November 30, 2008

Communications Complexity Conundrum

Filed under: Telephony, Uncategorized — jothmeister @ 1:13 pm

I’d like to discuss the number of different forms of electronic communication we all try to use these days and how complex and stressful our lives have become as a result. It sure is great that we can so quickly and efficiently communicate with our friends, family, co-workers and even strangers. Compared with one generation older than us this is a dramatic change. Our kids don’t even know what “carbon” is when they “carbon copy” someone on an email. Who sits down and hand writes everyday messages to other people any more?

So sure, all of this social interaction is mostly a really good thing but how come we have to maintain so many different things just to keep in touch, have fun, do our jobs and be part of a modern, mobile society? How many more inboxes are you going to have to tolerate before enough is enough? I think we have already reached that point and it is time to do something about that. To wit, let’s discuss just a few of the myriad of electronic communication mediums we all use every day. One more thing; I tend to focus a lot on the Millennials who are currently between 14-31. Here is why (Wikipedia):

  • 97% own a computer
  • 97% have downloaded music and other media using the Internet
  • 94% own a cell phone
  • 76% use instant messaging and social networking sites
  • 75% of college students have a Facebook profile and most of them check it daily.
  • 60% own some type of portable music and/or video device such as an iPod
  • 49% regularly download music and other media using peer-to-peer file sharing
  • 34% use websites as their primary source of news
  • there are 75 million of them and they spend about $172 billion per year

Mobile Phones

We all have them. And some of us use them a heck of a lot even while driving :-(   Last year we passed the magic point where more than half the human population has a mobile phone: over 3.3 billion have them now. In the US that number is 265 million or 86% of the US population. By the way, that is one of the lowest penetration rates in the industrialized world as most of Europe and several Asian countries have more phones than people. Millennials have an average 7 calls per day while us boomers have only 5.3 per day. I don’t have the data but I suspect on average their calls are longer too. The Millennials tend to have no other phone number while Boomers also have a landline at their home. Even Millennials in the workforce sometimes don’t have a separate work number and use the cell phone even for work. Boomers do tend to have a work line and increasingly they also use some form of VoIP (like Skype or Vonage) through their computer. Each of those phones has a voice mail box which requires focused time to process it. You have to log in or call the voice mail box number, listen to each message and then do something with each message you process.

Texting (SMS) with our mobile phones

74% of all mobile phone users are active texters (over 2.4 billion out of 3.3 billion total). Across that entire worldwide user base, 2.6 SMS messages were sent per day per person. In the US, the CTIA says the average number per month sent was 188. Millennials are huge texters with over 96% regularly texting and their average per day at about 20. They have had an impact on their parents because now over 20% of adults 55-64 send text messages too (Sprint). What is very interesting is the shift in communication mediums being chosen. It is very age-linked but  early Millennials are the most balanced in their use of email, texting and instant messaging. This is one reason we believe it is essential to have only one client from which you send and receive all types of messages and have the ability to easily see all communications no matter what form, in one organized place. If you had some emails with someone, switched to IM to have a quick conversation and then when you were out and about and did some texting with them, seeing all that communication in one place can be pretty important. Switching from one client to communicate to another (or from whatever you were doing to a new device) is time-consuming taking on average 64 seconds each time you switch according to studies done by Dr Thomas Jackson of Loughborough University, England. That “context switch” time works in both directions so if you stop working on something to take a call or respond to a text message you actually lose 64 seconds twice in that process.

Email

Across the world, 1.4 billion people have active email accounts (Radicati Group). In the US this translates into 97 billion messages per day more than half of which are spam (IDC). According to the IDC study, 77 percent of online consumers said they were annoyed with e-mail volume and have begun to lessen their use of e-mail in favor of other communication channels, such as social networks and text messages. We know business users send and/or receive a total of 156 emails per day on average. The number is smaller for personal use at an average of 71. The amount of time spent on email per day is 130 minutes. One study found that 26% of that time is considered wasted (Cohesive Knowledge). The waste is characterized in this quote from one of the sponsors of this study.

“Few people practice efficient [email] use. Poor habits like never emptying Inbox and Deleted Items. Not using folders to organize email for later use and record keeping. Not using Rules to route incoming email to folders. Using email to send too large of attachments. Sending small email back and forth, when IMs would be more efficient.”

Instant Messaging

ComScore found that 82 million people (49% of the European online population) used IM applications to communicate monthly.  In comparison, 69 million people in North America (37% of the online population) used IM. 90% of 13-21 year old use IM, and 80% of 22-34 year olds do but only 49% of those older than 55 use it. It is increasingly used at work to augment other forms of communication especially when you want to communicate quickly with a colleague and to get an answer you need to make a business decision. And while IM use remains very high, I have anecdotal evidence from my own small sample group of my kids and their friends that their use of IM dropped off a cliff as they switched mostly to Facebook and texting.

Social Network usage

Finally, I’d like to cover social networking to round out our discussion of the most common form of electronic communications mediums. MySpace and Facebook are now essentially neck-and-neck with approximately 120 million active visitors per month. Facebook has come from behind and by most measures is now taking the lead as the most popular social network in the world. In face, it is now the 4th most trafficked website in the world (ComScore). Even LinkedIn, which is a social network site “for adults” used by business people quite heavily, now has 10 million users. All of these sites now have Inboxes and other forms of 1:1 and 1:many communication which require you to be on the site to use. So we have to now consider not just mobile phone (voice), texting, emailing, and instant messaging as the primary forms of electronic communication but increasingly we have to add social networking to that list as well. It is another “client” so you have to switch to your browser and navigate to the correct URL to use it and you have to organize and sort though your incoming and outgoing messages (using a more primitive UI than your normal email) just like an email program so it is probably much less efficient than email normally is.

All of this is bad enough but there is more. In this blog I did not consider all the places you have to maintain your profiles. I did not consider all of the time you have to spend getting into your voicemail box and listening and responding to those messages. If you are a blog reader, and I have proof you are :-) , you may take the time to comment on something you read: well, that is communication you might want to easily be able to find later. We at Rocketvox are not the only ones to recognize this is gettign to be a pretty darn big problem. Read what Radicati Group had to say about this

“Service providers are increasingly requiring reliable commercial e-mail platforms in order to provide feature-rich messaging and collaboration offerings. With aggressive competition and price pressure in the hosted e-mail market, service providers are looking for e-mail platform suppliers to include more features with their products, particularly support for IM, wireless e-mail, VoIP, enhanced security, and Web 2.0 clients, to meet the growing demand from businesses for next-generation messaging and collaboration.”

Soon on this blog we will install a little electronics communications personal complexity calculator where you will be able to see how much time you spend communicating and how much time you waste with inefficient, poorly organized or scattered forms of communication. And what we cannot measure is your psuchit overload and stress level from having to maintain all those things you need to use to go have the relationships you want to have.

November 19, 2008

Killer social App? The Away Message!

Filed under: Social Networking — Tags: , , — jothmeister @ 6:19 pm

That is right. Remember, the Millennials, at least most of them, were in high school and college during the hay day of instant messenger. Sure they liked to chat but the real game was their away message. Everyone loved seeing what their friends thought up to put on their away messages. Some put up poems, some just little clues and as I have said, my daughter used to say “In the shower, leave one” which drove me crazy. She knew others could read it but kept insisting no one but her friends in her dorm would care.

I talked in the last blog about the mass migration away from IM towards both texting for fast unthethered communcation, and Facebook for…what? Answer: It’s just the Away Message again, stupid. Facebook calls it the “What are you doing right now” thing which always starts off “Jothy is…” so you can say a lot of different things. My son used to like saying “better than you” back when he was a wise guy. The point is that it is this that they consider the critical feature of Facebook not the Newsfeed which they hate and not even the pictures which lots of sites have.

Where Facebook falls down flat on its face again is that this message is binary: either you have one up on your page or you don’t and the whole world that visits your page can see this message. We think that is dead wrong. Just as you want to control how much information on your profile is seen by the different concentric circles that describe your relationships, you want to control who sees what about what you are doing. Maybe you do want to say “In the shower” but you only want those closest to you seeing it. Everyone else should just see “Away” or nothing.

November 12, 2008

Millennials will abandon Facebook

Filed under: Profiles, Social Networking — Tags: , — jothmeister @ 9:45 pm

 

There is no disputing the fact that Facebook is quite a phenomenon. It has now overtaken MySpace and has 120MM active user accounts. ComScore reports that Facebook attracted 132.1 million unique visitors in June 2008, compared to MySpace, which attracted a paltry 117.6 million. Here are some other numbers that make one take pause: Facebook is in the process of increasing the number of servers from current estimates of about 10,000 servers to over 50,000 servers in order to keep up with its growth.

But what is Facebook trying to become? And do its core users want it to become that? How badly are some of the negatives about Facebook hurting it? 

To understand (which we won’t completely because even they do not know) what Facebook is trying to become, first we must quickly remind ourselves where they came from. Mark Zuckerberg founded “The Facebook”, originally located at thefacebook.com, in early 2004 while attending Harvard University as a sophomore. The company dropped The from its name after purchasing the domain name facebook.com in 2005. Actually, Facebook originally started out as a “Hot or Not”-esque project called FaceSmash a site to rate women like a diving competition on a scale of 1 to 10. They changed the name and dropped that focus and became the place on campus to keep in touch with each other. Membership was initially restricted to students of Harvard, and within the first month, more than half the undergraduate population at Harvard were registered on the service (just the guys?). They expanded beyond Harvard when it opened to all Ivy League schools and gradually most universities in Canada and the United States. For a long time you had to have an .edu email address to register. Facebook later expanded membership eligibility to employees of several companies including Apple Inc. and Microsoft and they then opened to everyone with a valid e-mail address in late 2006.

My kids are Millennials who were in college during the perfect time when Facebook was open to all .edu addresses but still closed to the rest of the world. They shifted from almost total dependence on instant messaging to keep in touch with each other to Facebook. That is worth noting: they dropped IM like a hot potato and they have never gone back. IM worked well for them in high school because they and all their friends were on precisely the same schedule and so they knew the other person would be on-line and ready to IM when they were. College didn’t work so well for IM so Facebook took its place nicely to deal with their out-of-sync new lifestyles. They liked the fact that Facebook was closed and only college kids were in it. They felt safe and private from the prying eyes of creeps and parents. And frankly, while not many of them were thinking ahead about this, they were safe from a graduate school admissions person or a hiring manager for a job from seeing any of their profiles. By the way, Millennials are a really big deal: there are 75MM of them and they are the best group of any for advertisers.

What did Facebook do for these Millennials? They used it instead of email to communicate directly with someone. In fact, email seemed very formal to them: it’s what parents used for their work. They used the Facebook Wall feature to send broadcast messages to a bunch of people. They posted pictures for fun to share with their friends. My observation is that most of those pictures somehow always seemed to involve drinking. Once in a while they used Facebook to expand their network by finding some high school friend who went to a different college but this was pretty rare. That’s it. And that’s all they really needed during college. 

When they graduated, their use of Facebook dropped dramatically. They went from being on it for long periods of time six times per day to checking in once a day or even just every few days. They still felt drawn to it because they did not want to lose touch with important people with whom they had established a Facebook relationship. But right about then Facebook opened up to the whole world. Suddenly they started to hear about friends who were rejected for a job that looked good for them only to find out that it was because of some of those Facebook debauched party pictures that seemed so innocent at the time.

They froze. And they have started to rebel. But you see, Facebook won’t notice any more than Microsoft noticed that every single person on the plane with you is grumbling how much they hate Microsoft (and it will take a while but we are seeing the beginning of the demise of Microsoft). What happens to companies like this sneaks up on them. They have lost touch with the real customer and they are just focused on the numbers. Facebook thinks they are masters of the universe because of their growth. What’s strange is that they still don’t have a business model that works (at least Microsoft has had that for 20 years). To wit. 

Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg insists that his company remains more focused on expanding its user base than its revenues. The right business model for the site will emerge over time, he has said. — WSJ

Look at this. MySpace makes $6-7 per user per year. FaceBook will make less than $3 per user in 2008. They are losing money at a monumental pace.

So what is turning the Millennials — Facebook’s original and core constituency — away in droves? Creepiness, complexity, and lack of privacy.

As soon as the floodgates opened up, Facebook’s safe collegial walls came down and let the creeps in. My daughter was even outraged that I could come in and join. She did not want me in there. She did not want me seeing what was arguably her private place. I am not a creep but creeps came in as well. They used to laugh derisively about how creepy MySpace was and now Facebook to them is the same kind of place. And wake up Facebook: THEY ARE LEAVING as soon as they can.

To Facebook, the news feed and the apps and all the other things are either experiments to try to find something that works or they are the coolest new platform for Web 2.0 stuff but to the core audience they are just noise. These people are not buying it. And guess what, even though the Millennials used to say email was for the old-foggies, they now use it as they have become professionals themselves. And now the way Facebook makes you come to their site to see your inbox and answer messages is just a pain in the ass. It gets worse. 

“Slide, the hot Widget start-up, has arranged for video from Hulu, CBS and Warner Brothers on Facebook. It is part of a new Facebook application the company is working on FunSpace Channels. Facebook is all about person-to-person and person-to-small group communications. It is using your social connections to improve e-mail, not to improve television.” — NYT

I firmly believe, as soon as someone let’s the Millennials have what they still want from Facebook and avoids the noise and clutter they are gone.

But the biggest issue for these kids is the lack of privacy. You have so little control over your profile on Facebook. Look what kind of horrible things happen all the time. A recent survey by Kaplan Test Prep indicates that roughly 1 out of 10 admissions offices check out prospective applicants on Facebook. Ouch.

Virgin Atlantic recently sacked 13 of its cabin staff after they criticised the airline and some of its passengers on social networking website Facebook. — The Independent

Giving millennials a chance to get off of Facebook onto a secure network was helping them get rid of their ‘Facebook tattoo’. -Former Telecoms exec now at a Silicon Valley startus

We at Rocketvox have done some initial surveys with over 100 Millennials to examine what they like and don’t like about social networks like Facebook. What they told us about what they did not like included

“Can’t opt out of things like the newsfeed.”

“It’s really ugly now.”

“Can’t remove things from your page.”

“You are stuck with things that are useless to you.”

“It’s getting creepy.”

What they really want is simple: a way to find and connect with friends and friends of friends. They understand that especially when you are starting out a lot of your opportunities are based on who you know and who will help you. So they fully understand and appreciate the importance of building and maintaining a good solid network of contacts for business as well as for social activities. Fun is important too but that fun has to be carefully kept private from any prying inappropriate eyes.

We believe Facebook has lost its way and just like Instant Messaging, this generation will drop it so fast Facebook will not know what to do with their 50,000 servers. It’s just about the upteenth time the lesson will have had to be learned that you are doomed if you do not carefully listen to your core customers and give them what they really want.

November 8, 2008

Relationship-centric communication

Filed under: Profiles — Tags: — jothmeister @ 11:17 am

 

I used the term “relationship-centric” computing in my first blog post here and I should explain more about what I mean. In a way the term is a tad redundant since one could say that anyone you communicate with by definition is someone you have a relationship with. But if it’s so obvious how come most email systems only give you the ability to sort messages by one attribute such as ‘From:’ or ‘To:’ at a time? That feature where you can sort by a column are great but more often than not, I actually want to see all the messages To and From a particular person. And by the way, I would actually also like to have those messages where they were just Cc:’ed included as well.

 

 

Truth is what I really want is every communication of every type that I have had with a certain person grouped all together to give me the complete picture of what, frankly, my relationship with that person entails. This is drifting back to the concept of a truly unified inbox but all of these problems with our e-communications are somewhat interlinked. To see the complete picture of my relationship with that person, I want all emails, all IMs, text messages and yes, I want the Facebook wall postings and the comments they made on my blog. I want it all and I want it all in one place. That finally would give me a complete picture of where our relationship is going.

So seeing everything in one place is part one of relationship-centric communication. Part two is fine-grained control over who sees what in my profile and then how I can categorize all my relationships into groupings that I think of as “circles”. Around me (because in this situation I really do get to be the center of my universe) I will see a set of rings or circles of people who are close to me and then not so close to me and finally people I barely know but still want to sometimes communicate with (even if its just to call them to order pizza). Once I have done that, I can use those groupings or circles to not only control exactly what parts of my profile each circle gets to see but I get to go back and exert my callee-control (see immediately preceding post) again, based on these relationship circles.

We’ll visit this concept again when we delve a bit more into what seems to be working and what doesn’t in social networks.

November 4, 2008

Private/confidential e-communication

Filed under: Security — Tags: , — jothmeister @ 12:24 pm

 

When you send a physical letter though the postal service you have an expectation and a guarantee of privacy for that communication: it is a federal offense to open mail not addressed to you.  From Wikipedia:

The U.S. Postal Inspection Service (USPIS) is one of the oldest law enforcement agencies in the U.S. It was founded by Benjamin Franklin.[12]

The mission of the USPIS is to protect the U.S. Postal Service, its employees and its customers from criminal attack, and protect the nation’s mail system from criminal misuse.

U.S. law provides for the protection of mail. Postal Inspectors enforce over 200 federal laws in investigations of crimes that may adversely affect or fraudulently use the U.S. Mail, the postal system or postal employees. The USPIS is a major federal law enforcement agency.

The physical seal on the envelope is pretty darn good assurance that the letter has not been opened. And the physical nature of the medium makes monitoring all mail a completely unscalable proposition. In the EU, there is a constitutional guarantee of secrecy of correspondence and e-mail is covered from eavesdropping. The guarantee is a lot softer in the US with a requirement for a reasonable expectation of privacy.

 

The Internet is a huge network of computers designed to withstand major disruptions (e.g. nuclear strike) on one portion and still able to function and in fact continue to route traffic around the disruption through a redundant set of routers and switches. The Internet is amazingly open and accessible making all this traffic inherently vulnerable to eavesdropping or worse. The standard still used for email today was established as the SMTP standard in 1980. It was originally designed to exchange messages between the researchers who were by design the original users of the Internet. The standard has not been replaced but simply had add-ons such as MIME for attachments added to it. As a mail message leaves your desktop it probably goes through your company’s server, through the ISP’s servers who serves your company, through some unknown intermediate switches, routers and servers and finally to the ISP and corporate servers of your addressee. That is a lot of servers, switches and routers not to mention connections between them where the message could be read. Many people believe they have some protection called “security through obscurity” whereby there are so many billions of messages going through these servers that the chances someone will pick my little message to focus on must be really low. For anyone who uses Gmail or one of the other free mail offerings that publish ads on your Inbox page, you know better. They have clearly scanned your messages to pick out words and phrases to drive their auto-placement of ads. We are told this is a fully automated process and that no one intervenes, but as we now know, such assurances about the NSA monitoring phone communication only of non-US citizens were not true so it calls the email assurances into equally high questionability.

If you work for a company in the US where we do not have any secrecy of correspondence laws, e-mails sent using company computers are considered the property of the company and they have an explicit right to monitor them and they do. They are looking for proprietary information leaking out of the company. They are looking for employees who are not doing company business on company time. And they are looking for potentially libelous or other types of inappropriate communication (e.g. sexual harassment, pornography) that could put the company at risk.

OK so why don’t we just encrypt all these messages and be done with it? There are actually a number of solutions that have been proposed to encrypt email communication so why don’t we all just do it as a regular course of daily activity?

Let’s just spend a minute talking about how encryption works. I am going to focus on public key cryptography for this discussion but there are other technologies that also can do this; PKI just happens to be the most prevalent form of encryption around. Like everyone else talking about cryptography, let’s use Bob and Alice as the actors. Bob wants to send something secret to Alice and he wants Alice and only Alice to be able to read it. First we need someone we both trust to identify us and to be able to assert we are who we say we are. If we don’t have this Alice could be someone else who just claims to be Alice. So we each have to prove we are who we say we are to a Certificate Authority (CA). We do that to our bank so you know how this goes. We have to tell them some personal secrets that they can validate before they are convinced we are who we say. There are all kinds of levels of authentication starting with “just trust me, I am who I say” all the way up to providing a DNA sample. The problem with “I am who I say” is that that approach has given us literally thousands of people who got certificates that said they were Bill Gates. OK so clearly that is a joke. But its pretty standard now to ask someone some questions only they know and you can check in databases like credit bureaus, drivers license bureau and other sources. So without having to show up at the doorstep we can pretty reliably get authenticated by a CA who will issue us a certificate. 

A certificate has two keys in it: a public key and a private key. These keys are just large numbers that can be plugged into a special mathematical algorithm used to transform (or scramble) some data. They are pretty magic in that if I use one of them to scramble some data, only its mate can unscramble the data. If I scramble with the private key, only the public key can read the original data. Or if I scramble with the public key, its only the private key that can read it. They are named public and private for a good reason: you always keep the private key very close to you and no one ever gets to see it or access it. On the other hand you freely distribute to everyone who needs it your public key. So play this out a little. If Bob grabs Alice’s public key and uses it to scramble (let’s start using the correct term – encrypt) a message, and assuming Alice really does keep her private key to herself, guess what, only Alice can read that message. Very simple, very clean, so what is the big deal?

Three things make this a technology that has never taken off. One is getting everyone who wants to communicate privately to get authenticated and get their certificates with the key pairs in them. If Bob wants to send a private message to Alice and she does not have a key-pair, Bob is stuck. He has no Alice public key to use to encrypt his message to her so if he wants to communicate at all he better just send it in the clear. The “network effect” is strongly at work here too. Bob can be a good guy and go get his certificate but if everyone he ever wants to communicate with has no certificate, Bob might as well give up because he can never encrypt any of his messages. And with none of those people out there having certificates, Bob will also never receive an encrypted message and he got that certificate for naught. Only within very closed environments such as the military and employee-to-employee within the same large company is there enough control such that everyone you communicate with can be counted on to have the certificate needed to participate.

The second reason this has never taken off is that it has never been smoothly integrated into the email / chat / SMS user interfaces. If its not easy to use, people will not be bothered and they will continue to hope that the critical data they are sending is not noticed by anyone out there. Finally, the third reason is that many of the biggest participants in email transport don’t want those messages encrypted. Certainly if you are a Google or a Yahoo! getting ad revenue by placing context-sensitive ads on people’s InBoxes, you will lose revenue if you can’t read the messages to extract the context.

People are increasingly sophisticated about e-communication. They hear the stories about people not getting a job because the new employer looked at the old pictures of them drunk out of their minds at the frat party. They see that the NSA is eavesdropping on US-citizen to US-citizen calling to have intimate comforting calls. And they know that technology exists to make communications secure. If we create a system built in one of these Internet Clouds where people register to get a new email account and when they do, a decent authentication that they are who they say they are is done, then we have a way to make sure everyone who is part of that system has a certificate. Further, as that system grows and grows, the network effect works in everyone’s favor and the people you want to communicate with will also be part of this system and will have a certificate. Finally, since such a system is just being built now the encryption of messages and the privacy of profiles is smoothly and elegantly built into a simple, clean UI from day one.

November 3, 2008

Unified instant messenger

Filed under: Convergence — Tags: , — jothmeister @ 9:59 am

 

We are big fans of unified interfaces to modes of electronic communication. So we applaud companies like Trutap with this little ditty in TechCrunch last week. They recognize that with 67M IM users in North America and a whopping 82M in Europe, instant messaging is still a very important mode of communication. And there are so many different IM protocols: MSN, Yahoo!, AIM, ICQ, GTalk, Jabber, MySpace, LiveJournal IM, Bonjour, Groupwise, IRC, XMPP, Skype and probably a few I missed. Trutapp has created an interface that supports many of these protocols in one UI so you can access your network on each service without switching to a new client. They have a lot of competition including Mig33, Nimbuzz, eBuddy, Palringo, Adium, and others.

Here is my problem with this. IM is a commodity and no one is making money on it. From the user’s perspective, while it is nice to have one UI, this is just a small part of the problem. Frankly, what I really care about is that I want my IM conversations treated just like email and I want a dialog between you and me that started in email and at one point veered off into a quick chat via IM, to be storable and searchable in its entirety. Frankly, what I really want to be able to do is see all communication between you and me no matter what medium of e-communication we used at various times. From the standpoint of archiving, legal discovery and corporate liability, this is a big deal; its not just an issue of convenience to users.