ReadWriteWeb

Sleep, sex and...Twitter?

A new study suggests that people are more likely to give into the urge to check email and their Twitter account than they are to smoke cigarettes or drink alcohol. While the study headed by Wilhelm Hofmann of Chicago University's Booth Business School was limited in size, covering just 205 people between the ages of 18 and 85, it seems to confirm what many of us have suspected for years.

Last year I wrote this post reviewing 40 years of using email. I am old enough to recall many of those events and while I wasn't exactly present at the dawn of email, I know people who were. But it seems as if email, at least corporate email, has come and is in the process of going all in my own lifetime. A number of factors are making turning off, or at least reducing your email dependency, more viable these days. And I should point out that we are talking here about just eliminating internal emails; no one is suggesting that we go without emails to connect people in different domains.

The last time you cleaned out your inbox, how many of those emails were auto-generated notifications from social networks and other websites? Unless you're particularly aggressive about turning off default notifications, it was probably more than a few. You've been meaning to get around to going through and changing all those settings, but - oh hey, hang on, there's another email.

Editing the notification settings on a few big Web services doesn't sound like a big deal, and in reality it's not. But in all the digital, real-time chaos of life online, it's easy to put off. You might zap one when you think of it, but what about the rest of them? Are you really going to sit there, hunt them all down and annihilate them?

Email, long seen as the scapegoat in the downfall of the US Postal Service, could be its savior, according to a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor.

Shiva Ayyadurai, who was the first to copyright the term "EMAIL," is working on a proposal for the USPS to enter the email management industry, reports The Tech, MIT's student-run newspaper. Ayyadurai says the typical flood of daily email is too much for the typical company to handle, meaning important messages get lost or misdelivered.

The social Web is noisy. Each individual social network is noisy enough, but there's a second layer of noise - notifications - in which all the social apps compete with each other just to draw the user in. The creator of Handpick sent me along his solution today, and I love where it's going.

Handpick is a social Web app that doesn't interfere with the Web itself. It lives in your bookmarks bar or Chrome extensions. When you find a link you want to share, you click it, and it pops up a simple form for a title, link, description and a checklist of recipient groups you've created. When you click 'share,' it doesn't buzz all your friends' phones right away. It collects links for you all day and sends an email digest to each group in the evening.

So, how do you feel about email? It's a rough question to ponder on the first no-excuses work day of 2012. Email is like a treadmill. If we don't keep running, we're going to fall down. Maybe email would feel better if we started the new year off with some better practices for managing it.

ToutApp has built a free service called Year In Review that will help. It scans your Gmail/Google Apps account and gives you all kinds of feedback. Tout is upfront about privacy, and your report is just for you, unless you share it. ToutApp has the same goal for Year In Review as its users do: to get better at email.

Last week was the first time I'd ever been called for jury duty. I put it on the RWW team calendar weeks in advance. I figured I'd miss one day at my desk. I'd spend it sitting in a waiting room, voraciously reading Twitter and shouting from the sidelines. I was wrong. I was chosen for a jury trial that lasted all week. I sat in the voir dire session, answered questions honestly, and before I knew it, I was in the booth.

Before long, I could tell why I was chosen. It was a civil case, and practically all the character evidence was in the form of email, Facebook and Myspace posts. That's all we had to juxtapose with the in-person testimony and figure out who was telling the truth. It was a bit embarrassing at first. What did this have to do with justice? But that became clear. There are lots of new lessons to learn about being civil in an online society, and judges and juries are how we common-law countries work that stuff out.

One of the most basic tasks a smartphone can perform is the reading and writing of email. Research In Motion built an empire off of this function with its BlackBerry platform. Yet, the concept of mobile email might need to be redefined. Currently, a mobile inbox does not look all that different from a regular inbox. IBM Research studied how users interact with mobile email and is developing a whole new client based off triage and capturing user intentions.

If you are looking for a basic but solid course on how to teach your entire staff the essentials of good email security and how to avoid common phishing attacks, you might want to look at the education package offered by Wombat Security Technologies. The series can be accessed by any Web browser and has some solid pedagogy behind it.

The operating word here is basic: you aren't going to get any of the industry security certifications here. If you need to educate your mailroom and loading dock workers and even some aging executives about cyber security, then this is the program for you.

Fans of Paul Newman will recognize his character's famous line in Cool Hand Luke. Never in the history of electronic communications do we have so many choices and yet experience so many communication failures. This was made clear to me recently when I tried to get in touch with a "friend" of mine. I put the word in quotes because I mean it in Facebook terms: someone that I may or may not have met f2f, but want to stay in touch. Let's call this friend Bob for simplicity.