Transitioning from email to collaboration platform

Transitioning from email to collaboration platform is a difficult problem.  Technology of deploying collaboration platform is easy.  What is difficult is getting people off from email and have them start using collaboration platform to start realizing the benefits of shared virtual group page.

As I wrote earlier in my blog post, I have been thinking about this problem for a while.  This week, I've decided to look into a simple module that would make this transition easier.

Minimal Viable Product is a simple one.  As an email user and collaboration early adopter, I want to start posting emails with long To and CC list to an internal collaboration system.  The system will keep track of single master copy of the email thread and recreate the thread by timestamp.  That's it.

Email as messaging system

I ran into Sachin Agarwal's blog about how email is the de-facto standard messaging system of Internet.  I totally agree.  Email is a very simple tool that everyone understands.  Although I hate using email as collaboration tool, email has its killer use case, and it is here to stay.

I can think of the following compelling reasons why email is not going away.

Do the job well: Don't sit on the reply

What I'm about to share is based on my personal experience.  I'm still in the middle of perfecting my technique and getting better at communicating with the team.  If you have any suggestion or improvement idea, I would love to know.

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I thought I was different.  I thought I knew better.  I somehow felt that I did not have to subject myself to explain every details of my thought process.  I believed that sharing too much detail was counter productive.  What mattered the most was the result, the final answer.

It may have been watching too much Apple commercials in the late 1990's.  Or it may have been cockiness of a recent graduate where just about everything was graded on a curve.  I fell into the trap of thinking that I was different, and I knew a better way to deal with emails.

And that led to not sharing information quickly.  I would rather have the perfect final answer in an email rather than sending a premature half-baked reply.  When I get an email requesting for some information, I would dig up my old email to confirm, retest the code to validate and send what I personally verified data back to the requester.

Product Idea: Email to collaboration

I get 140 - 160 emails a day.  Most emails have multiple recipients.  Rarely I get an email that is addressed just to me.  Only automatic alerts are sent just to me.  Others have often a dozen recipients.  What's interesting is that recipient list gets longer as the email thread drags on.

I'm sure that you've seen many.  Someone sends you an email.  You respond and copy someone who might know the answer.  Recipient starts copying someone who might add to the conversation.  Each time new recipients are added, the email thread gets longer.  Message gets buried.  Dozens of emails are littered across many individual inboxes.

We already know how to fix this.  Answer is to use a collaboration system.  Instead of attaching Word doc with edits, sending a pointer to the central collaboration server where the up-to-date version is hosted is the answer.  And it works well when collaboration happens with well defined task.

Webmail Privacy: Is true anonymity possible?

EFF ran a blog post describing how-to on sending and receiving Webmails anonymously.  With the CIA director David Petraeus resigning over leaked personal Webmail, I read through the how-to steps thinking that I might consider keeping personal data, such as correspondence with my wife and my medical doctor.  But after a half way into it I realized that it was just way too restrictive for me.

Alas, price of leaking secret communication can be high.
Source: http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-250_162-57547958/cia-director-david-petraeus-resigns/

The deal breaker for me was the fact that I had to use Tor Browser Bundle all the time.  Even if I made a mistake of logging on to the anonymous Webmail account, Webmail provider could have logged my IP, identify my access point and locate me using ISP record down to my home address.

Facebook Messages: now comes with email flavor

You would probably heard of by now that Facebook rolled out @facebook.com email address to all 900 million Facebook users.  If you are not sure what your @facebook.com email address is I suggest that you look up your Profile Contact Info Section.  It should show a new email address that Facebook slipped in there for you.

Facebook becomes full web mail service;
look for anti-spam war in your Facebook
messaging inbox soon.

This time Facebook showed a sign of maturity, and had my new Facebook email as visible only to me.  If it were early 2009, I would have expected it to be visible to everyone but maybe shown in jpg graphics (Facebook used to display user's email address as image to prevent spammers from scrapping Profile sites).

Why would Facebook give up their own @facebook.com domain for all users?  What would Facebook gain by giving everyone an email address?  Isn't Facebook all about short status updates and messaging?

Email, killer app or first successful virus incubator?

I used to like getting emails.  Back in mid 90's I had about a handful of people who sent me emails.  All emails were either from my sister and classmates.  Checking your inbox using Pine was similar to checking your mail box.  When you found an email waiting for you, you were glad to see them.

15+ years later things are different.  Much different.  I get about 120 - 150 emails from people and another 150 - 200 emails from bug tracking system alerting defect change history.  In total I get about 270 - 350 emails a day.  That's just on my Outlook client.  Then I have my personal email accounts which collect about 50 - 100 emails a day from 3 different email accounts.  And I know that I'm just an average user.  I bet that most heavy users get hundreds more emails, if not more (probably Fred Wilson falls in this heavy user category when he blogged about getting drowned in email).

Email vs Social Network: Differences

The other day I blogged about similarities between email and Social Network. I talked about how Social Network might evolve in future looking at how email has evolved. In today's blog, I want to talk about the differences between them, and where the future may look like for these two different communication mediums.

There are several differences between email and Social Network (again, I'm using capitalized Social Network to mean social Web 2.0 sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Jive, Connections, Sharepoint, etc.).

Email vs Social Network: Similarities

Today I had a lively discussion about the evolution of social network and where it's all heading with our executive team. During the discussion, one question that kept coming up on my mind was the similarities and dissimilarities between how email and Social Network have been evolved and their future (I use capitalized Social Network because I'm talking about Web 2.0 sites that are categorized as social media or social collaboration sites, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Jive, Connections, Sharepoints, etc.).