Monday, September 20, 2010

Gmail Bug

Hollywood, Silicon Valley, DC, Wall Street, American Hinterland

Image representing Mark Zuckerberg as depicted...Image via CrunchBase
TechCrunch: Zuckerberg, ‘The Social Network’ And The Rise Of The Terror Nerd: With The Social Network, Hollywood has made an artful attempt at taking the inferiority, fear and awe that it feels towards Silicon Valley and projecting it onto the cold, calculating (and fictional) Zuckerberg; “Creation myths need a devil,” spoken by Rashida Jones’ Marylin Delpy, is the most resonant line in the film..... people who understand how to code and build websites have power ..... Sorkin himself told New York Magazine, “I am not a fan of the Internet.” ..... Mark Zuckerberg is the perfect scapegoat for the whole damn thing, being someone who stole Hollywood’s cultural influence and built a half a billion strong distribution network it could only dream of, delivering a brutal blow to its business model as a side note.

NY Mag, NY Times, All Things D, CNet.

9/11 was Hollywood not doing its job. The Gulf Oil Spill was Hollywood not doing its job. When the political pundits were saying because the Cold War has ended and history has ended, it was Hollywood's job to point out otherwise. America always has had to violently tussle with chunks of autocracies. The fact that most of the Arab world was not democratic should have had alarm bells ringing, but did not.

America as a population should not have had to go through the trauma of a Gulf Oil Spill to start thinking seriously in terms of a zero emissions future. That emotional jolting should instead have and should come from Hollywood.

By that measure this Facebook movie is a stark failure. It does not even begin to fathom what it takes to build an epoch changing company. To say it is just fiction is not a good excuse.

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Email Solutions

Image representing Gmail as depicted in CrunchBaseImage via CrunchBase
TechCrunch: Email Overload Fix: 3 Sentence Emails
Email has to be completely scalable. There can not be too much email. Not for nobody. That is the ultimate email solution. I could get 10 emails a day, or 10,000, and I still should not have to feel overwhelmed.

On the other hand, email has to have a holistic communication approach. It has to fit into the larger picture. That solution is multi platform.

One direction is condensing. It is about being able to visualize 10,000 tweets at once. Another direction is when you want to spend a lot of quality time with one or more people. Your communication platform should make that possible.

The inbox today is dreaded. That right there is a huge business opportunity, or two, or three. Gmail's Priority Inbox is a good step in the right direction, but it does not even begin to fathom the inbox of those who get deluged with emails.

Facebook helps. You get emails from people you are already "friends" with, or groups you signed up for. Strangers can email you, but they have to send out one email to one person at a time. Facebook email does cut out a lot of noise.

Twitter is my idea of the email client of tomorrow, but Twitter has been dragging its feet forever on adding features and simplifying its service.

The Gmail free phone is great. The voice feature of Gchat is great. Sometimes you want to dig into a conversation, and you want to zero in on a person, and text does not do it, so you talk. You get your headset going.

And then there is meeting in person. FourSquare can be a swell platform for that. FourSquare's social graph is special. While you are zeroing in on a person, you want to cut out all the noise, you don't want to be taking calls, you don't want to be seeing yet another incoming email.

For me blogging is an essential element of the larger complete communication platform. Being able to reach out to complete strangers who might also be talking about some of the same things you might be talking about is so very key.

But then all communication all the time is not what we could possibly be shooting for. Where is the time for non communication work? The time to get things done? The time to acquire new knowledge? Social is not 100% of the territory. Social is not 10% of the territory. The best communication platform knows when you are thinking, and lets you be: a phone that does not ring, a screen that goes into hibernation.

A good communication platform knows when you are on vacation. When you are off, you are off.
I have been impatient with Twitter. (User Friendly Twitter? Get Out Of Town) And I have been impatient with Gmail.

You should be able to visualize 100,000 tweets right on the Twitter website. And perhaps for Gmail the next big push after the Priority Inbox will be the word cloud. I should be able to say, create a word cloud for all my unread emails for the day. And when I hover over each word, I should see the names of each sender associated with that word, with the option to click and go to that specific email.

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