Blogg-Ed Indetermination

Q. What do velcro, pine tar, and email have in common?

A. They are all sticky applications!

While I was working at Netscape (you remember them, don’t you? They helped Al Gore invent the Internet) we talked about Internet browsers and email as “sticky” applications. By this we meant a software program that people are loath to give up. They have invested time and energy into learning it, creating and maintaining their bookmarks or address books, and the software may even be associated with a particular Internet service provider with a non-portable email address. We tried to make such applications even stickier by adding more features to them and integrating them with other applications.

We used a less flattering analogy sometimes as well — “getting the needle in their arm” — to describe the addictive nature of certain applications that our “users” (ironic choice of words) found difficult to give up even when they knew there was a better way.

If I may, I’d like to suggest yet another analogy for sticky apps: boat anchors. And what brings this to my mind today is my school’s email messaging system, which shares many of the characteristics of a boat anchor:

• it provides a safe harbor for many users during a time when there’s a sea change happening in technology.
• like an anchor, email can slow the rate of change or acceleration in an organization; useful if one is about to crash upon the shoals.
• an anchor is a really simple machine; a chain and a heavy weight describes the essence of an anchor just as sending and receiving electronic messages describes the essence of an email system.

But even the heaviest of boat anchors are meant to be hauled up and moved with the ship when it’s time to move. When an anchor becomes permanent, it becomes a mooring. When software becomes permanent, it becomes a liability to learning and innovation.

Email software and its associated features (address books, calendars, chat, and so on) are moving from the desktop to the cloud. Special purpose applications are giving way to the web browser, which itself is often a gateway to not just displaying information but interacting with server software tuned for the computer or handheld device accessing the site. Email is blending with blogging, wikis, social networking, Twitter, SMS, podcasts, vodcasts, photo sharing, and voicemail. The electronic, text-based message is morphing into its next, but certainly not final, iteration. It has lost it’s stickiness as a stand-alone application by becoming more fully ingrained in everything we do. So in a way we are more firmly attached to email than we at Netscape could ever have imagined, even as we could not imagine Netscape in its current state as a high-noon shadow of it’s former self.

Out with clients, in with the cloud, and anchors aweigh!

If only everyone who sends me email would read Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home (Amazon citation) my life would be so much better.

Authors David Shipley and Will Schwalbe have created a witty and practical guide to that office terror known as email.

Email! So much like the weather in that we all complain about and don’t do much about it. Who hasn’t experienced things such as:

• the “reply all” carpet bomb?
• the reply without the original message head scratcher?
• the subject line that, after several volleys, is no longer relevant to the topic under discussion?
• the CYACC line to keep everyone (and the dog – because on the Intent know one knows your’re a dog) “keep you in the loop?”
• SHOUTING, poor spellyng, and annoying and impenetrable :+)!!

A short, pleasant read that will remnind you that the laws of common sense are not suspended whe it comes to email. You’ll want everyone to read this book, but you’ll want to keep your own copy so make them get their own.