permitting) whether I’m currently around to deal with it or not. If I’m offline, it’ll wait until I get back - in effect, I have complete control over when (or if) I respond.

In contrast, IM is a synchronous medium. If I’m offline, then messaging me won’t work because I won’t receive it. Which is not a problem if the two parties are online simultaneously, but how often does this happen in real life? And the situation is worsened if the parties are geographically spread - it’s entirely possible that one would be finishing their working day as the other one starts.

All of which got me thinking about whether it would be possible to meld both email and IM into one platform - where I could message someone if they were online and the communication medium would behave in an instant messaging-style; but a platform that would be able to gracefully degrade back to a store-and-forward model if my recipient was offline. What would such a system look like, and would it work? Would it be adopted, or are the two separate technologies too entrenched to change?