Failbox: The Broken State of Email Clients – Part 1

If you’re of a certain age, as I am, your first expose to email was probably in college or at work. Processing messages daily wasn’t difficult; the number of people that had access or reason to send you messages was low and messages arrived fairly infrequently.

So quaint and last century.

Today, I’m tracking 8 email accounts, multiple Twitter accounts, 1 phone, and a number of other accounts I check infrequently1. By a conservative guesstimate, I receive 400 incoming messages daily. I suspect this is lower than some of you and higher than others.

In this context, there’s no surprise Facebook, MySpace, etc have become a primary communication mechanisms for peer communication. The restricted context makes processing messages much easier if only by reducing the number of messages. Easy, like the scenario some of us started with.

Here’s a quick survey of popular email clients
Email Client (Initial Launch)
Apple’s Mail.app (2001) direct descendant of NeXTMail (1991)
Hotmail (1996)
Microsoft Outlook (1997)
Yahoo Mail (1997)
Google Mail (2004)

While all of these applications have evolved and changed, their DNA is from a simpler time. A time with less email and no Twitter.

Spam has guaranteed receiving an email message is no longer a rare event, yet all of these clients insist on an unread indicator and its annoying little brother – the unread mail quantity indicator. All ordered reverse chronologically. Why a message has priority simply because it arrived last is baffling. Imagine lines at the IKEA managed via last-in-first-out. Riots would break out.

“My broader gripe is messaging fragmentation – creating a growing need for universal app to do mail, Twitter, Facebook, etc” – Julio Ojeda-Zapata

In Chris Anderson’s recent conversation with Russ Roberts, Chris Anderson digs into the economics of providing email clients for $0 (Yahoo, Google). It left me wondering if free is the innovation or if it’s preventing innovation.

Elsewhere:

“Personally, it feels like my Facebook stream is becoming an email inbox. I get a lot of messages, a few of them matter to me, and there are lots of business newsletters and promotions” – Jim Lastinger

1. Flickr, Facebook, Pownce, Skype.

Planting Flying Meat Acorn Near Photoshop Elements Grave

Like most professional graphic designers, my career was measured in versions of Adobe Photoshop.

v2.5: I decided I wanted to be a graphic designer. The dad of a high school classmate was one. I went to talk with him about it. He worked out of his basement home office with a view of the lake, a room full of Apple gear, and telecommuted to Minneapolis. He launched Photoshop and showed me some of the crazy stuff he was doing with it. I left stunned.

v3: Spent far too long on the Photoshop Classroom-in-a-book tutorial as part of my least favorite college course – something about printing methods and preparing images for press.

v4: The first version I used in a professional environment auch auf Deutsche.

v5: Editable type, Multiple Undo. Those two features are reason enough to fall in love with it.

v6: Like Word 6, and Star Wars 2 – all the hope, promise, performance, and love of the previous version was an unsaved memory. This is the last full version I used and the beginning of my strained relationship with Adobe.

In 2002, my new digital camera shipped with Photoshop Elements v2 and then a couple years later, my scanner shipped with Elements v3. Aside from a few small omissions (inverse selection, select color range, etc), Elements was all the image editing horsepower I needed. It was my go to app, until I switched to the MacBook.

Elements never launched on the MacBook. It’d just bounce and bounce and bounce and bounce until I forgot why I opened it and Force Quit (a pretty good indicator of my image editing workload over the past 2 years).

After 15 years, my relationship with Photoshop officially ended today.

A while back, I downloaded Flying Meat’s Acorn and hadn’t opened it until this afternoon. While Elements was bouncing, I opened Acorn to take a closer look at a client website mockup. Instinct kicked in and I was pushing pixels, using the same key commands I remembered from Photoshop.

Before I hit Save the first time, I bought a license.

In addition to costing less than 1/10th the price of Photoshop, it was the most integrated web/desktop licensing experience I’ve seen. After completing the purchase online, a single click in the browser applied the license to the still running desktop app. Seamless. Fast. Amazing.

I’m one step closer to being Adobe-free and happier than ever.

Did Twitter Kill This Blog? No, Cullect Did.

No, despite my activity on Twitter, I don’t blame it for my barely bi-monthly postings here. And given Twitter’s uptime (ba-dum-bum) you shouldn’t either.

There’s a far more guilty party; Cullect.com.

Writing posts on Twitter is easy – have a passing thought, write it down. Done.

Writing more than 140 characters is more time consuming. An hour, if I actually collect my thoughts. An hour Cullect whisks away far more easily. Just ask the 10 drafts at this blog, a few more elsewhere, and the 2 coffee review podcasts in the queue.

The few bits of weblog writing I eek out between posts here are probably at Cullect’s blog (though it has a number of unpub’d drafts as well).

3 Other things Cullect has all but eradicated:

Like my newborn daughter, Cullect is only a few weeks old. We’re all still adjusting.

Big thanks to Dan Grigsby for asking.

Update 29 May 2008
Though I’ve picked up the pace since publishing this, I wanted to chime in to Chris Heuer’s question of why I don’t write more often by seconding a few of his excuses:

  • Don’t think I have anything valuable to say
  • Not in the mood

Parsing Arbitrary XML Namespaces in Ruby with Hpricot

(This post inspired by a Ruby.MN conversation)

I’ve burned through at least 3 different XML parsing libraries in building Cullect. I started the built-in REXML (pro: built-in, con: heavy and slow) then moved to FeedTools (pro: easily parses the most common feed formats, con: no longer in active development). I have a lot of love for FeedTools, but in the end, it didn’t want to parse XML it didn’t already know about. Then, after a series of far less memorable libraries, I found _why‘s Hpricot (pro: written by _why, con: written by _why).

Hpricot is fast, lean, and doesn’t care about expected tags, namespaces, valid XML, it just makes it easy to get the data and attributes out of the XML.

Here’s an example of how I’m grabbing a feed item’s permalink using Hpricot

doc = Hpricot.XML(feed_contents)
items = (doc/:item)
items.each do |raw_item|
link = raw_item.%('pheedo:origLink') || raw_item.%('feedburner:origLink') || raw_item.%('link')
end

Notice how Hpricot doesn’t require anything special to grab pheedo namespace links or feedburner namespace links in comparison standard links. Just tell it what the tag is you’re looking for. Fast, easy, scalable.

Lazy Libertarianism

A couple of conversations about Libertarian Paternalism came up on the iTunes this week, centered around Thaler and Sunstein’s book, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness.

The most enjoyable being the EconTalk with Richard Thaler, where Thaler does an amazing job of challenging Roberts. Not there’s enough of that on EconTalk. 😉

I found the Glenn & Helen Show with Sunstein annoyingly preachy. The conversation felt like a bad episode of The View, more interested in arguing at the surface rather than finding common ground by going in-depth.

In both, the primary challenges against Libertarian Paternalism seemed to be:
Because governments offering services vs. private firms competing in the market is an either/or proposition, governments shouldn’t be offering services, let alone deciding things for it’s citizen.

In addition to not represent reality (keep reading), this perspective just encourages bad, inefficient government. Since government exists, shouldn’t we make it the most effective, efficient, institution for providing the services it provides thereby requiring fewer resources?1

I jotted down my frustration with this perspective over at Twitter:

“garrickvanburen doesn’t understand the perspective of preventing the govt as one of many vendors in any given market (healthcare, retirement, etc)”

Privately, I received an email asking me to consider if the reverse was also true (“private firms as one of many vendors in any given govt market”)

In fact, I agree with both statements. I’m not sure what makes govt so special that they get a monopoly in some sectors and not in others – same with any private firm. If a private firm brings a competitive service to govt-dominated market – awesome. I’m also not sure why govt can’t enter some markets and not others – ‘we’ rarely tell private firms (Wal-Mart, GE, come to mind immediately) which markets they can’t enter. Feels the same.

My instincts tell me that govt should focus on the infrastructures to support; commerce, trade, security, and encourage highly-speculative new ventures that build markets (space, internet, highways, biofuels, etc). From that perspective, it’s less about what ‘business’ is and more about what belongs in the infrastructure. I’m thinking of Minneapolis’ city-wide-wifi. It was decided that internet should be part of the city’s infrastructure, and they brought a fair offering to market. It’s not the only offering, nor should it be. It’s an option and more options are better than fewer. Nor are they requiring people to sign-up for their offering, that would be anti-competitive.

To the private firms in govt markets statement, the first example that comes to mind is mail. US Postal Service is one vendor that delivers messages, FedEx, UPS, DHL are private options. Each with their own costs and benefits. And this leaves out other ways to deliver messages – email, fax, telephone, bike courier. None of which are govt offerings.

1. Mental exercise: What if taxes were the most effective way to outsource?

Elsewhere:

“Rather, opposition to these increases grows from the correct perception that a legally protected monopolist such as the United States Postal Service can keep prices higher, and service inferior, to what these would be under competition.” – Don Boudreaux

UPDATE 11 June 2008:
This perspective is why I’m all for public mass transit, national passenger rail, ubiquitous high-speed internet service, and state-level (or federal) universal health care.

RE: How Do People Find The Time To Watch Television?

“…for the first time, society forced on an enormous number of people the requirement to manage something they’ve never had to manage before…which was free time. And what did we do with that free time? Mostly we panicked and spent it watching TV.” – Clay Shirky

A nice reminder on what is actually active and social:

“People still spend a huge amount of time consuming passive media like television. If even a small fraction of that mental energy was diverted to more active pursuits, it could lead to the production of dozens of socially-beneficial efforts like Wikipedia. The problem isn’t finding people with time on their hands; we’ve got tens of millions of those. The challenge is finding socially-beneficial projects that they’ll enjoy participating in more than re-runs of Seinfeld.” – Timothy Lee

…And They Asked 4 Followers, And They Asked 4 Followers

Something I wrote on Twitter a couple weeks ago:

“…2 questions: a) What if there was an open source, more effective alternative to Google search? b) What if Twitter is that alternative?”

Today, Four Reasons Why Twitter is the Next Google writes:

“Not only has Twitter inadvertently taken crowdsourcing to search, it has actually taken it a step further into friendsourcing. In fact, it has created the first personalized and trusted search engine in the world.” – Mr. List

The interesting bit is that Twitter doesn’t even offer ‘search’. Search engines like Summize (how I tracked down my above tweet) et. al, are building search atop Twitters API.

Steve Gillmor was absolutely right to cut off Dan Farber. Pasting text ads (a la Google) onto Twitter is boring. That’s why we haven’t seen it. And won’t.

As more vendors like H&R Block, Joyent, and even Comcast start to invest themselves in Twitter, we get much much closer to a VRM world. A world where both customers and vendors are smart people speaking intelligently to each other.