Not quite reading e-mail
E-mail is a troubled medium. It’s not that it isn’t incredibly useful as a quick way to communicate with someone. It’s just that everyone is so flooded with messages that they when they don’t respond immediately, the message gets lost in the abyss of their inbox, easily forgotten.
Mobile e-mail aggravates the problem. I check messages all the time on my iPhone, but don’t respond right away because I don’t have time or the iPhone keyboard isn’t the best for longer responses. However, the message is marked as “read” when I get back to my computer even though I’m not truly done with “reading” it and responding.
What if reading e-mail wasn’t so binary and offered more options than just read or unread. What if there was a “skimmed” setting for e-mail? Could e-mail be location- and time-aware, knowing that you just glanced at the note with a mobile device without fully reading it, and then remind you later when you’re at a desktop, able to digest it and craft a response?
Facebook’s new News Feed
Facebook sprung a surprise on its more than 300 million users today. It changed what “news” they see when they log on to the site.
The updated feed offers two options:
- News Feed: Which attempts to show you updates relevant to you based on a proprietary algorithm sorting content by who is close to you, what’s getting more comments and other heuristics
- Live Feed: Similar to the former real-time stream that had been the only previous view. Note that if you’re on the News Feed option, you see a little number racking up the number of posts that you aren’t seeing. (Great, yet another number of unread bits of content like email or RSS feeds to keep you stressed about falling behind in life.)
Another change was how applications can post to the stream, which are being standardized to help the news feed look less spammy.
I actually hadn’t been looking at the news stream much lately, finding it a chore to keep checking back and see what content has been added. Instead, I’ve been using NutshellMail, a product from an fbFund startup that was originally designed to help corporate users get around company firewalls blocking access to social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. You give NutshellMail your login credentials and it fetches the latest updates from your social network on its own and consolidates it all into a single email. You can click on links in the received message and do many of the tasks like commenting and posting wall items that you would be able to do on the social network site itself. The email even includes reminders for friends’ birthdays and displays your latest Twitter followers and unfollowers.
NutshellMail’s key insight and innovation that came from filling a real user need ended up having wider applications. I thankfully don’t have to deal with corporate firewalls. But it is quite handy to have a service that sends me e-mail several times a day with the latest news from my social networks. I have set NutshellMail to give me updates three times a day, at 8am, noon and 4pm. I’m not always watching the real-time stream, where I anyway couldn’t possibly keep up with everything. But the app gives me nice dips into the stream to keep updated on my social networks without too much overload.
Media Diet
Since this site will be about media consumption, I thought a good place to start would be talking about my information diet, and make that a regular feature. Maybe this will help you, and maybe you have advice to help me find meaning from noise. This way I can also track how my habits change.
I’m not in any way suggesting what I do is ideal. Part of why I started this site is that I feel the technology today has plenty of room to improve so it can simply get out of the way of communication. We should be able to do better, and we’re getting there.
- Wake up: First thing I usually do is grab my iPhone and check my email. Typically there are about 20-30 messages that have arrived overnight. Some is personal email, like from my fiancee in Tokyo. Most tends to be email newsletters that I have subscribed to, either news-related like The New York Times headline summary or Daily Beast, along with journalism-related e-mails from places like the Poynter Institute.
- I usually get on my shiny MacBook Pro laptop pretty soon after waking up. I might try and clean out some e-mails there that I just skimmed on my phone, send responses if needed or go to links that seemed interesting from the e-mails. I have tried to get my gmail inbox down to zero with limited success. It’s at 76 messages now, not so bad at all by my standards. When I hear alerts throughout the day for new items, I usually immediately check to see what arrived. I still feel that little rush from getting e-mail, the gratification that someone is contacting you. If I’m out and about, I can’t go long without pulling my iPhone out of my pocket to check for new messages.
- RSS is still a habit for me. I use NetNewsWire as a desktop application, which syncs to a Google Reader account. I have just over 50 feeds there, a mix of journalism, technology and entrepreneurship sites. Throughout the day, I hit the refresh button to see what new items have arrived. I skim the headlines and click to read whichever items seem useful or interesting.
One new RSS-aggregation gadget I have been trying out lately is FeedHub from mSpoke. You send in the list of your RSS feeds and it figures out which posts are most relevant to you. I’ve actually found that does a pretty good job and am thinking about dropping individual feeds. But then I’d have the feeling that I might miss something that I need to know (an issue that I intend to come back to). - Twitter is more of a sporadic thing. I follow too many people to really watch what they are doing (about 1,000), so at one point created a “watch” list on Tweetdeck to monitor those who seemed to have the most useful or interesting updates. But I kept falling behind. Now, I tend to use the very clean and simple Tweetie desktop application, and just dip into the stream when I have the time or inclination. I usually do find many links there that keep me jumping around the Web and forgetting where I began (yet another issue to get back to).
- As for my Web browser (now Firefox), I don’t go to pages in themselves. Almost all the links I go to are from referred from the above-mentioned sources or Google searches when I need specific information. I do not have a regular home page online or regular set of tabs that I open.
- IM is a constant for me when I am online. I use Adium to stay simultaneously logged on to all the major clients, AIM, Gtalk, MSN, Yahoo, etc. It’s the main source of communication with my fiancee. It’s also one of the major ways that I communicate with friends both near and far, a habit acquired from years living overseas before cheap international calling was the norm. I find that people are often more open and intimate in this medium and have had some of my deepest conversations with people through IM.
I’m sure I’ve left something out, but this is just a start and also sparked some ideas for future posts.
