billso.com

I recorded these two videos a few minutes ago on my Mac’s built-in iSight camera. The second video is my comment about the brief Gmail outage an hour ago.  

The good news and the bad news on 12seconds.tv

Google has announced that there are over 1 million users for the education version of Google Apps. this doesn’t surprise me at all, as Google is offering very low per seat pricing on these contracts.

It’s always been difficult for universities to manage their email and messaging systems. Email is the lowest common denominator for Internet users, which is one reason why phishers, scammers and crackers target email users. Everyone on the Internet has at least one email account.

University users have adopted social media en masse as an alternative to email. But that doesn’t mean that email is not important. It’s still mission critical for universities.

See this announcement, Back to school with over 1 million users worldwide, for a list of universities and schools that are adopting Google’s enterprise cloud computing solutions.

Related articles and pages on billso.com

• 9 July 2008: Is email in danger from microblogging?
• 12 May 2008: Software and services - free or paid?
• 22 April 2008: It’s 2008 and email is still broken
• 11 April 2007: Google wants to hear about your university email service
• 23 February 2007: Google Apps vs Microsoft Office
• 7 December 2006: Spam is back with a vengeance
• 22 August 2006: 95 percent of all e-mail is UCE
• 4 August 2004: E-mail is broken

I’ve claimed for several years now that email is broken. At best, email is the lowest common denominator (LCD) for sending messages to a specific Internet user. Every ISP subscription comes with some kind of email account. Free webmail addresses are easy to get. Many mobile phone accounts come with an email address. Alex Iskold’s post from ReadWriteWeb called Is Email in Danger? discusses how microblogging services like Twitter can overcome the inherent problems of heavyweight email clients like Microsoft Outlook.

Broadcasting with a microblog

Microblogging services are best suited for broadcasting messages to lots of users. FriendFeed, Twitter and similar services are widely used by popular bloggers to publicize their latest posts and mention their daily activities. Most of these services accept text messages and offer mobile versions of their web sites, so they are easier to use than email from an ordinary mobile phone. iPhone and BlackBerry users have better email clients on their devices, but microblogging from these devices seems to work well. 

As I mentioned yesterday in my article called The battle against Twitter spam, microblogging services like Twitter have their own problems. Because email is a mission critical service, it’s almost always available and working. Collecting comments and posts from microblogs can be accomplished with RSS - I use this to repost my FriendFeed activity to billso.com, but it would take a bit more effort to do this as part of an archiving and compliance effort. 

I’ve never been a fan of Outlook. In its easly versions (Outlook 97 and 98), the application would crash at least once a day. Microsoft developed  ActiveSync software to support PDAs, but 10 years later it is still a maddening piece of cruft.  

Look out for Outlook and iTunes

My university uses Microsoft Exchange as its faculty/staff email server, so I occasionally get meeting invitations and Outlook forms in my Gmail my box. All of my university email is auto-forwarded into my Gmail account. Microsoft meeting invitations are useless in Gmail - I have to tap out a reply to accept or decline the meeting.  

To be honest, Apple’s iTunes is following a similar evolution. It start as a music player, but has become a media storefront, disc burner and iPhone application installer. I’d think that several specific lightweight apps would work better than a huge, monolithic instance of iTunes. On a Mac, iTunes performance is barely tolerable. iTunes on a Windows box is a lumbering behemoth. 

Gmail, on the other hand, was designed as a lightweight solution that would work in a standard web browser. I love Gmail because I can search for messages quickly, and I know I won’t run out of storage room for old messages. There’s no reason for me to delete an old message in Gmail. 

Attacking the inbox

One approach to managing a bulging email inbox is to sit down and clear the queue. The Inbox Victory web page tries to make this process fun by letting users post pictures of themselves with their empty inboxes. I clear out my Gmali inboxes a few times a year. 

Luis Suarez of IBM claims that he reduced his incoming email by 80%, thanks to his usage of social networking tools like RSS feeds, Twitter and IBM’s internal clone of Facebook, Beehive. Suarez discussed his  article in the New York Times called I Freed Myself from E-Mail’s Grip.

Suarez admits that his job as a social computing evangelist helped him cut his email volume. He’s supposed to encourage his fellow IBM employees and managers to use Beehive, which is as much a knowledge management (KM) tool as it is a social intranet application. IBMers are supposed to use Beehive to share events, lists, pictures, tips, and ideas across the enterprise, as part of formal and ad hoc workgroups and project teams. 

Image courtesy of gwENvision through a Creative Commons license. 

Related articles and pages on billso.com

• Email and spam
• iPhone
• 7 July 2008: The battle against Twitter spam
• 22 April 2008: Email is still broken
• 10 June 2007: Just say “no” to HTML in email
• 19 April 2007: The great Blackberry blackout
• 22 August 2006: 95 percent of email is UCE
• 4 August 2004: E-mail is broken

I’m knee deep in paper grading right now, but here’s a quick post with some April Foolishness.

Patrick Altoft has a live blog of April Fools pages and pranks here.

Planning to take over the world? Read the Evil Genius Guide to Business. I’m talking to you, Hank Scorpio!

ThinkGeek and Amazon are selling a book on silly Internet RFCs. A Request for Comments is a document that describes proposed Internet standards and technologies, and there is a long tradition of joke RFCs.

Google continues its annual tradition of gags, as reported on Cnet. This year’s crop includes Gmail Custom Time, a feature that lets Gmail users send thir email messages into the past.

There are almost a dozen Google hoaxes this year, including Google Australia’s gDay, a search engine that travels 24 hours ahead in time.

Google also announced Virgle, a joint venture with Virgin to develop an open-source expedition to Mars. Google’s co-founders describe the project in this YouTube video.

The New York Times ran an interesting critique of the mobile Web yesterday. Michael Fitzgerald identifies some of the major obstacles to mass-market adoption of mobile websites, including the following items.

1. Inconsistent user interfaces on mobile devices – new users have difficulty finding the address bar and bookmark features. Fitzgerald fails to mention that, on some mobile devices, the font sizes are too small for most older users to read. Managers, who make media placement and Web development decisions, tend to fit an older demographic than their customers.
2. Poor formatting on small screens – RIM, Google, Bloglines and other service providers include reformatting and filtering technology in their mobile portals, but many web sites do not resolve well on a small screen.
3. Lack of support for Flash – as more Web sites adopt Adobe’s Flash technology for animation and other features, Web developers often fail to provide a low bandwidth or text only version that will work well or at all on a mobile device.
4. Slavish duplication of the desktop web model – this can also be seen in Microsoft Windows Mobile, which includes a Start button as a key part of the user interface.

For the most part, I agree with him – but I still use the mobile Web every day to check Gmail and read other web sites. The mobile Web isn’t a smooth experience yet, but it’s better than toting around a full computer, as my previous post about the US Census suggests.