23 Musings

This post from Read/Write Web answers a question that has been puzzling me recently. Why do I seem to fill my mailbox with spam so quickly these days?

Seems spam has been growing at an incredible rate. Something really needs to be done to crack down on persistant spammers. A domain name of mine was recently used to send spam by someone and now I'm getting flooded by bounce messages, it's proving very difficult to deal with and spammers are rapidly becoming the one thing I'd eradicate from the net if I could!

Yes they could according to this great satirical post on Google Blogoscoped! The end result is below but read the article, it's well worth it!

For the first time the new darlings of the web (social networks) have overtaken the old darling (web based email) in the traffic stakes. Hitwise have a report showing the upward trend for the social networks and the rate at which they have caught up the likes of Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo Mail.

So, are users now using social networks instead of email? Well yes they are , naturally, they are a quick way to converse with close friends especially to groups of friends. And they're more fun to use, something email providers will have to address (OpenSocial and Gmail perhaps?). However, email still has it's place and the demographic data from Hitwise shows that unsurprisingly it's the younger users who visit social networks more.

One factor we should also consider is that email is something that you visit a few times a day maybe (unless the web is your life) where as users tend to browse social networks for long periods so the traffic is bound to be higher.

So Yahoo have one of the biggest email services out there on the web and yet they've shown no desire to get into the online office productivity realm, that is until now.

Yahoo have announced that they've brought Zimbra into the Yahoo fold to allow them to make Yahoo Mail on steroids! They've paid $350m for the pleasure of being able to join the race to create the first really viable alternative to Microsoft Office. Obviously Google is a long way ahead but if Yahoo is going to flash the cash they could catch up very quickly.

The way Zimbra offer email, calendering, contacts, document authoring all in a collaborative browser based on and offline experience is going to be an amazing add on to Yahoo Mail. I'd imagine we'd see a corporate/paid for version of this suite too.

So what's next for Yahoo I wonder? Possible Zoho acquisition?

In this blog post Facebook have announced that they are opening up their email features a little.

The new functionality allows users to email any email address direct from their Facebook account (rather than just emailing those on their friends lists). This is a very shrewd move and will result in Facebook being able to add lots of non-members to other members email lists, a nice little bit of marketing collateral!

It's hardly ging to make you move away from GMail or Hotmail but it will be interesting to see where this goes next. If they add storage and a proper email interface it could become a contender very quickly.

Facebook would sit quite naturally as a universal communications platform, IM integration next maybe?

We all know that feeling of too much to do and too little time to do it in! Well according to a research survey workers are feeling the strain caused by email volumes and the feeling of needing to reply to them so quickly.

Research found some workers are viewing their inbox up to 40 times each hour, leaving them tired and frustrated - as well as unproductive. According to the survey, females felt particularly hard-hit by the deluge. Internet psychologists said people should relax, and not take their work quite so seriously.

Good advice I'd say, I find it stressful when my work email box gets full after a holiday and you do feel that you need to respond asap. So take the advice, step away from the computer and think how important it really is that you reply straight away to that request from a colleague. Life's too short to stress over a job anyway (unless you own the business) ;-)

Google is buying Postini, a company who offer companies services to protect and control their email for $625M in cash.

This is the first move by Google to offer services to corporates. This is interesting as I've always hoped Google would move Apps into a corporate service space as well as the consumer space it currently occupies.

Apps has massive potential to be taken up by corporates everywhere and if they can offer some sort of security feature that is going to help corporates be persuaded to sign up!

Google have announced a mail merge feature for Google Apps. This will allow any businesses with IMAP to move their mail to Gmail easily. The emails will be automatically threaded into conversations and made searchable.

This is a huge bonus for small businesses who may be wanting to move to a cheaper, more portable email solution.

Google do need to do something to guarantee reliability and data integrity though. If they can show some kind of guarantee that your email is safe I have no doubt that people in their droves will move over!

EROI, those nice folks who are terribly good at email marketing and produce quality quarterly reports on the state of the market have released some figures from a survey they carried out to measure how addicted users are to their email.

The figures are quite astounding with some headline figures being:

• 61% of people surveyed said they continue to check email while on holiday (that's me)
• 56% said they feel a high level of anxiety if they cannot access their emails for a period of time (me too)
• 1/3rd said they read email every day (yep, that's me too), 90% read them six days a week and 75% reply six days a week
• 2/3rds expect a response to an email within a day (umm, me too)
• half admitted that they can't get up or go to sleep without checking email (sigh, I am seeming obsessed now)

It seems there may be some hope however as 55% admit that email takes up more time in their life than it should do. Not sure I'm quite ready to admit that, anyone for email counselling?