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IBM has been using an social network called Beehive to help employees share pictures, videos, links and meet in ad hoc groups. Users can post, share and reuse top 5 lists, which are called Hive5s. The ability to reuse or reshare lists has been a key feature. Over 35,000 IBM employees were registered on Beehive as of May 2008, with 15000 Hive5 lists and over 280,000 shared connections. 

The Associated Press called this a virtual watercooler in a recent article. Intrenet Blog has its own article called Behind Beehive’s social success @ IBM that has a screenshot of the application - the default background color is yellow, not blue. 

LinkedIn is developing intranet applications for enterprise clients, so employees can share contact lists and create private connections within a secure enivronment

Facebook is also moving in this direction, if the reports from this week’s F8 developers conference in San Francisco are credible.

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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. 

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LinkedIn, which has become the leading social network for professionals, tripled its size last month. Europe, North America and India are the main sources for new members, and the site is adding 5 languages in a push beyond the English-speaking world.

I like LinkedIn. There aren’t any apps. No flashy pages. I can network with adults.

But is LinkedIn really worth a billion dollars? Maybe. Depends on how quickly LinkedIn can add useful intranet functions like private company groups and directories without breaking their business model.

See these articles on Portfolio.com and the New York Times for more details.

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I’ve said it before in 2004 and 2006: email is broken. It’s a great rant topic for my 1200th blog post.

The credibility of email as a marketing medium was destroyed years ago by UCE (unsolicited commercial email or spam). Managers helped destroy email as a business tool shortly afterwards.

Students often treat email as a casual messaging tool, when college is a great opportunity to learn how to use email in an effective and professional manner. Every email user can learn to write better messages.

Help me read your email

It really helps me if the subject fields are meaningful. I get hundreds of email messages every day.

Tell me what class you’re taking. I don’t carry my class roster with me 24/7. I’ve had students email me questions about their assignment without ever mentioning which course they are taking. It’s more of a problem at the start of the term. After the first 2 or 3 weeks, I’ll remember which students are in which course.

Do you need an answer to a question? Then summarize the question in the subject line. If it’s an easy question, I can send a quick reply with my answer. If an answer will take me more time, I’ll send a reply saying so.

Are you asking me to do something for you on a deadline? Put the date in the subject line.

No fancy email

Email is a great tool for written communication, as long as the message is written in plaintext. When I get HTML-formatted email that has pretty backgrounds and fancy fonts - assuming that the message made it past my servers’ spam blockers - my reply is almost always in plaintext.

HTML is for web pages, not mail messages. The writer’s color choices might look nice to them, but these colors might render the email unreadable to a color-blind recipient.

It’s far too easy to hide web bugs and bogus code in an HTML-formatted email message. Some mobile email clients like Gmail will strip the HTML formatting before displaying the message.

I hate “reply all”

I often receive email messages from other faculty members, and the cc: and to: fields are littered with addresses. I love my colleagues, but some of them never really learned how to use the Internet or email.

Some email servers block messages with large numbers of outbound email addresses, as a courtesy to the potential recipients. If one of the recipients presses the “reply all” button, their message gets sent to the entire list. It gets annoying when their reply is something innocuous like “OK” or “I’ll be there”.

Get with the program

Most people who are sending one email message to more than 20 people should consider posting the content to a web page, an intranet, or an RSS feed.

Granted, I do use the mass email function in TurnItIn.com to remind students about assignment deadlines, or to announce a new assignment. I almost always make these announcements on billso.com, but experience has taught me that some students cannot access the web site on a regular basis.

I’m could go off on a rant, but most of my students do use email effectively. These articles from about.com and Microsoft have some great tips for those who are interested.

HPU students can check the front page of Pipeline to see a list of changed and canceled classes. This is a good example of a pull system. Students have to log in to Pipeline and look at the channel to see the information.

Here’s a screen shot of today’s notices. There are no classes scheduled today, of course, because it’s Labor Day. The fall term starts tomorrow.

The channel only reports official changes, though. In the past, the university posted these changes by the classroom door, using a paper sign. If an instructor hasn’t told the university that they are canceling a class for a specific day, the change won’t appear by the door or on this new list.

It would be nice if this list were available on the public web site or an RSS feed. As I mentioned on April 16, a push system could send out notices to the affected students, perhaps by email, text messages.

RSS can be either a push or pull system, depending on how it’s used. For example, users can have the posts in this blog sent or pushed to them by email. Just pull up the RSS feed as a web page and look for the option.

Most users tend to employ RSS as a pull system. It’s a bit different from web browsing, as an RSS reader can be set to automatically check and retrieve new articles on a schedule.

I have a longer discussion about RSS and how students can use it in my courses – it was posted January 23, and it links to an older post from September 23, 2006.