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.

The study was primarily focused on willpower as opposed to addiction, and the moments when people were forced to resist urges to partake in an activity or deal with conflicting urges, such as the urge to sleep and the urge to stay out socializing. Sleep and sex generally trumped other urges, but checking media and work were generally put ahead of socializing and shopping urges.

"Modern life is a welter of assorted desires marked by frequent conflict and resistance, the latter with uneven success," Hofmann said.

The study found that resistance to all urges declined as the day wore on, and that people seem to do a better job of resisting the urge to smoke or drink than many may have thought, given the addictive nature of both.

"With cigarettes and alcohol there are more costs - long-term as well as monetary - and the opportunity may not always be the right one," Hofmann said. "So, even though giving in to media desires is certainly less consequential, the frequent use may still 'steal' a lot of people's time."

Photo courtesy of ShutterStock.

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?

Yes, that's it. It may seem almost ridiculous that anybody would need such a tool, and it doesn't pull off any great programmatic feat. But truth be told, simply providing all of those links in one central, command-and-control interface is all many people will need to actually go through and tweak their notification settings in a way that's more conducive to reducing clutter and preserving sanity.

Notification Control is the brainchild of Ben Lang and Tim Kendall, both of whom are in their late teens. It lists popular services like Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, YouTube, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Pinterest and others and provides a direct link to each one's notification settings. Naturally, you still need to sign in to each service to access the preferences; There's no special cross-site authentication magic going on here. Kendall and Lang are just reaching out and helping you do something you swear you were going to get around to doing yourself, eventually. Maybe.

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.

USPS is facing the prospect of cutting 35,000 jobs to avoid bankruptcy. Ayyadurai was contacted by USPS officials after discussing his ideas for the service in a FastCompany interview in September.

"Email was right there for them to own, if they wanted it. It was mail in electronic form being received, sorted, transmitted, and had to be done with reliability, speed and efficiency - all the core rubric of their entire model of transmitting mail," Ayyadurai said in an email interview with the magazine. "Instead, the USPS saw themselves not as a communications organization but a paper mail delivery company, and this was and is the source of their downfall, and at least the source of lost opportunities."

In 1996 Ayyadurai founded EchoMail, which used an algorithm to sort email for businesses. Ayyadurai said that he eventually discovered that humans were more efficient at sorting email than an algoritm, given birth to the thinking that led to his current, USPS-saving proposal.

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.

Now, that's still better than an inbox full of email, but that's not Handpick's solution. Recipients of your Handpick links only get one message, and it arrives late in the day, when there's more time for thinking. You create groups of contacts using whatever criteria you choose, and each group gets one message around 5 p.m. Pacific Time.

It has support for desktop and iPhone browser bookmarklets, a Chrome extension, and it can link with Instapaper. It's a great way to share selectively with minimal interruption, reaching your contacts in a place they'd check anyway. Want to try it out? Here's an invite link. Room is limited. First come, first served.

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.

The report starts with big numbers: "You dealt with XX,XXX emails in 2011." "You sent XX% less emails than you received." (Hey ToutApp. It's Jon. That should be "fewer," not "less.") "You sent the most emails in June." "Wednesday is your busiest day." That's all good to know. It helps you get into the rhythm.

Then it moves on to the social side of email, showing your closest and most frequent contacts, as well as popular words from subject lines, giving a sense of what you emailed about.

Finally, the report gets into the trends. It shows messages sent and received by month, week, day and even hour. This breakdown is amazingly helpful. For me, the trends were so clear, I can now plan my day better based around email rush hours.

The last section, a nice touch, shows you which email marketers and notifications you dealt with most. Lord knows we all get plenty of that. How about this for a new year's resolution: Unsubscribe from 95% of the things in this list?

Check out the sample report if you want to see exactly what you're getting before you sign up. The Year In Review report is only for Google email accounts for now, but ToutApp will support other email systems "very soon." You can join the private beta if you want to be alerted when your email service is supported.

What strategies do you use to manage your email?

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.

It was fascinating to watch these former colleagues testify for and against each other's character. We had to be judges of performance. We had massive binders full of of printed online exchanges to weigh against the testimony, and that was how we were to make our judgment.

This was a lesson in how the Web has become a part of our character in both our professional and personal lives. Too much overlap, especially online, can dissolve the work/life boundary altogether. And here we were, 13 jurors tweeting, Facebooking and emailing on breaks, doing our best to reassure our networks that we weren't just AWOL for a whole week.

I mostly used Path to document the experience, an awesome answer to all my questions about that app. The plaintiff and the defendant were more into Myspace.

I learned so many lessons about the Web on jury duty last week. Here are just a few.

Write Like What You Say Will Be Read To A Jury

I'm not speaking abstractly here. If you document your life dramas online, and if those dramas end up in court, the lawyers will dig it all up. Work emails are one thing, but people in this case admitted private Facebook messages as character evidence.

The plaintiff deleted one message that would have been a key part of the testimony, and the very omission was damning. After so many of these people's emails and wall posts had been read to us in the courtroom, we knew what that message said.

Your Online Life Is Your Character

More precisely, if you share your life online, that life can substitute for your character. If these people hadn't waged so much email war, we would have had to use more traditional methods of assessing their testimony.

Instead, we could weigh their spoken testimony against the words they wrote and sent to one another years ago, when the events of the case were taking place.

You see why they wanted a tech blogger on the jury? Most of us were tech-savvy people. One guy read the New York Times on his Nook Color tablet every morning. I had never held one of those before. On breaks, many of us were tweeting or IMing, and if not, we had to talk about anything but the case. So we talked about what we had been reading, watching and listening to lately. By and large, that meant we were talking about the Web.

This case required the jury to understand and extract meaning from online communications. That was all the evidence we had. And these were not super-nerd early adopter people in this case. They were just people who worked in an office together, and they sometimes used Myspace and Facebook to flirt and fight with each other.

Work/Life Imbalance Online Makes A Mess

We should all know this one by now, but we don't. The people in this case brought their work dramas home and their social dramas to the office, and email and social networks tied it all together. Ranting about work on Facebook is not smart. Remember, your rants can be read to a jury, and if you delete them, the jury will notice that, too.

Likewise, if you have personal problems with someone in the office, emailing your other coworkers about it is not a great way to handle it. What we saw on the jury was lots of lost productivity and wasted time, as well as unnecessary and damaging tribalism in the office. That's nothing new. What's new is a work email that says "OMG, look what so-and-so said about me on Facebook last night."

Don't Friend Your Colleagues... Unless They're Your Friends!

This is the bottom line. I read an illuminating interview with Tiffani Jones Brown in Contents magazine about her work on the content strategy team at Facebook. These people choose the words you see on Facebook very carefully.

The word "friend" could be any number of things. It means something very different from "follower." Contrast "friend" with Google+, which doesn't have a word for your connections. It just says "in your circles." What do you call people, then? Circlers? Encirclements?

Whatever. That's Google's content strategy problem. Facebook chose "friends." It did so early on, when the only users of Facebook were college friends. Facebook has hundreds of millions of users now, but the word "friends" is still there.

Suffice it to say that, after a while, the people in this case were no longer friends. They didn't "unfriend" each other until it was too late, though. They ranted in status updates, taking passive aggressive stances they each knew the other would see. It screwed up their whole lives, both socially and professionally.

After seeing what transpired on the witness stand last week, I know this: Facebook is for "friends." Twitter is for "followers." LinkedIn is for "connections." Those words are hints. These networks facilitate our lives now, if we're the kinds of people who read (or write) tech blogs. We need to use them with good judgment.

Coincidentally, Dan Benjamin and Andy Ihnatko released this awesome podcast about documenting our digital lives last week. I was listening to it when I took the picture above. I highly recommend it.

Have you served on a jury before? Did the Web factor into the case? Share your experiences in the comments.

This is where IBM Research wants to help by recreating the user interface for mobile email. The first step is to help users triage (sort) email messages. So instead of the mobile email client opening straight to the inbox, IBM's notion is to open it to a triage screen. It provides color-coded "badges" to help users determine what untriaged mail they have. In the picture to the left, , the grey badge represents the number of read messages, light blue unread messages and dark blue for new messages.

Once a user has determined new messages, the untriaged view of the inbox looks a lot like a normal mobile email client. A dot to the left of the message indicates how many people have received the message, with a full green circle for the user as the sole recipient, half a circle for a select few users and an empty circle for a large amount of users. New messages have a light blue background.

It is then time to capture the intention of what users want to do with the email. The triage is just a way to determine how to initially react to an email. The next step is to actually act. An overlay appears in the client with the prompts of Next, Deferred and Reference. Next is for when users want or need to respond when they have a spare moment, Deferred is to be used later when a user is at a desktop computer and Reference is for relevant information that does not require an action of its own at this particular time.

Users can also assign a specification action such as call, print, read, reply, save, schedule, send and visit. If users do not want to assign a category, the "next" category will be assigned by default. Tasks can be acted upon by the user from within the client. Users can view, edit and delete tasks. Tasks are synced to the cloud to be available across devices and desktops.

IBM's research on a new mobile email client is directed at enterprise users. To a certain extent this would not work well for commercial users with a high volume of emails or people that see hundreds of emails a day (like the staff at ReadWriteWeb). IBM's strategy centers around Lotus and while that is one of the most-used email clients overall, it may rub some people the wrong way. To a certain extent, IBM's research is classic enterprise thinking: give IT managers and users more layers of control. On the other hand, the notion of triage, capturing intentions and tasks adds more pain points to the email experience. Users want things to be as simple as possible. IBM's triage and capture does not seem to be simple.

The study was done by IBM Research guru Jeff Pierce. You can see the details here and here.

Does mobile email need to be rethought or does the current system work just fine? What are the differences in needs for enterprise users versus commercial users? Let us know what you think in the comments.

Adjusting the density of your Gmail is another handy feature. Gmail automatically adjusts density based on the type of monitor you're using - but having the option to do-it-yourself is also useful.

Heavy Gmail users (read: anyone who stares at their Gmail for, um, most of the day) will appreciate the new HD themes. To update yours, go to the Settings menu.

The Biggest Improvement Yet: Smarter, Faster Search Box

Wow. This is a big improvement. Traditionally, Gmail Search has functioned in the same way as Google Search. You type in keywords, Gmail finds it. The new search box gives you the option to customize search, selecting which areas you'd like to search within, "from" line, "to" line, subject, has the words, doesn't have the words, has attachment and a date range option. This looks rather similar to the filter-creator in Gmail, making it easier to create custom filters.

These advanced search options were already available in Gmail, except they were practically hidden. To access them, you had to click "Show search options" to the right of the "Search the Web" button at the top of your Gmail. Being able to create a filter right from the new, improved search box is a big plus - before, you had to do that manually by clicking the "Create a filter" link, which is also located to the right of the "Search the Web" button.

New streamlined conversations make it easier to keep track of email threads. Gmail integrates your Google profile picture, and makes each email feel even more like an ongoing conversation. It's one of those features that won users over from the get-go, especially when other email services were treating emails like mail, and not like conversations.

Here's the video from Gmail:

Sparrow 1.4 integrates with quicky-and-easy filesharing service CloudApp to enable user to include links to files without using the traditional email attachment functionality (which is still included in Sparrow for those who want to use it).

In addition to being an easy way to attach files, this has the added advantage of bypassing Gmail's file size limitations and allowing users to avoid eating up their total storage on Gmail.

Sparrow is a simple, nicely-designed IMAP email client for Mac desktops that got a lot of positive feedback when it first launched. Our initial impressions were positive as well. This latest update also includes various bug fixes and improvements to the app's interface.

Sparrow is available as a paid downloaded or as an ad-supported version, Sparrow Lite.

The co-founder of Sparrow, a popular Mac desktop client for Gmail, is working on an iOS version of the app, he told Business Insider recently.

In venturing into iOS territory, the Sparrow team runs the risk of facing the wrath of an App Store rejection email from Apple. Why? An email client of this nature competes directly with Mail, the email program that comes pre-installed on all iPhones and other iOS devices.

Leca acknowledges this, but says they're going to continue working on the iOS version anyway. As he points out, Apple finally started accepting Web browsers from third parties like Opera after initially forbiding them.

"In regards to apps that compete with [Apple's] own apps, I think iOS is sufficiently settled and I think people have been evangelized enough now so Apple will feel more secure opening it up," said Leca.

It's true that Apple has slowly become more tolerant of certain types of apps that compete with its own offerings, but so far there hasn't been a flood of third party email clients in the App Store.

The desktop version of Sparrow has made over $350,000 in sales from the Mac App Store, and the team is hoping to extend that success into the mobile and tablet spaces.

On iOS, Leca and his team plan on making a faster alternative to Mail with a few extra features, such as the ability to attach images while composing an email. Sparrow for desktop is already designed much like an app for iPad or iPhone, so porting that experience over to iOS should just be a matter of further simplifying the UI and making it more mobile-friendly.

"We'll see what happens with Sparrow for iPhone," said Leca. "We're just starting on this, but it's still far far away."

You can read the full interview with Leca on Business Insider.

A survey of 2300 adults, conducted by Harris Interactive and sponsored by the VOIP service Rebtel, found that Americans still overwhelmingly prefer to communicate by voice. 74% of respondents said that the phone was how they keep in touch with friends and 81% said it's their preferred method of communicating with family members.

The survey looks at the preferences for communicating with friends, family, significant others and co-workers. In three of those four categories, voice is the number one choice. When it comes to our work colleagues, however, we prefer to send email: 43% of respondents said they would choose email, 33% would choose voice/phone, 12% would text, and just 6% would use social networking sites to communicate with co-workers.

It's interesting, despite pronouncements about the death of email, to see that method continue to rank so highly. In fact, there was very little difference in the usage of phone and email across these groups, with the notable exception of communicating with a significant other: 85% use the phone, 58% text, and just 56% use email.

Photo credits: Flickr user plenty.r

The Associated Press reports that Yahoo Mail has 277 million users, down 1% from the same time last year. Hotmail is the global leader with 327 million users while Gmail has grown 24% (43 million users) over the last year to 220 million. Yahoo's announcement coincides with last week's iOS update to Yahoo Messenger as the company looks to reassert itself as an innovator and communications leader.

Yahoo Messenger with chat is now easier to use and brings Yahoo Mail much closer to GChat/Talk in terms of communications functionality. Yahoo Mail also allows users to send and receive SMS directly from their account.

We reported last year that Yahoo rebuilt its mail using CSS3 and loads with fewer images, thus reducing load times by 35%. It has also added feature applications within the inbox such as Flickr, Evite and PayPal.

If you find yourself tethered to your inbox, you're about two years late to the party that is AwayFind. The service, since its launch back in 2008, has given users a way to set up specific filters so they can receive notifications and make sure only the truly important messages disrupt their day. Last year, the company added notifications by Twitter, Phone and IM and today, it has added to simple features that should truly keep email at bay.

If you've ever found yourself consistently checking your email in case that one important message comes in, check no more - AwayFind will let you know. And even better, you can set up the alert from the AwayFind iPhone app, while you're out and about.

First, the app now has a feature that lets you set up quick alerts on the go, in case a message comes in from a particular email address during a certain amount of time. Normally, you set up filters for specific people that are always considered important, but not everybody is that lucky. If, however, you're waiting on that one email and don't want to keep checking, this feature is for you.

The next app, once you hear about it, is another no-brainer that should make life exponentially easier. Say you have a meeting with someone this afternoon but are going to be out and about the whole time before then. If they email you to move the time just a little bit or change any little thing, you might miss it. If you sync AwayFind with your Google Calendar, however, it will let you know when anyone on your calendar emails you within a certain amount of time around that event.

Like we said when we wrote about AwayFind last year, it's "one of those ideas that seems so obvious, you're left wondering 'why didn't someone think of this already?'" Thankfully, we didn't have to, because AwayFind founder Jared Goralnick did it for us.

"'Retrieved from the cloud,' the collection of approximately 40,000 emails dating from 2004 to the present," the Library said in a statement, "is the most substantial in a literary archive acquired by the British Library to date, affording among other things a fascinating and extensive insight into writerly networks."

This is not an email.

The acquisition cost the Library just under $53,000. They have wrapped it in a multimedia presentation, "as part of a wider programme of enhanced curatorial activities." This included a "panoramic digital photograph of Cope's study and an interview recorded on the day the material was collected, in which she reflects on her archive and the writing life it represents, will allow researchers to reconstruct a retrospective context for the physical and electronic records acquired, as well as recording for posterity the space which informed the creative process."

These sorts of issues - what to collect and how to contextualize the collections - have always been big in archival circles. The electronic elements are just another turning in archivists' relationship to the materials.

This is not the first time poet's emails have been collected, but it seems to be, by far, the largest such collection. As more media is used by poets to correspond, take notes, make drafts and float ideas, the collections will grow. Already, Twitter, blogs, social networks and searches are no doubt growing on the hard-drives, thumb-drives and clouds that surround contemporary poets.

You have to wonder though about the sense of poetic presence that a physical medium allows. When you see a poets marginalia in a book of, say, Dickinson poems, there is a sense of "I am where she was." Can that be communicated with electronic media?

Listen to Cope reading several of her poems, "Strugnel's Haikus," "Flowers," "The Christmas Life" and "On a Train."

Page image from the British Library | other sources: The Chronicle of Higher Education

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• The iPad isn't a product, it's a badge - a way to identify ourselves in a world in which the traditional ways of classifying ourselves by social class and mainstream religion are losing their purchase: http://ind.pn/ed9EZG via @StevenParrott
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What links did we miss? Let us know in the comments.