"Brilliant Only in Tiny Bursts"

I'm reading Seth Godin's new book Linchpin. Great snippet:

"The more value you create in your job, the fewer clock minutes you actually spend creating that value. In other words, more of the time, you're not being brilliant. Most of the time, you do the stuff that ordinary people could do.

A brilliant author or businesswoman or senator or software engineer is brilliant only in tiny bursts. The rest of the time, they're doing work that most any trained person could do.

It might take a lot of tinkering or low-level work or domain knowledge for that brilliance to be evoked, but from the outside, it appears that art is created in a moment, not in tiny increments."

So true. The time you spend building the element of a product that's truly game changing is often just a small fraction of the total. Most time is spent on mundane tasks, vanilla code, and things everyone else has already done.

Mobile Advertising needs Rich Media and Better Targeting

Mobile advertising is a $2.2 billion business. Advertisers put up mobile ads for two reasons: (1) Building brand awareness and (2) generating leads, whether to download their iPhone Apps or sign up for their service.

Two possible improvements:


Two possible improvements:

Rich Media

All ads you see today on your phone are static text or images. Brand advertising works by playing to emotions, and to do that, you need animations and sound. I know you dislike those Flash ads on websites, but they're how the content gets paid for.

Those ads are static for a reason: iPhone doesn't support Flash, and the ads need to be small in size due to limited bandwidth. I'm sure one of the players in this space is already working on building technology to show great-looking, animated, interactive ads - whether with proprietary technology or some sort of browser plugin. Rich ads, rich CPMs. Even the bandwidth problem can be solved: There are plenty of ways to preload ads and cache them for later display.

Better Targeting

If you've tried putting up an AdMob ad, you know that the targeting options are pretty limited: You can narrow down by country, device (iPod Touch / iPhone), and connectivity (Wifi/3G).

There's one type of ads that could unleash dramatic growth in mobile advertising: Imagine you're on the way to lunch at Pete's Burgers, and your iPhone shows you a coupon for Joe's Burger Shack. You go to Joe's and show them the coupon you just clicked on. The ad just generated a verifiable lead, and the advertising network just made a bunch of money.

For this type of application to work, targeting needs to get better: We need street-block level targeting, time of day ("only run this ad at lunchtime"), and likely user activity ("user likely walking to lunch").

I imagine that local ads like that could be bigger than the $20 billion / year search advertising business (e.g. Google AdWords), which makes money by generating leads for people to buy stuff online. The number of real-world transactions and the amounts I spend on them are much higher than what I spend online. Done right, mobile advertising could be much bigger than that.

7 Points on “The End of the Email Era”

"The End of the Email Era", a Wall Street Journal article by Jessica Vascellaro ignited, somewhat ironically, a flurry of "have you read this?" emails in my inbox. I'm a bit late to the party of dissecting Vascellaro's piece. All of last week, I was cranking on a new version of reMail. Yet I felt I'd write about it, since I feel pretty qualified to comment on email-related topics.

WSJ's 4 Points

In case you haven't read it, here are the points that the WSJ article makes:

1. IM is better than email because it gets you faster responses.


2. Twitter and Facebook updates are better than email because they're informal and fun.


3. All these updates will cause even more overload and filtering needs to improve.


4. Facebook gives you context about people's location, mood, and current activity. You need to coordinate less than if you were using only email.

Gabor's 7 Points

Most people misread the WSJ piece as "email is dying". But email isn't dying, it's being complemented by new modes of communication. And despite Paul Graham's warning about "lists of N things", here's my list of 7 things to contribute to the social network updates vs. email debate.

1. Twitter and Facebook updates are orthogonal to email. Looking through the last 200 tweets on my Twitter feed, I didn't find a single update that I would have sent as an email had Twitter not existed. The use cases are too different. Thus, Twitter is a parallel world to email.
   
   This HuffPo article puts it best:
   

   If you're like us, you still send text messages on the weekends, check voicemail at work, post photos to Facebook, watch viral videos on YouTube, and Tweet your favorite news.
   
   In other words, we haven't "killed off" our previous tools: we're actually adding, not abandoning, platforms. And when we do ditch, it's because of forces more complex than seasonal trends (or the news cycle).

   
   
2. Email is private, Twitter is public. Twitter and Facebook can't replace email because they're public or semi-public communications channels. Direct messages in Twitter and Facebook messages are bad, low-fidelity clones of email functionality. You shouldn't use them.


3. Your work email belongs to your employer. You can't use Facebook for work. The messages and the intellectual property you create while at work belong to your employer. If you leave the company, you shouldn't be able to take them with you.


4. Email is about task management. The reason why your inbox is a source of stress and your Twitter feed is not is because email is a task manager. Twitter and Facebook are entertainment. Your boss wouldn't assign a task to you via a Facebook update. But if your boss sends you an email, you better read it and get that work item done.


5. The unread messages counter. Unlike Twitter, email has an unread message counter. If it didn't have that counter, email would make you far less anxious. But it would lose its work value as a task manager.


6. The future of email is not to become IM. Part of the value of email is that it's asynchronous: While you're getting actual work done, new messages pile up. You don't want to give everyone the chance to interrupt your work flow. You wouldn't get things done. And that's exactly the problem with turning email into IM, whether it's with push notifications or Google Wave: Yes it will get you answers instantly, but it would make everyone less productive.


7. The lack of innovation in email is because the underlying protocols suck. If you have a great idea about how to use or display the data in Twitter, all you need to read is the Twitter API docs. If you have a great idea in email, you need to know MIME (the encoder), SMTP (the message protocol), IMAP or Exchange (the access layer), and your email client (the viewer). The email technology stack is huge, wobbly, and antiquated.
   
   Take IMAP: a hugely inefficient, stateful protocol with an ugly message format. State-of-the art in the late 1990s, yes, but if you were to reinvent it today, you could do a much better job.
   
   We need to make it easier to innovate around the mail client. We could rip out everything (maybe save for SMTP) and build a great new stack that allows fast iteration. Make it easier to move the needle in email, and the needle will move.

Do You Keep Gmail Open in Your Browser?

Everyone who uses Gmail knows this: You keep Gmail open in your browser all day so you can check your email, send off messages, and search your email archives.

Why This is Unacceptable

Yes, I believe that Gmail is the future of email (I'm a little biased).

But this is far from the optimum. Keeping Gmail and Google Calendar open in your browser should not be how we'll do email in 10 years.

Why?

1. It gets lost: Gmail being just an open tab in your browser means that it will get lost among many other tabs and browser windows that are open. As I'm writing this blog entry, I have 11 tabs open in Firefox.


2. No notifications: Unless you install separate tools, Gmail can't notify you of new important messages that come in. I'm not a fan of push email as it increases hyperactivity, but some level of notification, especially for meetings approaching in Google Calendar would be useful.


3. No integration into your workflow. Clicking mailto links doesn't work. There's no spot on your screen that says "email". There's no right-click send for documents.

Should Gmail Become Outlook?

Should the Gmail become a desktop client Outlook? No. I think that would be a step back, not forward. I imagine the ideal setup to be like Tweetie's desktop client. An icon sits in your desktop bar and gently lights up when new things arrive. (Update: Mailplane and Fluid have similar functionality, but only for the Mac).

Here's how I imagine the optimal desktop webmail experience:

1. Always on: It's not a tab you launch in your browser. It starts when your computer starts and it's on while you're working.


2. Smart notifications: Rather than showing a toast notification or playing a chime sound for each email that arrives, it would know about the relative importance of messages and infer from your behavior if it's OK to interrupt you. There's plenty of research about both importance and notifications that still needs to make it into the real world.


3. Keeps a copy of all your messages: I think reMail demonstrates how powerful it is to have all your mail on your phone. If you have your mail on your phone, why can't you have it on your desktop? Offline Gmail is headed the right way. In my ideal client, its features would become standard.

Making real progress in email clients is hard. It's easy to add new widgets, helper utilities, notifiers, and spam bots. But it's hard to move the needle on the fundamental paradigms - how do we read, check, search, and organize. Moving Gmail away from the browser into an always-on background app seems comparatively easy. The things I mentioned could probably be done by a third party - it doesn't need to be Google. Please, let's get this done.

Some Unconventional Ideas

There should be an X-Prize for high speed rail. I read recently that an ICE 3 train set costs 35 million dollars, but the tracks on which it runs costs billions (depending on distance). It's fun to talk and worry about the train sets - there's plenty of coverage of decisions between Alstom's TGV and Siemens' ICE sets. But no one writes about that we need cheaper tracks that are fast to build. There should be an X Prize for people to build the cheapest, safest, high-speed train tracks. Whoever gets 1 km of track to cost less than $100k total wins.

Cities should set immigration quotas and criteria. Immigrants always move to a specific city, not a country. It's more likely that someone will move from San Francisco to London (8645 kilometers) than from San Francisco to Merced (212 kilometers). Cities should be able to compete for the best talent directly, and set their own criteria. For example, London should be able to decide that it will allow 5000 non-EU foreigners to move to it this year, and all of them need to have a bachelor's degree. These choices would be made by the people who are actually affected (Londoners), not the whole population (UK != London). The UK/EU would still do the background and security checks.

Record Stores should sell digital songs. Remember the nineties where you'd have to go to a store to buy songs? With iTunes, that's over. In the physical world, discovering new music was fun. On iTunes, I barely ever buy from artists I don't already know. That's why the record stores that still exist should kick out all the CDs and offer a great, comfortable, physical environment to discover new music.

A Model of Your Inbox

I've been thinking a lot about how users view and manage their inbox. This post is about the model I came up with. I'm basing this on my own experience and on having talked to dozens of people about their email habits. But since this blog also is read by lots of email enthusiasts, I'd love to hear your feedback: Does this make sense? What am I missing?

Four Quadrants

Every single email message youreceive can be classified into one of the four quadrants below. Important emails are the ones you need to take action on. Urgent emails are time-sensitive. Urgency does not necessarily imply importance: Your coworker's cake will be gone in a few minutes, but it's not necessary to take action on that, especially if you're on a diet.


The key insight here is that the stuff you care about are the emails on the left. These are the emails that make it worth checking your Crackberry every few minutes. They emails that keep you awake at night.

Filtering the Important

How can you filter out what's important? My theory is that for humans, that's actually the easy part: You often easily determine importance by just looking at the sender of the message. Roughly, senders fall into three categories:

1. Crap: these are easy to remove: iTunes Receipts, Amazon notifications, LinkedIn emails, frequent flier statements, and the like. Not important.


2. VIPs: You know who they are! Major customers, your manager, and your girlfriend belong in this category. Important.


3. People you know: These are the non-VIPs that you still want to deal with. I like to think of this category as the intersection of your Facebook and LinkedIn connections. Mostly Important.


4. Everyone else: Recruiters and salespeople, senders you don't recognize. Mostly not important.

Research indicates that people use senders as their main importance indicator [1, 2]. The task of filtering out important email is easy, and you could probably train a classifier to very high degrees of accuracy.

Managing Later vs. Now

I believe that this is the heart of email overload. Remember how I said that the left side is what matters. I like to label the two subcategories as "Later" and "Now" [3].


The workflow should be that you decide whether you want to deal with an email now or later. You respond to the "now" emails and they disappear into the archive. The "later" emails haunt you until you're done with them.

This is the point where today's email clients fail. Users try various mechanisms to manage now/later and to do/done: Keeping emails unread, starring them in Gmail, and filing away stuff that is done into an intricate foldering system. The number of email management strategies that users come up with impressive [4].

But none of this works. Emails that are unread and starred disappear from your main view. Out of view, out of mind. Poof. There is no pressure to act upon them. In contrast, filing away emails that are done requires an amount of discipline that few users have. I think that the inability of managing now/later and to do/done is one of the main reasons for email overload.

Wrapping Up

Let's review. I've outlined three theories here:

1. Your incoming all fall into one of the four quadrants of urgency and importance. What really matters is the important stuff, which breaks into "Later" vs. "Now".


2. It's easy to filter important vs. not important.


3. It's hard to manage Later vs. Now because the current tools are broken.

I'd love to hear your views on my theories. Drop me a line or leave a comment.

References

[1] Gina Danielle Venolia, Laura Dabbish, JJ Cadiz, and Anoop Gupta. Supporting email workflow. Technical report, Microsoft Research - Collaboration and Multimedia Group, September 2001.

[2] Olle Baelter and Candace Sidner. Bifrost inbox organizer: giving users control over the inbox. In NordiCHI '02: Proceedings of the second Nordic Conference on Human-computer interaction, pages 111-118, Aarhus, Denmark, 2002.

[3] The "Getting Things Done" school of thought has a more intricate system than this, but I think that Later / Now is the essence of it.

[4] Steve Whittaker and Candace Sidner. Email overload: exploring personal information management of email. In CHI '96: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pages 276-283, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, 1996.

"The Future of Email" Talk in Sydney

Yesterday, I gave a talk about my views on the future of email at CSIRO / Macquarie university in Sydney. Thanks to Andrew Lampert for the arranging and promoting the talk. Here's what it was about:

Mail clients haven't moved forward since the mid-1990s. Most applications have added superficial features, but the basics remained unchanged: Folders, lists of disconnected emails sorted by arrival time. Clients have no sense of priority, urgency, workflows, or connectedness. Their search features are simple and are sometimes painfully slow. Users today are bombarded with email and find popular email clients hard to use and inefficient.

How did we get here? How do we get out of it? This talk presents new ideas of improving the email experience for overloaded users.

I promised to put the slides online. Here they are (also on SlideShare).

Gabor Cselle - The Future of Email

I'd also like to thank the audience for the great discussion that ensued after the talk - I might post some of the best questions here at a later date.

A video of the talk is available on the CSIRO website here.

I Want Your .com For New Startup

My new startup needs a name and the corresponding .com domain. I've spent hours and hours trying to come up with something good. Why not crowdsource it? My blog now has over 400 subscribers. Thus, there must be someone in my audience who owns the perfect domain name for a new email / communications startup.

Here's my "wishlist":

• It has to be a .com as people have difficulties with domains like del.icio.us


• If possible, I'd like to closely follow Guy Kawasaki's naming guidelines.


• Unambiguous spelling: It should be easy to map from how it's pronounced to how it's spelled.


• I like alliterations such as FriendFeed, they really stick to your mind. Not a must, though.


• Either a name that has something to do with communications ... (good examples are PostPath, TellMe, Gmail, or Twitter);


• ... Or a word that sounds good and can be used for any type of business, such as Google, Skype, Yahoo, Zimbra, Groove.

To give you some more inspiration, I like these words: shine, glow, joy, happy, dream, sky, light, utopia, drum, jet, jam, fun, run, hop, leap, fly, flow, fast, now, right, easy, wow, zap, clean, and fresh. (Yes, I've tried combinations of these and ones domains I liked were taken.)

Do you have a .com that fits these criteria? Let's chat! My email address is here.

If you don't have a stack of .com domains piled up, please send a link to this post to your friend who does. Thanks for your help!

Six Mobile Ideas

Here are 6 ideas for mobile applications I’d like to use. Two of them are about easier data access:

1. Access to desktop files: I’d like to list, search, and open files from my desktop on my phone. Dropbox lets you do this through an iGoogle gadget, but I’d like to go to a simple page on my iPhone.


2. Offline content: When it has WiFi reception, my phone preloads itself with all the content that’s on top of Hacker News, and lets me to quickly browse it when on the go. Similar to AvantGo from the old Palm days, but doesn’t need you to plug your phone into your computer.

The rest are location-based services which require either good position triangulation or built-in GPS on your phone:

3. Instant Meetup: An extension to my Academic Lunch Dating idea from years ago. I’d like to do things like: “I’m in Washington Square Park right now and would like to find someone with similar interests”. It’s GPS-powered instant friendship building or dating.
4. A Location-based Upcoming: “I’m at 3rd and Market and would like to do something exciting within walking distance.” This would give recommendations of what to do – it might give you your friends’ party 4 blocks down, or the latest SFMOMA special exhibit.
5. Yelp it now: Instead of tediously going through Yelp’s interface – which is super slow on my iPhone – I want a simple, fast-loading page that returns the top 3 rated restaurants on Yelp within walking distance.
6. NextBus plus GPS: Using built-in GPS, finds out which bus stop I’m at. List the next bus arrivals here, in any directions. Much like the existing NextBus, but no scrolling through pages of stops.

Has someone already done any of this? If so, please leave a comment and let me know.

Book Review: Send

Send is a refreshing book. In email research and email software startups, we spend our time coming up with better ways of displaying and organizing email. In this book, David Shipley, Op-Ed page editor of the New York Times and Will Schwalbe, a journalist and editor, discuss the other part of the equation: The humans behind those messages.

Send shines the light on emotions and motives: The emails that are sent to create the impression of progress. The passive-aggressive messages you send when you feel like you’ve been wronged and, more importantly, how to avoid them.

At parts, the book reads like "Email for Dummies", but there are some highlights: I shiver when people send me subject lines like "Quick question" and "Great News", when they should have written "Release date for next version?" and "Expenses approved". This is the book you want to hand out to the guilty.

I'm already wondering about how to put this into a product: Could we make software that orders people to rewrite the email in a more effective manner? It could pop up "Your subject line sucks" and make you rewrite it before you send. Could we find out the mood someone was in when sending a message and display it alongside the email? Food for thought.

Disclosure: I didn't buy this book - I found it in my snail mail one day, and I can only guess that the authors sent it to me. Keep'em coming - this is a good way to get your ideas read by the email community.

Business Book Diff Tool

I’ve been reading a lot of business books lately to brush up on my management skills. There's a lot of overlap: Most of them devote page after page to the basics. But at the heart of every good business book is a gem: A collection of insights with real value. The take away.

I'm wondering if someone could build a business book diff tool: You feed it a list of all the business books you've read so far, and give it the book you're currently reading. It runs fancy natural language processing algorithms - a text similarity matcher, and a summarizer. It generates a summary of the contents of this book that you haven't read elsewhere, and gives you the pages and chapters you should actually read.

Amazon and Google have the input data for this, since they've scanned and OCRed millions of books. Building the magic NLP algorithms is a different story. Has anyone done something like this?

Seven Things We Should Fix

It’s time to complain about the world’s imperfections.

7. Finding Parking: I’d rather have my car’s navigation system just tell my where the next parking spot is, instead of spending 20 minutes hunting for one.

6. Taxi Fleets: In Germany, your average taxi is a largish Mercedes. In the US, it’s a Crown Victoria. The city gas mileage for both is horrible. The incentives for cab operators to switch to hybrids are there: The cars cost the same, but the gas mileage is much better. Why aren’t we seeing faster adoption?

5. Different power plugs: Why does almost every country need to have a different type of power plug? Instead of carrying around an assortment of adapters, the countries of the world should sit together and agree on a global standard.

4. Power adapter bonanza: Why does each device need a different power adapter? If all electronics manufacturers sat down and agreed on a few common types, you’d never need to ask "does anyone else here own a Nokia"?

3. Power lines: Those huge masts are an ugly distraction in the landscape. Can't we dig holes and put it all underground?

2. Tickets: In the age of e-tickets, why do we still need physical tickets to concerts and public transportation?

1. Cash: Coins and bank notes? You have to carry them around and refill supplies when you run out. The fact that cash even exists creates opportunities for counterfeiting, money laundering, and other unwanted side-effects. We’re actually pretty far on this one, but some last rebel holdouts still refuse to take MasterCard or Visa.

The World of Work in 2012

While this post mentions a number of Google products, the opinions expressed here are mine, not those of my employer! I do not work on any of the products mentioned in this article.

I believe that how we work and collaborate will fundamentally change over the next 5 years. This is no far-fetched vision, but pretty obvious stuff, and I'm even not the first to connect the dots and point it out. In the space of five years, most technically inclined consumers will see:

• their lightweight communication and collaboration move almost entirely to the mobile phone,


• most document editing and heavyweight collaboration move to the browser,


• with just a few heavyweight applications remaining on the desktop.

Last weekend, I went to visit Lucerne, Switzerland, with friends. Among them was Fabian, who is a strong believer in using the cell phone solely for calling and sending text messages. He still owns a trusty old Nokia 6210 . We had no city map, and I had only a vague idea of the city's layout, so I whipped up Google Maps Mobile on my 6280 and searched for Lucerne. Fabian was hooked. (The only thing he's worried about now is data fees.)

Back in my student days, there used to be these group assignments: Each group had to come up with some form of document and hand it in. This is where the world split into nerds and normal people. The nerds used Latex files or HTML pages checked them into CVS. The normal people used Word documents that were mailed around and eventually unified into one by the last person. Today, the obvious choice is to put this into Google Documents.

These two examples illustrate how we'll see user behaviors change on cell phones, in browsers, and on the desktop.

The World of Cell Phones

There are many possible killer apps on cell phones:

• maps, directions, traffic information, timetables,
  
• shopping comparisons,
  
• fact lookups on Wikipedia,
  
• email

Some of these are already available, but are either unusable or usable only on a few devices, such as BlackBerries (CrackBerries?). This will change.

Have you seen the iPhone keynote? When I heard the announcement, I was a bit skeptical at first, since my current cell phone does almost everything theiPhone can do: It doesn't have WiFi access, but matches Apple's product on all other counts. But the iPhone's goal is not to introduce new functionality: Its goal is to make existing functionality usable. If you make something 10x more usable, 1000x more people will use it. But Nokia, Motorola, and Sony Ericsson aren't stupid - in a year or so, expect their phones to get significantly better, too.

In the next few years, the average cell phone user's device will have a great email client, a decent browser that displays the same version Internet as a desktop browser, and access to her online documents with lightweight editing. Some of this software won't come from the phone vendor.

In 2012, the most important part of your cell phone plan will be the price per transferred megabyte, not call minutes. You'll leave your house without a timetable printout, a clear idea of what gift you want to buy for your girlfriend, or even where the shop you want to visit is. You'll read all your email on your cell phone first, and only use a computer when the response needs to be more than a couple of lines.

But sometimes, you'll still need to sit down in front of a screen.

The World of Browsers

Let's say you're putting together your company's budget for 2013, or maybe you're writing a memo about how your car fleet should move entirely to hybrids. In 2012, you'll be working on this inside the browser.

Creating, editing, and revising documents are the prototypical activities of the office worker. Today, these documents are created in Word or Excel, after which they are emailed around to get feedback and iterate on the original draft.

The reason why Word and Excel are used is because of network effects: If you have the same software as everyone else, you can be sure the document will look the same as on the sender's machine. Most office users have also gotten used to the clumsiness of emailing around documents as just another aspect of drowning in email.

Even today, web office suites such as Google Documents or Microsoft's Office Live get rid of the need to sink thousands of dollars into desktop software. Documents look the same everywhere, and instead of emailing around revisions, all users can edit the same document at the same time, for free. In addition, you have access to these documents from every web browser anywhere in the world, instead of carrying a single copy of them on your laptop.

By 2012, these web applications will have evolved to a point where the default way of dealing with documents is by loading up the web app. But there are some applications that will remain on the desktop for a long time to come.

The World of the Desktop

Aaaah the power of the desktop. If you run applications right on the machine, you lose mobility, but you gain processing power, storage capacity, and the ability to build richUIs . That's why some applications will stay here: They require processing a lot data in real time, or need specialized user interfaces that cannot be replicated in the browser or the mobile phone. Examples are:

• Programming
  
• Desktop publishing
  
• Audio/Video editing
  
• Computer games

Let's take video editing, for example: If you're a video artist in 2012, you'll still be working with Gigabytes of data, and many work steps will still require huge amounts of processing power. It's unlikely that there will ever be enough bandwidth to handle all this data remotely. The same applies to anything from desktop publishing to computer games. Even five years down the road, you'll see these things happen on the desktop.

How to Get There

Plenty of things will have to happen before this becomes reality.

There are technical hurdles: For example, anyone who has worked with Java on Mobile Phones will happily attest that the UIs you can implement with the standard libraries aren't that compelling. On the browser side, there is also room for improvement. For example, making rich editing work right on both IE andFirefox is a nightmare. And then there's the offline problem, which I've written about before: No amount of technical innovation or investment will ensure 100% coverage of the planet. We need to build cell phone and web apps so they can deal with being offline.

Then there are the economic problems: For all this to work out, the price for data communication needs to drop very significantly. In countries where there's healthy competition between network operators, this will happen - all others will lag behind.

In addition, will users need to trust Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, et al enough to store their documents' data in their datacenters? Corporations in particular are very sensitive about security and privacy issues.

But the greatest hurdle is that non-technically inclined masses tend to stick with what they know, even if something better comes along. (People clinging to the old ways are hardly ever convinced later; they just die out.) If email in Outlook works, why switch? According to Bob Cringley, the masses only switch quickly if something is 10x as good - so these mobile and web apps will have to really kick ass!

So if my prediction doesn't become true, I have plenty of parties to blame. Still, I hope that this works out.

--

Thanks to Douwe Osinga, Fabian Siegel, Bálint Miklós, Julia Ferraioli, and Keno Albrecht for their ideas and comments on initial drafts of this.

Academic Lunch Dating

Swiss people are shy by nature. Academics are often a bit reserved. Combine the two and you get what is a common phenomenon at ETH: Entire research groups always go out to lunch together. The same people eat with the same people, every day.

On the other hand, great research always happens at the intersection of two fields. Ideas do not form in a vacuum, but are the result of interaction. To get more ideas, you'd ideally talk to different people every once in a while.

That's why I'd like to propose academic lunch dating. Unlike in traditional online dating, the ultimate goal here would be the exchange of ideas, not gene sequences

We'd make Thursday the designated lunch dating day. We build a website where students, researchers, and professors can sign up. Every Wednesday, they enter what kind of person they want to talk to: Student or researcher, data mining specialist, mathematician or biologist? The system would match up fitting pairs, and send out emails. You'd meet Thursday 12:30 at the cafeteria you agreed on.

On Friday, everything would go back to normal and you could have lunch with your peers in peace.

Offline Mobile Content

Have you tried Google Maps Mobile? It's the most useful application I've ever seen on my cell phone. Still, at least here in Europe, few people are using mobile services. Since telcos are competing on the price per talk minute and price per SMS, they are still charging extremely high fees for GPRS. With my current plan, I pay a whopping CHF 2.50 ($ 2) per MB! Most people don't even know what GPRS costs, so they are hesitant about using it.

Still there is so much content you'd want to have access to on your phone: Aside from the maps, I'd love to have mobile access to tour guides, restaurant reviews, business listings, movie ratings (for next time I'm at the video rental place without a clue of what to get) [*].

Almost every new mobile phone today comes with a memory card with ample capacity: My Nokia 6280 came with a 64 MB card. Its successor comes with 512 MB.

For the time being, this creates kind of an arbitrage opportunity for content providers: While GPRS data rates remain high, they could offer downloadable packages of offline content instead of a web service. A map of Zurich to download on the web and store on my cell phone via Blueooth? All for CHF 5? I would certainly pay for that.

This model will be viable unless data service becomes practically free: Most would probably rather pay a small flat free than put themselves at the mercy of intransparent price plans. Once data is free, it's better to use the online service as it is more up-to-date. But I doubt this will happen soon: Making data service free endangers the telcos' core business – Mobile Skype, anyone?

[*] Update on Oct 11 2009: And my email archives might be a good idea too.

Two Social Search Ideas

I'm on a short vacation in the Mediterranean, and as always during trips, I get a bunch of ideas that seem smart when you're chilling on a beach but may be useless when confronted with the real world.

Here are two simple ideas that could make search more useful by accessing your social networks. Both ideas seem pretty obvious. So obvious and trivial, in fact, that I'm pretty sure someone has already tried this. I figured I'd still put them up for discussion.

Click Popularity

A recent article in the Economist points out that people like to follow the herd when confronted with many options. They buy the most popular cereal in a supermarket, and download the most popular songs in an online music store.

What if we extended this concept to search results? If search engines showed click counts for each item on the results page, SEOs would instantly start clicking away, making that measure completely useless.

But what if we integrated search and social networking? We could show just the click counts of your friends. Your friends have little incentive to skew results. They will have similar tastes and preferences as you do, so they will search for similar things and likely click on the same items on a results page. And you could be sure you clicked the "right" result – i.e. the one your friends clicked.

Query Trail Sharing

Search results are seldom perfect on the first try: Even Google can't read your mind. When searching for something specific, users often spend considerable amounts of time refining their queries.

For example, I was recently looking for the name of the Python function that lets me get a class member given a string with its name. The function is called 'getattr', but that had somehow escaped me. Here is the query trail for that day, reconstructed from my Google search history (The first and last queries are unrelated):

• Senator Everett Dirksen
  3:50 pm: Clicked "Everett Dirksen - Wikipedia"
• python classes
  4:11 pm: Clicked "9. Classes"
  4:16 pm: Clicked "7.7 Class definitions"
• python class advanced
  4:19 pm: Clicked "5.7. Advanced Special Class Methods
• python getattr
  4:21 pm: Clicked "4.4. Getting Object References With getattr"
  
• python semaphore
  4:59 pm: Clicked "15.3.4 Semaphore Objects"

By looking at word overlaps and the timestamps, one could now find out that the inner three queries belong together. When a friend searches for the same item, one could now show related queries.

Problems

Implementing both features is fairly straightforward and could likely be done with a bunch of Greasemonkey scripts. But the two huge problems are privacy and the number of friends needed to make this useful.

I doubt that users would dare to use this if they thought that their searches are watched by friends. Therefore, click counts and trail sharing should be anonymous: You don't know which one of your friends clicked where. Plus, it may be useful to filter those Jenna Jameson-related queries.

Second, you don't want to be the only one signed up for this service: You only profit from the feature if you have lots of friends signed up for it as well. Sure, we could also look at data from friends-of-friends and further layers, but that increases spamming opportunities and decreases privacy. Maybe it would make sense to integrate this with existing social networks, such as Xing or LinkedIn, and have people download a browser plugin. If Google or Yahoo did this in our post-AOL-leak world, there could be an public outcry.

Let me know in case you know a product that already does this.

How Researchers are Reinventing the Mail Client

For the last 10 years, the three-pane has been the standard view of looking at email. A pane for folders, a pane for folder contents, and one showing the selected email. Even though mail clients are highly configurable, this has been the standard view of many users. It isn't likely to change soon: The beta of Microsoft Outlook 2007 – pictured below – sticks with conventions.


Email today has many annoyances. Even though we now seem to have a grip on the spam problem, many users are suffering from email overload: There are just too many emails flooding the inbox. Many are drowning in heaps of emails that aren't even important – it's just a colleague at work Cc-ing everyone evenly remotely connected to his project.

There are plenty of ideas on how to improve the current state of mail clients, and I'll present some of them here. None of this is my work: I'll give references to publications of others. There are literally hundreds of papers on this subject, so I've chosen to present my selection of personal favorites.

Here are the three ideas I'll present:

• task-driven email organization
• smart organization structures
• cool new features

I'll present one example from each category.

Task-Driven E-Mail Organization

People's lives today are organized in their mail client. It's not just communication that takes place here: Meetings are organized, lists of todos and deadlines are exchanged, documents are sent around.

In effect, what you're keeping track of in your email client are tasks. Most emails you get are part of some project, belong to an event you're attending or organizing, or are part of a greater plan, e.g. keeping in touch with a girl.

That's the idea behind TaskMaster [2], a tool developed at PARC in 2003. All your emails, drafts, attachments, and bookmarks are mapped to "thrasks". Emails in the same thread are grouped automatically, but the user still has to assign other mails, links, and deadlines manually.

Thrasks can have associated actions, such as "call this person", and "review this". You can also add deadlines to each task: they are shown as green and red bars as they approach. Documents can be previewed right inside TaskMaster's UI, as seen with the Word document on the bottom.



I think the great advantage of this approach is that items that belong together are displayed together. Instead of using email folders to hold related messages, the central element is the task, with all the associated deadlines, todo items, and documents.

Here's a quip from the paper's usability interviews:

"It's just nice to be able to have the control over mixing [...] related things together, even though they might not be [...] the identical kind of thing."

What if we went a step further and looked at workflow patterns? For example, at a company where you interview candidates in a formal hiring process, you get automatically generated messages reminding you of the interview, requesting feedback after the interview, and a notification of the final decision. In the future, we might be able to automatically identify the structure of such processes [4] and classify email into these activities [5] – both of which goes beyond Taskmaster's model, which requires some manual effort.

Creating Smart Organization Structures

Almost everyone I know keeps incoming email entirely in the Inbox. Newly arriving messages join the 500 messages already marked as unread and are displayed at the top of the pile. Is there a better way to organize this view? Can we sensibly restructure incoming mail?

Bifrost [6], a plug-in originally conceived at Lotus Research, that takes this approach. The idea here is that the people are the main indicators of whether an email is important. After installing Bifrost, you're asked to sort your contacts into five groups: Your own email addresses, "VIP Platinum" (extremely important people, e.g. your manager), "VIP Gold" (important people: friends and family), as well as small and large distribution mailing lists.

Bifrost then reorganizes your inbox and displays your email in a number of predefined categories:

• Timely: Emails that contain today's or tomorrow's date in the subject line. They'll likely be important today, but not next week.
• VIP Platinum: emails from your manager.
• VIP Gold: emails from friends and family.
• Personal: replies to emails you've sent out, emails sent directly and only to you, and any unclassified emails you receive.
• Small distribution: Intended for group messages.
• Large distribution: Large-distribution mailing lists.

Below is a mock up of what this looks like in practice. (I had to draw this up myself as the screenshots in the paper were too small).


This structure is helpful in identifying important messages and weeding out the less interesting ones. A quote from their user interviews:

"If I am running through an inbox, I might be tempted to read a title and get sucked in because it is interesting. Whereas if it is in a pile of listserv stuff, I just ignore it altogether. That was a nice thing when I was busy, to not get distracted by unimportant mail."

It's interesting to note that except for differentiating small and large distribution messages, this approach can already be replicated in today's email clients. You can simply create search folders or message filtering rules which simulate the Bifrost behavior. However, this would put emails into folders and wouldn't offer the one-page overview that Bifrost has.

Cool New Features

ReMail [7] was a project at IBM Research that ran from 2001 through 2004. It was basically a reimplementation of an email client from the ground up and had several cool new features. I'll describe two of my favorites below.


Thread Arcs visualize relationships between email messages. Instead of wasting lots of space with a tree view that Thunderbird has, it displays the thread structure in a little image. This feature helps you see where you are in a long conversation. For example, in the picture below, emails B, C, D, E, F, and H are all direct replies to A, while email G is a reply to E.



The advantage of thread arcs is that you can see the position of the email you're viewing in the larger conversation, without having to switch to a tree view: your main inbox pane remains sorted by arrival time.

Contact Maps offer a different view of the address book: Senders from which you have received email are grouped by domain. Each person's name is shown with a different background color, depending on the time of the last email exchange. This offers a better view of your contacts than the traditional non-grouped lists where your least important contact looks just like your most important one.



Many of ReMail's other ideas can be found in today's popular clients: Instant messaging is now integrated with Gmail, which also groups emails by thread. The collection mechanism in ReMail is semantically equivalent to Gmail's labels. Outlook integrates emails and calendaring and has list separators ('today', 'yesterday', 'last month'), just like the ReMail prototype.

Conclusions

It seems like the ideal email organization tool would be like your personal, smart secretary: It knows what's important or interesting, and deals with stuff you don't want to be bothered with. That would be perfect.

Today, we seem to be at a point where it seems like we might be able to solve the spam problem. But the problem of figuring out which of the non-spam emails is important, and what it relates to, still exists.

One solution – the one I presented here – is to add nifty features to the mail client. But would all these features really be understood and used? Users today seem to be using a very basic set of mail client functionality. Anything we add should not only solve a painful problem, but also be easy to use. I'm not even sure this applies to the applications I've shown here: You don't know until you've tried.

What do you think? Are these good ideas? Would normal people who are drowning in email use these features? What features can't you live without? Post a comment and let me know.

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Thanks to Keno Albrecht, Bálint Miklós , Markus Egli, and Fabian Siegel for reviewing drafts of this.

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References

A more thorough and academic overview of the subject:
[1] Steve Whittaker, Victoria Bellotti, Jacek Gwizdka: Email in personal information management, Communications of the ACM, 2006

Examples of task- and activity-based systems:
[2] Victoria Bellotti, Nicolas Ducheneaut, Mark Howard, Ian Smith: Taking email to task., CHI, 2003
[3] Michael J. Muller, Werner Geyer, Beth Brownholtz, Eric Wilcox, David R. Millen: One-hundred days in an activity-centric collaboration environment based on shared objects, CHI, 2004
[4] Nicholas Kushmerick, Tessa Lau: Automated email activity management: an unsupervised learning approach, IUI 2005
[5] Mark Dredze, Tessa Lau, Nicholas Kushmerick: Automatically classifying emails into activities, IUI 2006

Bifrost:
[6] Olle Bälter, L Sidner: Bifrost inbox organizer: giving users control over the inbox, NordiCHI, 2002

ReMail:
[7] ReMail: Reinventing Email Website, Collaborative User Experience, IBM Research, 2003