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So, I’m sitting here working today and I’m a little self-conscious about how long my emails can get. I don’t write novels, but if you know me, you know I tend to go overboard on information. On my most recent email, I really believe I needed to include all of the info; it totaled 300 words.
I want to be sensitive to people who get a lot of email and respect their time/attention. Years ago, I used to wear out my welcome from being too verbose. Even though I’m not that guy anymore, I can still improve in this area.
What’s your take?
When is a long email appropriate?
How do you know when it’s too long?
What strategies do you use to decrease your email length, especially when you’re trying to get people on board with an idea or project?
I just watched a couple really neat videos on YouTube of large airliners coming together. This is amazing! The first one is an Airbus A340-600, the second one is a Boeing 777.
I’m not a big fan of the screen name. Let me clarify: I think nicknames are great, as long as a person’s real name is easily accessible. Why? Because people behave a lot better and they’re nicer to each other on the Internet than when they use a screen name. I’ve seen this played out countless times on sites and discussion groups over the last eleven years.
Screen names are good when they allow someone to express their personality. They’re bad when people use them to hide behind a computer and avoid being held responsible for their words and actions as they would be in offline society or their local communities.
Hiding behind a computer anonymously just does stuff to people.
Now, I completely understand If someone needs to stay anonymous out of fear for safety or privacy. In that case, the next best thing is to use a pseudonym and creating a consistent online identity that you have an interest in building and maintaining a reputation around. You can keep that distinct identity separate from your real life identity if you need to.
Penelope Trunk, author of Brazen Careerist, has changed her name on multiple occasions and now blogs under a pseudonym, and now it has become her professional identity. Because it’s a name she’s built a reputation and trades on, there’s a disincentive to damage he name or reputation by acting like an idiot on the Internet or being malicious. The effect is the same as if she were using her real name. (Of course, now that she’s ‘out’ with her name it no longer acts as a privacy filter).
This Sunday I was out to lunch with four friends. All but one were on Facebook, and of us four “Facebookies,” three of us had added the My Aquarium application and were actively sending fish to each other along with funny notes. So, what did we do? We talked about the last couple days’ activity. I felt awkward though that one person was left out, so I said to my friend “Mary,” “you really should get on Facebook.”
She replied that she just didn’t get into “those things,” (by that she meant social networks like Facebook and MySpace). While I can see why someone wouldn’t get into MySpace (heh heh), Facebook has really helped me stay connected to (and reconnect with) people I would have lost track of over the years. It’s really enhanced my social life, and it’s easy to use to boot.
So why isn’t Mary (and others who share her disinterest) on Facebook? I’ve boiled down peoples responses to two categories:
People who don’t get into social networking for one reason or another (I think my friend fits this category)
People who are intimidated by computers and/or the Internet
So, why do I care? Does it really matter? (Short answer: to me it does)
I want an easier way to coordinate social activities with my primary social group, the twenty-somethings at my church. The primary way we let everyone know what’s going on is via email to our group. Since my church is low-tech as a whole (they grasp email), people are always getting left off of group activity email blasts. We’re a fairly active and tight-knit bunch, so when people get left out multiple times in a row, it becomes an issue and feelings get hurt, even though there was no ill intent.
I’d say 80% of us are Facebook friends with each other. It would be very easy to create a Facebook group called “Young Adult Lifegroup” and broadcast events there. If you want the updates, join the Facebook group (and here’s instructions how and an invite). This prevents people being left out on the email CC and gives one central, easy to use location for group “stuff.”
I floated the idea a month ago and it was shot down. I’ll probably float it again soon. It looks like I’m an early adopter getting frustrated waiting for the late adopters :-)
For people who just aren’t into social networks, it would be great if Facebook had a feature that let you subscribe to a group via email; news items, events, photo gallery notifications, etc. This feature would go beyond the “invite people not on Facebook via email” feature when creating events, instead someone could sign up for email updates from a group if they received an invitation code. That would be cool, and it would let the 80% use a centralized site to manage their events and meta-discussion with the group.
The idea of social networking among real-life contacts is a very attractive proposition. It documents and makes it easy to communicate a shared culture, and it provides a one-stop place to get the word out about activities and events. But, some people haven’t taken the plunge yet and aren’t on Facebook (by far the most useable and attractive social network right now). Pretty soon, I see a new form of “digital divide,” those who are connected to their in-person friends via social networks, and those who are not. Call it the “social network divide” or “social OS divide.”
The questions I’m left with in the case of my friends are:
What is keeping the stragglers from signing on board?
If they’re intimidated, what can be done to make them feel more confident?
If they’re just not into it, where’s the motivation to get them into it?
I started using Facebook two years ago, right after I got out of college. I deliberately signed up after I was done with school, because I saw the others in the lab spending all their time on Facebook instead of doing their homework. When the site was just open to college students, I knew somehow it would have to “grow up” with its users to keep them engaged, but exactly how, I couldn’t predict.
Watching Facebook open up over the last year has been nothing short of amazing. Today, you hear the site being called the future “social operating system”. Facebook has the potential to encompass everything we do socially online–to the point where when I meet startup social network companies, I strongly suggest they write an application for Facebook Platform.
In LinkedIn, everything centers around establishing a connection. In Facebook, connecting is just the beginning. Facebook is all about community. And this can been seen by doing things like leaving messages on users’ walls, joining groups and having discussions, as well as some of the more social applications built for Facebook.
Thanks to the address book import feature, I’ve added many of my professional contacts to my Facebook friends list. I’ve also started adding people I meet at networking events like TechCocktail on the site. Even though I don’t know these people well (yet), because Facebook is “about the community,” or better, the ongoing interaction between users, it provides a superior tool for deepening the connection and relationship over time. This is really cool!
That said, there are a couple feature improvements Facebook (or platform developers) can make to make Facebook the optimal business networking site:
Segmentation of your Limited Profile - Right now, you can only customize privacy settings on one single limited profile. I use this to limit access of certain people to my info–but I have it set up for personal privacy and this applies to a very small handful of my online “friends.” If I could segment my limited profiles, I could effectively “hide” some of my business activity from non-business friends I don’t want to put to sleep. I’d hate to wear out my welcome for them on Facebook by posting too many business blog posts, for example.
iCal feed for upcoming events - I’m a Google Calendar user. I wish there was an iCal feed for every Facebook event I’m attending that would post the event in my Google Calendar (or iCal on my Mac, when I start using that). This is a simple, no brainer one.
What about you? Any pet features that would make Facebook a kick-butt business networking tool?
Wow, has it been that long? Flash back to the summer in-between my junior and senior year of high school. The memories are coming back to me now. I read the news on our email list on July 27, 1997–two days after he died of flu complications near his home in NSW, Australia. I had never met James face-to-face, but I had traded a bunch of email with him. I loved using the program he wrote called LDraw, it let me build LEGO models on my computer in 3D and share them with others. It was a DOS program and at first I was quite confused, so he walked me through using it over email.
This was the first time someone I knew only on the Internet had died. I was amazed at the sadness and emptiness I felt, even though to me, James was really just a series of emails and a program. What amazed me more was his death impacted all of my online friends–and at that point I hadn’t met any of them yet either. A memorial sprung up. LDraw users picked up where James left off, writing new parts and coordinating “official” community updates. They kept his passion for LEGO and computers alive through our “L-CAD” list.
One of my most treasured LDraw experiences over the last ten years was the brief opportunity to meet James’ parents, Don & Robyn, in 2001. I invited them to the second annual BrickFest in DC as a gesture, a courtesy even, not thinking they’d fly all the way here from Australia. They leapt at the chance.
Over the 2-3 days we spent together at the convention, they told me stories about their son and the remarkable things he did while he was alive. Never selfish, always helping other people, and passionate about computers and kids. James dropped out of his first year of college and soon after he taught senior-level courses. He was simple and humble, he loved his family and he loved to be a servant. He ran a small computer business and wrote LDraw as a hobby. Don & Robyn were sure proud of him, and they were delighted that we loved using and furthering James’ work, even if it was just his hobby.
Just a few weeks ago, I had the honor of presenting the 2006James Jessiman Memorial Award at BrickWorld here in Chicago. The award is a way the LDraw community recognizes people who make outstanding contributions to the LDraw system and advance James’ original work. While it has been a decade since James passed, I like that we pause and remember where our system came from by acknowledging James and his original work. When you look out today at the LEGO hobby, there’s hardly a corner LDraw hasn’t touched. It’s fundamentally shaped how people communicate, trade, and share ideas online about the brick. That’s something I wish James could be here to see.
Very good news came through the intertubes today about BrickShelf. Kevin Loch announced that he has determined a way, through paid accounts, to keep BrickShelf running. Also, in his post, he communicated his logic behind the shutdown last week, and admitted in hindsight it wasn’t the best way to go about it. Certainly a forgivable offense, and there’s nothing like a little shock therapy to give folks a wakeup call.
In followup to my previous post, though, I definitely wouldn’t do this to a paying customer.
Here’s to hoping BrickShelf lives on for years to come.
I was at the Denver airport on Monday. Before I whipped off my belt and set my laptop in the tray, I snapped a picture of this sign by the security line:
Tell me my taxpayer dollars don’t actually go to pay for a sign with an illustration telling people they can’t bring bombs on planes??
I love companies and people who provide great customer service. I have varying degrees of negative emotion ranging from annoyance to all-out hatred for companies who suck at it.
Today I stumbled, in a rather personal way, across an example of really bad customer service. The web site tens of thousands of LEGO fans have used to host photos of their models has been yanked from the web with not so much a warning — rendering thousands of image links and references unavailable and some people (including me) without some of their photos. The only “warning” was after the fact - a message on the BrickShelf web site that read:
Brickshelf has discontinued operation. We apologize for any inconvenience.
I for one lost a pretty rare photo — one of me with James Jessiman’s parents, Don & Robyn, when they came to visit in 2001. For those of you who know the backstory of James and LDraw, that’s a big deal to me (and I presume to a few others). Yes, I should have had that photo backed up, but I had no idea Kevin would pull a stunt like this.
Now, for some background, Kevin Loch has been hosting these images for free for about ten years. The bandwidth charges have been enormous for this, as Eric Smith speculates in his post (his numbers are spot on, I work in the data center industry). The LEGO company did subsdize the site for a while (not sure of exactly how long) when the cost became prohibitive, but has since stopped. Kevin also attempted to recoup some costs by displaying ads on gallery pages.
On one hand, it’s Kevin’s site, his out-of-pocket expenses, and he can do whatever he darn well pleases with the site. No one is or has paid him a dime (save individual donations). He has no legal obligation to anyone to maintain the service or give a warning of shutting down. It even says so in his terms of service.
So here you have it. Hundreds of thousands of pictures hosted on a site for years (and linked to by thousands of pages) are just gone. No advance warning, no opportunity for image owners to back up their stuff if they need, no chance for them to change their links over to say, Flickr, and keep their web site viewers happy.
Kevin deserves our thanks for providing a place to look at people’s creations. If he’s decided to take it down, then we need to say thanks, and move on. A warning might have been nice, but you have no idea what the circumstances were that caused the shutdown.
They have good points, but ahem “A warning might have been nice?” ??!
Let’s look at the bigger picture here. Tens of thousands of people have uploaded their stuff to BrickShelf. Thousands of people have used it as the de facto image hosting site for about ten years. This means there are thousand and thousands of links to images across the internet. Many are indexed on web sites, discussion forums, and blogs and they reference creations that are easy to find with a simple search. Kevin knows all of this.
While he’s been providing this for free for years, and it’s within his rights to take it down without a word, it’s certainly not nice. In fact, it’s downright rude. And while yes, the people who have used his site and enjoyed the pictures on it over the years do owe him a huge “thanks,” it’s also reasonable to expect us to be upset when it just disappears overnight, uprooting the majority of model images online.
The bottom line: it’s about customer service, and Kevin blew it on that one. By not giving people any opportunity to back up their stuff when he discontinued BrickShelf’s service, he pulled the rug out of a whole lot of people who “bought” into him and his site as a trustworthy place to host and link to their stuff. I don’t know what Kevin does for a living, but if I were looking to buy the professional services he provides and knew the BrickShelf story, I’d look elsewhere without batting an eyelash.
So Kevin, so long and thanks for all the images–but no thanks for pulling the cord.
. Thanks for visiting!
Wow, has it been that long? Flash back to the summer in-between my junior and senior year of high school. The memories are coming back to me now. I read the news on our email list on July 27, 1997–two days after he died of flu complications near his home in NSW, Australia. I had never met James face-to-face, but I had traded a bunch of email with him. I loved using the program he wrote called LDraw, it let me build LEGO models on my computer in 3D and share them with others. It was a DOS program and at first I was quite confused, so he walked me through using it over email.
