Email with an attitude

Wow. Intersting post from Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten at The Next Web about a new email management system he's developing, InBox Pro.


Call it email with an attitude:

You can help me test it however by sending an email to boris@inboxpro.com. Try it now and the following will happen:
Your email will land in my ‘Queue’ box and you will receive a reply via email with some information and options. The email states that my inbox currently contains 325 emails and that it takes an average of 3 days, 7 hours and 47 minutes for me to reply to emails.

I hope that message alone will make it clear to people that maybe they are sending me too many emails and to accept that they probably won’t get a reply within a few minutes. But it doesn’t stop there. I also invite the sender to optimize their email for me to ensure I get to it faster. They can do that by following a link and then changing their email to one of 4 formats:

1: Yes/No question:
2: FYI Message
3: Short Message
4: Long Message

Each format has a separate ‘Average Response Time’ and it is shown as you compose your message. Over time it will likely show that Yes/No questions and FYI Messages are answered faster than Long Questions.

In a few months I hope to have an iPhone and Android app that skips the whole email part of this setup and just allows you to pick an address and submit a message format.

There is one more feature that make Inbox Pro worthwhile for me personally and that is the ‘Expire’ function. I can set a time after which emails will expire. That means that if I haven’t been able to reply to your email within one week that simply means I’m too busy to answer it.

Of course, the equation here is how many people will you offend with those responses? But then again, wouldn't it be nice to add some of this kind of structure that would truly make email useful again as a multidimensional communication channel.

Beware of merchants using Squareup

Update June 2012: I have started getting Square receipts with the type of card and the last four digits. See, Square, wasn't that easy?
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I hate to post this because I think it is wonderful new technology for small merchants to be able to swipe credit cards and handle the transactions through their cellphones.

But if you are a business traveler, beware. As these little white square attachments start sprouting from cellphones, etc., you'd better check with your accounting department on whether it will accept the receipts you are emailed or texted.

Many remain skittish about email receipts (possibility they can be easily forged). But the one I got today from a merchant using Squareup is likely to pose a special problem. While it is a visual receipt, not just a text-only email, it merely lists "item" without any details, and it does not detail which credit card was used (only the generic Visa). This can be a special problem for travelers who might have multiple cards for various reasons.

Here, for instance, is what a typical receipt looks like.

If the merchant is using an iPad, there is the option to print a true receipt. But many, like cabs, use cellphones, and they don't invest in a printer (the point being to save money, right?). If not, email is all you get. So then you have to wait till it posts to your Visa account (assuming you have access to that account), print out the record, etc. If it's a corporate account, how willing do you think accounting is going to be to check dozens and maybe hundreds of these things (as they become more common) against the corporate account, especially since there are no account or reference numbers?

I also take a bit of exception to the preset "tip" percentages at the bottom of each screen with no way, that I saw, to enter your own (other than "no tip").

So caveat emptor.

(I've often wondered why companies like this don't have a feedback mechanism on their websites, since the customer, not the vendor, is the ultimate word-of-mouth promotion for something like this. As a result, I sent my feedback through the website's "press" email. I'd encourage others to do the same. press@squareup.com.)

Here's a review of the company (officially called "Square"). Generally good, but some problems.

Update 4/1: After some extensive back and forth with Square's help desk - and kudos to the desk for continuing to talk with me about the options and take suggestions - there may be a way to get a detailed image of your receipt. Unfortunately, it is not obvious, and it may be off-putting to some: Sign up for a Square account, even though it might seem those are only for merchants.

Almost Everything on Square's website  (except the Pay with Square link) as of this post is merchant-facing, so the fact that you as a consumer can do this is not overly obvious. If you sign up for an account, you will be asked seemingly merchant-type questions for security. This includes the last four digits of your Social Security number. Square apparently uses all this information to dig into databases (credit reports?) and identify you. It will come back with a screen with those details, you confirm them, etc. You will be asked to click to have a Square card reader sent to you. You can ignore that and, after all that, you will have an account. One of the links in that account is "Receipts." I haven't run into a Square-enabled merchant since doing this, so I can't tell you how well it works.

I've suggested that Square engineer a consumer-facing link that skips most of that stuff and allows people to clearly sign up for an account to access their receipts. In addition, if Square had a big "convert" button in that account, then once it had me as a consumer, if I decided to start a small business, etc., it might well have me as a merchant customer (remembering that the demographic likely to use this for receipts is also the one that has the resources in both time, money and education, to do just that).

Google announces chromebook

(In recovering some earlier posts that had not been published, this one inexplicably moved to the top. It is an older post of about a week ago.)
 
Google has just announced the chromebook - not so much a computer as a cloud portal in a laptop box running Chrome.

Its big selling points:

• Almost instant startup
• No real internal programs
• Everything on the cloud
• Automatic background updates

From Google's promo site: Thanks to the power of HTML5, many apps keep working even in those rare moments when you're not connected.

Color me cautious right now - if only because in a few weeks I am headed to a place - for more than a "rare moment" - where I will NOT have high speed access (yes, such places do still exist, even here in the good old U-S-of-A). It's another decade, I think, before we get affordable, ubiquitous high speed access.

Yet, I can definitely see a place for this on, say, a college campus, where usage and access are concentrated. Can we see a day where these become standard issue to students?

Put this in a tablet, and I might like it even better.

Yahoo's cuts, Delicious, etc., and dealing with ambiguity

Lots has been posted around the Web on Yahoo's decision to cut some services, such as the Declicious social bookmarking service. There's also some word that Flickr could be in danger.


Yet, as at least one comment has noted, this is also the Web and in five or 10 years, we may well be mourning the loss of Twitter or Facebook or, who knows, Google

These two - Delicious and Flickr - are what I would call "core" services, used by so many people and so interlinked by other sites that their demise would cause some serious damage. So let me just toss in my two quick cents:

• This does highlight something we have yet to come to grips with: deciding if we should have a way to preserve such "core" services and, if so, how. It's easy to put a list out of alternatives to something like Delicious, but at some point a service has so many users and crosslinks that the reality of wholesale shifting is impractical.
• If there is to be some way to preserve and provide an orderly transition, how do we fund and accomplish this? Delicious, for instance, says it is considering ways to exit from Yahoo and not shut down, but the impression is that this is more of a fire drill than the result of careful planning (more here on the problems).
• This decade will gradually see the erosion of such "free" services. The Web is not free; there are server and bandwidth and other costs. And there probably will always be neat new useful services that will be free out of the starting gate. But at some point past the newness and the optimism and idealism, a business crossroads is reached - can an ad-based model or a freemium model actually support them? I think we will see more services closing or switching to some kind of subscription model. The challenge is how to keep the prices low enough that they are accessible. I'm thinking it has to be in the $5 to $10 a year - yes, a year - range.
• I'm worried that this will just reinforce the paranoia some media managers/companies have about "free" and open-source services. As a result, they cut themselves off from useful innovation. News organizations must be willing to use all forms of software and services that can advance their journalism. The successful manager will be one who can evaluate what services are critical and must be kept on more proprietary platforms the organization can control and what are more flexible and short term and can be experimented with on free and low-cost platforms provided by others. Part of that will be keeping up with alternatives and having plans and strategies for migrating as the Web changes.

If there one thing we should know by now, it's that the Web is a living, morphing thing and that if you cannot deal with its ambiguity, your chances of success are much slimmer.
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UPDATE: Read this post on ReadWriteWeb to get an idea how journalists can use sites such as Delicious to stay ahead of the competition.

July 4, 2010 - a weekend in journalism history

Perhaps this weekend will be one of the times journalism historians will write about when they look back at significant changes.

Paywalls went up at the Times of London (with the expected debate about whether they will work) and at three Gannett newspapers (as I've written, I think the significance of that has not gotten quite the press because if big-G shows success, others will surely follow).

And the Journal Register Co., as part of its Ben Franklin Project, published all editions throughout its chain using only open-source software. That may sound geek-like, but the significance could be much greater if it breaks the industry's almost manic bias against open-source.

OK, not in all cases, but in too many. Here's an example: In working with a major media company to rebuild a site that had crashed, we had to change content management systems from Drupal to Expression Engine, the one favored by that company's IT management. Now, EE can build robust sites. But you'd be hard-pressed to see it from our rebuilt site.

Most of what you now see on our site has been a hack through yeoman's work done by a programmer at this media company. Gone, however, are the community calendar, the polling, the aggregator of other feeds - all things integral to Drupal or easily obtained from its robust development community.

Those things may exist in EE, too. I haven't had the time to dig deeply into its modules. But here's the thing, it does have useful modules, but I'm told they have not been approved by this big company's IT procedure, which apparently makes government paperwork look tame.

It is one reason I have become convinced that when the history of this tectonic shift in journalism and media is written, someone needs to hold the proprietary publishing system companies to account. They can scream foul all they want, but I know from personal experience dealing with editors and others in many newsrooms as an AP editor that for many of those publishing systems, online - and the idea of easily integrating content across platforms - was a dream at best until the middle of this past decade. (Oh, the systems supposedly could do it, but ask anyone who had to work with one about the internal workarounds.) And the idea of integrating or even managing user-generated content definitely was not part of most systems until recently.

Yet, it's hard to get a publisher or vice president to give up a system in which the company has invested perhaps millions and which it had expected to depreciate over a certain number of years.

Is it any wonder the pure-play online sites, willing as many are to work with as much open-source software out there as possible, run rings around traditional media in flexibility?

More commentary on the Journal-Register project from Jeff Jarvis (who had a hand in it) and Terry Heaton.

Help through the tech thicket for journalists

The Hack/Hackers group, which is designed to help journalists connect with and understand the technology running their lives, has a very useful glossary of tech terms.

I suggest reading it - two or three times. You don't have to get all tech-talk about things, but these days you do have to understand what the tech talk is all about.

Another version of the glossary with a little more commentary is on Poynter.

Hack/Hackers was put together by three journalists: Rich Gordon of Northwestern, Aron Pilhofer of the New York Times and former AP correspondent Burt Herman.

Quick interesting reads

I'm on the road, so just a quick hit. Allow me to suggest two items from today's Paid Content. Both involve the shift happening in the traditional Web as mobile and apps become more prevalent:

The first discusses how traditional publishers are turning back to more of the print-type experience online and how not only apps, but also the Safari browser's new '"reader" view are aiding and abetting that.

The second is an interesting follow-on, with Scribd suggesting those publishers might do better using robust HTML5 coding instead of sinking many dollars into multiple apps.

I touched on some of this on a recent press association panel and in this month's Common Sense Journalism column.

I am just fascinated by what I expect to be the next digital evolution, powered by mobile, apps and geolocation - a Web without websites as we know them

J-lab/New Voices: Peering into the future

A couple of weeks ago, I was asked at a state press association meeting to peer into the future and try to give the assembled publishers and editors a sense of where things might be going.

I talked about HTML5, which will be multimedia oriented (here's the summary from Wikipedia and the gory details from W3C, if you really want to wonk out). I also talked about augmented reality through apps such as Layar, geocoding and the idea of a Web without Web sites. (Think about it - the last time you whipped out the smartphone and punched the button on that app, did you go to a Web site? Chances not, yet you certainly had an online experience.)

I also stressed that every news operation, even the smallest community one that hasn't been hit that hard by the recession, needs a mobile strategy. Why? Because even in the backroads and hamlets, that thing people are carrying around in their purses and on their belts ain't a newspaper, Bubba. Cell phone/smartphone technology is following Moore's law of doubling in power, etc., about every 18 months.

But Amy Webb of Webb Media Group can do it a lot better than I can, and she was at the J-lab confab today, so I'm just going to run out the notes I took and let you follow whatever links your hearts desire.

But you've got to sit through the 10-second commercial first: What contact I've had with Webb and through those I know in the industry, she's been about as accurate as anyone about all this. Do yourself a favor; visit Knowledgewebb, her company's training site, and sign up for her free newsletter. You might find something else you like (that costs extra, however).

Now the show:

Tools that can work for you:

What's important and what can wait? How nimble must you be? Do consumers really want everything out there.

Ask yourself:
- Who are you really developing for?
- Will it stick?
- Is it comprehensive enough?
- Will it generate engagement that is habit forming?
- Do you need all the features?

Six spheres, social media is a part of all of them that ties it together:
Traditional media
Web ("just stuff you get going online")
Mobile
E-readers
Tablets (iPad gets all the publicity, but her firm is tracking 18 from 18 manufacturers, some yet to be released)
Connected TV (plug your TV into the Internet/ AT&T's FIOS fiber-to-house broadband vastly expanding options).

Computers in cars: "Pretty soon you're going to be driving a computer down the road."

Do not assume that people are only engaging in traditional or web spheres because of social or economic status. (Doug's comment: Mobile, for instance, is becoming so cheap that for many people it is leapfrogging the traditional computer and is the way they are accessing online.)

Trend 1: User engagement 2.0
It's being offered in unusual places, it's not just tweeting the latest thing, new media organizations have found a "sweet spot" of producing content and getting content contributed. You have to be part of the community to really understand.

Social media being incorporated in unexpected places. Land's End, Netflix, for example, have incorporated social networks.

Ask yourself:
- Who is the audience?
- Are they where you think they are?
- What are the expectations of the audience (tell others? contribute? you listen?)?
- Are you willing to participate?

Keep the sharing options on your site to a minimum - the ones your audience is using.
She does not like AddThis or Shareomatic and similar services. Says they produce too confusing a list, most of which people seldom use. Points, for instance, to Mashable, which has just Twitter, Facebook, Digg, RSS and e-mail. But for this to work you have to know where your audience is sharing. (See Quarkbase below.)

Tools:
Quarkbase – get site metrics, most popular social media referrals
Facebook Connect –Problem is that with Facebook you can lose lots of data.
Disqus – aggregate comments (My note: I've had mixed results on various sites that have it installed; sometimes it seems to get into weird loops.)
KnowEm – plug in your username and it will go through all the social networks and see who has your name already.

In discussing content management systems, Webb's one recommendation was to get off Expression Engine (the CMS Media General is using for Hartsville Today, the local site I am involved with). She sees it as less extensible and flexible than most of the others.

Trend 2: Geolocal engagement
Why the hyperlocal model does not work. Things like LoudonExtra (the Washington Post's defunct site) and Everyblock just can't be hyperlocal enough or don't deliver the information the way people want it. Webb says Everyblock, for instance, gets fewer than 200,000 visits/month and that AOL-Patch metrics are "awful."

Consumers want to know what is happening, but they want more sophistication. Content has to be niche. Otherwise there is too much competition, too many platforms. She used this example of a smart phone app, Offender Locator, that takes data like Everyblock's but lets the user query it wherever he or she is -- it is location aware -- and pull down a list of sex offenders nearby.

For the consumer local is where I am right now, not necessarily physical; just as likely topical. Less about ZIP code and more about what I am doing right now. Real-time! Not just about maps and citizen-journalism. Action must be associated with content and conversation – context must be social.

Twitter, for instance, now has location info and the accompanying privacy concerns.
She calls this the check-in culture accompanied by a rapid change in user expectations.
- Your consumers want hyperlocal, but the way they define it.
- Tied to local.
- Socially interactive.
- Wrapped in opportunity (points, games)
- Not repurposed or stale.

Some other tools:
- Micello – maps for the inside of buildings. She showed some shopping malls. Someone raised the idea, however, that this will last "until homeland security shuts it down."
- Foursquare – "Twitter with location" as you "check in" to places. However, there also is a gaming aspect – get badges based on how many check-ins.
- Gowalla – she doesn't like it as much as Foursquare, but it's an alternative.
- Miso (gomiso.com) – connect with others while watching movies, videos, etc.
- Apple's iGroup allows you to set up a local social network where you are.
- Create your own iPhone check-in app through Double Dutch, $499 setup fee and $40 a month.
- Fourwhere: See what Foursquare users who have checked in from a location say about it.

Trend 3: Augmented reality
Two aspects to this: Show a coded marker to a webcam and cause an action to happen (think Esquire's recent augmented reality edition) or use the camera on your mobile phone, linked to geocoding or image recognition.

Some examples:
- Wikitude: An app available for all phones – install it, point your phone camera at something, like a monument, and get information about it.
- Post office: Hold item you want to ship up to camera and virtual box simulator will tell you size box, etc.
- Rayban: Virtual mirror allows you to "try on" glasses.
- Acrossair: Among other things, makes apps that allow you to hold up yout iPhone and see nearest subway stations in the direction you are holding it.
- Toozla: Voice activated augmented reality
- Layar: Maybe the most widely known, out of Holland, put the app in your phone and you can look at several "layers" of information such as shopping, real estate, etc. Or you can create your own.
- StreetSpark: Augmented reality dating application. Use your phone to see if any fellow sparkers are near you; strike up a conversation (or … whatever).
- Recognizr – Point a phone at a person's face and find out what social networks they are on (not public, but available business to business).
- Face.com: Tool being used by Google's Picasa photo site. From the Picasa site: Picasa scans all the photos in your collection, identifies the ones with faces, and groups photos with similar faces together. It's easy to add name tags to dozens of photos at once by clicking "Add a name" below a photo and typing the person's name. Once you've tagged some pictures, you can make a face collage with one click, easily find all your pictures with the same two people in them, or upload your name tags to Picasa Web Albums.
- Google Goggles: Scan logos, books, text, etc., and get info returned.

Bottom line:
- People are uploading content
- They are tagging content
- They are geocaching that content
- It's creating wide databases of info that can link people to locations and history of actions
- Consumers are starting to search and discover via social networks and mobile instead of the traditional search engine.

(Follow up: Webb's remarks Monday at ASNE.)

Sports journalism - more

The other day I noted how robotic writing programs being developed for sports were going to potentially change sports reporters' game, putting a premium on finding new stories and less on the game and handout/news conference (even if impromptu on a practice field) driven stuff we see now.

But I also noted how hard that will be because, if sports reporters are honest with themselves, they'll acknowledge they are in the middle of one of the absolute spin and control zones of the world.

After Florida coach Urban Meyer's outburst the other day, sports columnist Paul Finebaum makes my case for me.

With the newspaper industry under siege and cutbacks literally being made at every corner, a reporter covering Meyer or anyone else really can ill afford to spend time in the doghouse. Otherwise, he or she will be left out in the cold when the pack goes on the next scavenger hunt for whatever scraps are still fed to those on the daily beat.

I spoke recently to an official at a major BCS school and he openly scoffed at the beat reporters covering his team. The person told me his school could completely cut off access to the reporters and still get practically the same message out to the public by delivering it themselves.

Game changer for sports journalists?

I have a lot of young folks in my classes who want to be sports reporters -- only I think too many of them define sports reporting as covering games and news conferences.

They -- and everyone who is covering sports or expects to -- should read this about software coming to market that will automatically write sports stories (some of that already exists, but I think the point here is that it is becoming tremendously more versatile and efficient):

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/robot_sports_reporters.php

And if you are a budding broadcast sports reporter, don't necessarily get too smug - there's a reference in here to programs being developed that can automate the video coverage, too. How long do you think it will be before they can meld the two?

StatSheet founder Robbie Allen, who is developing the program, puts it this way:

Human reporters know a team and a season, but Allen says they also "have their scripts written." "They already think they know what to look at as the most interesting things that have happened," he says. "I'm talking about codifying that knowledge, to build a wider corpus of interesting facts to draw from."

Allen says he isn't trying to replace sports reporters, but augment them. Yeah, and we know how that translates once it gets into the executive suite.

The digital age is clearly showing us that journalism is much different from the function of putting out a newspaper or newscast. Journalism is a process that will flow, like water, wherever there is an appropriate vessel. Putting out a paper or a newscast is an industrial process that, like all such processes, will seek to lower and control costs -- and automate -- as much as it can. Any kind of "process," be it routine sports coverage or routine copy editing, or putting together the police blotter, is open to automation.

As an AP reporter and editor, I covered college and pro sports, so while I was not a full-time sports reporter I speak from some experience. And as I continue looking at sports coverage, it occurs to me this is a tough nut for most sports reporters to crack. Sports, even some high-school level stuff, is so controlled by leagues, owners, etc. (see, e.g., the battle last fall over SEC credentials) that getting past the "routine" is not going to be easy for our budding crop of sports journalists. (For another example, borrow a copy of the excellent documentary "The Paper" and see how the Penn State sports reporter was punished by the athletics department, and almost brought to tears, by using initiative to cover what actually was a positive story about players and their apartments.)

But if they don't get past the routine, some software developer is waiting in the wings to do their job for them.

Geek Squad guy looks into future of tech and news

Discovered this today. Worth watching. Robert Stephens, founder of the Geek Squad, prognosticates on technology's near future.

It's from the Future of News conference in Minnesota this past November.

"It feels like the last 40 years are all coming to a head where normal people will have high speed in their pocket."

"There's really only four screens that we are planning on as the plumbers of the future to support" the mobile phone ("the main event, it is the computer; everything else is just a piece of glass that connects to a network"), the anticipated tablet computers, flat screen TVs that really are "large iPod Touches" and in-vehicle systems.

Way cool tech think

Sure, it's just a concept for now. But all I can say to 10/GUI is find someone to build this!

Seriously, take a look at this concept video for a 10-finger computer touchscreen control.

My only fear - I never could play the piano. How much practicing would I need for this?

(Thanks to Zac Echola for the pointer.)

Microsoft tablet

From Gizmodo on Microsoft's Courier tablet.

Take a look at the video. If the come-to-market (if it ever does) version does even half of this, imagine the possibilities. And imagine if video, not just stills, was integrated. Blows my mind ...