I see you

I've read a short post a few days ago about a new gadget - a small videocamera that looks like an earpiece of a mobile phone, records continuously, can store a few hours of video and with a press of a button will save a clip of the last 30 seconds if you saw something interesting.

It's nothing revolutionary - just another gadget as electronics gets smarter and smaller, but it's being inconspicuous and the "always recording" mode made me think about the future that's almost here already.

It made me think of the "no cameras" signs we see here and there, like in airports or museums, where it's OK to see something with our own eyes but not to record, often for security reasons. It's quite useless even today, since any real "bad guys" would have no problems to conceal equipment and take a photo or video. But as such gadgets become small, cheap, and ubiquitous I think it may become quite common to just record everything happening around you during the day and then save the interesting bits for later. And preventing the general public from doing so will be difficult.

And I also thought of our expectation of privacy during our everyday life. We become more and more used to being photographed and filmed, either directly by someone we know, or just by chance, being in someones frame or perhaps just being caught in an embarrassing moment by a Google Street View car... And the younger generation will be accustomed to the notion of possibly being recorded at any moment, just as they live a much more publicly open life on the social networks, even if we have difficulties accepting this idea today, as you can read in this story (the motorcyclist was acquitted).

What do you think?

Email Goodies

In my last post, I talked about some problems with the current email clients. In this post I want to share a few improvements I read about recently, as well as some ways I manage my mail that help me to stay productive.

One cool browser add-on is Rapportive (via ReadWriteWeb), which displays a sidebar with additional information about the person you’re conversing with - his picture and info from various social networks. Here’s an example:

The limitation is that only the public info form social networks is shown (even if you’re “friends”), and also it’s less convenient when the correspondence includes several people.

Another interesting Chrome extension is Graph Your Inbox (via Google Operating System), which works with Gmail and gives you stats and insight into your emails usage patterns. Using Gmail search operators you can slice and dice your email history and visualize it.

Here’s an example of the amount of Buzz posts (from me and people I follow) this year:

A more interesting graph is my count of Facebook notifications, which shows a sharp increase in usage in summer 2009:

A recent article talks about many start-ups working in this area, so there are many improvements expected to come.

As far as managing my email, I receive enough email that reading it as it comes would be quite distracting. A few tools in Gmail are very useful to separate those that should be read and acted upon immediately, and those for later.

The first one is Labels and Filters - I have some 30 filters (rules) which label incoming email, and move most of it out of inbox. I label mails from social networks, financial institutions, university and work into a folder hierarchy for easy search later.

Unfortunately, Gmail doesn’t allow using filter rules based on Groups in contacts, so I had to manually construct a query string which matches each of the addressed in the “Friends” group, and label them as such - and those are mails I know come from people I correspond with, rather than some automated service.

Finally, here’s a simple but a useful rule to filter out much of the “funny” email I still receive from some friends and relatives - any email that was forwarded twice is usually junk, and it is moved into a “Fun” folder which I check on once a week:

Matches: subject:("Fw: Fw" OR "Fwd: Fw")

Do this: Skip Inbox, Apply label "Personal_Fun"

The last, but not least is the recent “Priority Inbox” that was introduced in Gmail. You should check it out - it’s a great idea, which I use to show three sections in my Inbox: Important mails I haven’t read yet, Starred emails which for me means TODO+Important, and other unarchived mail in Inbox which is basically TODO but not very important.

It takes a little while to train Gmail which mail should be marked as important or not - but it allows me to manage my tasks better as well as ignore unread mail which is not urgent, and that is a great way to reduce distractions.

That’s all for now, you are welcomed to share any interesting ideas about better using your email.

Email From Strangers

I received a curious email today - an internal correspondence between a manager and some employees of a large Israeli travel agency, discussing a problem with billing some clients - including a screenshot from the internal ordering system, with the full details of a couple of credit cards, expiration dates, CVC numbers, personal details, etc. After the initial surprise, I guessed it was a typo error when filling the To: field in an email, and my name was autocompleted by mistake. I dealt with this agency once, about three (!) years ago, and so apparently was in the contacts list of the manager.

I responded with a somewhat cynical response informing about the mistake, and hoping that such a serious company would be more careful with my financial details as a customer. I received a quick response with an apology and an assurance my details are "out of reach of the systems' users". Oh, and the response began with - "Honorable DR,"...

Besides the humorous aspect, and the personal mistake made by the sender, such mistakes are inevitable, and are symptoms of the problem with the system, not the user. People will always make mistakes, and the design of the current email apps and the contacts autocompletion is that it is very easy to enter the wrong recipient - and hard to notice the error, especially when two people may have the same or similar names. Thus it is quite easy to sent some personal or sensitive internal communication to the outside world - and it's a mistake that might be impossible to undo. And in the specific case described above - I wonder why would my email even be in the autocompletion list, after a short communication three years ago?

Some solutions exists, but aren't sufficient or widespread at the moment.

One is to completely separate internal and external networks - to reduce the chance for information leak. This is used in security related organizations, but is very difficult to justify in most situations as internet access is critical in today's workspace. And it still does not prevent from sending an email to the wrong person in the organization (I remember quite a few such cases from my own service, ranging from highly classified information to very intimate conversations being misdirected).

A much more productive direction is for the system to give the sender a lot more information about the intended recipient, making spotting a mistake very easy at a glance - a thumbnail picture (like when sending a message in Facebook, also possible for internal organizational users), his/hers role or company name, and perhaps an infographic of how frequently are you communicating with that person.

I don't remember at the moment, but I read of some start-ups who have a product that enriches the email interface with lots of useful information about the recipients. And there's a Google Labs experiment called "Got the wrong Bob?" that tries to warn you if you choose a wrong recipient based on your usage patterns.

If you know of any existing solutions for this being employed, or have similar stories - you are welcomed to share...

Setting up - IKEA, Contacts and Tomato

I've been busy for the last few days. The non-computer related part was buying and assembling a bunch of IKEA furniture - surprisingly all my fingers are still intact and the things didn't fall apart yet...

I also found a little time to do one of those things that you know you should, bet never get to - I got all my contacts from the phones, gmail, facebook, linked-in, etc., merged them, cleaned up the phones and email info and put them in Google Contacts. This guide was quite helpful in the process. My only annoyance now is that I'm used to manage people on the phone by their Hebrew names, but on Contacts it's all in English, and I haven't thought of a good way to sync them.

I also finally set-up a WiFi network at the new appartment, so I can have internet without relying on the kindness of strangers with public wifi. Since my wifi router is a bit away from the computer, behind a couple of walls (I'll be splitting a neighbors internet connection) I wanted to make sure the signal is strong. This can be done by installing a custom firmware on the router called Tomato which gives you a lot of control over how your router works including transmission power. It also has a better GUI, nice graphs, and a bunch of tools and settings to play around with, such as prioritizing traffic by application (for example - giving VOIP traffic higher priority than p2p).

That's all for now, will be playing with some more stuff in the near future.

Email is for old people...

I've been chatting on Facebook with a distant cousin of mine who said she still didn't receive some link I was meant to send her. She was quite surprised when I told her I emailed it a week ago. "Email? You should have told me! That's for old people..." was more or less her reply.

When I think about it, my 12 years old brother doesn't use email much or at all, and most of his online communication is via facebook and chatting. Maybe as they get into university or corporate environment they will start using email, or mayble the world is changing and I'm now an old guy using email...

What are your experiences on this?