The people at Zenbe have created a platform called Shareflow as a way to follow a group project, without the messiness of group e-mailing. The initiative to unify a group of people via real-time message boards is a movement toward simplification much needed by professionals with constant e-mail clutter. This application intends to increase productivity, and reduce the amount of mental context-switching you have to do while processing your e-mail.

Shareflow differs from ordinary e-mail because you can manually forward your existing e-mails into it and they become part of the conversation. Not only can your e-mail be added to a flow, but you can also add in text comments, charts, files of any size, and events.  Once participants enter the flow they are able to respond just like an instant message. 

While trying to centralize e-mail, the application unfortunately adds to the mess of multiple inboxes. Shareflow does not eliminate the need for an email inbox; it only provides an extension for collaboration. Busy business professionals need an integration tool to unify all forms of communication in one location. Shareflow is on the right path, but we need a more simplistic way of communicating considering the recent boom of social media and multiple inboxes.

As electronic communication behavior gets increasingly complex, so does the desire for a unified platform. Take the Google suite as an example; the ever-popular apps enable you to conduct your life within a Google browser window. This is a valuable service but it also means that all of your correspondence, scheduling, documents and contacts are housed on one company’s servers. As we begin to unify our online lives and entrust “the aggregators” with increasingly more personal information, it is important, as consumers to be aware of the protection offered by the gate keepers. One questions we must ask ourselves is, Does the steward of our data have anything to gain from that information?

The emergence of the universal inbox poses a new set of security challenges. If we are consolidating all communication (email, chat, text, voice, social networking, etc) into one place rather than distributing with a number of sites, the measures the company hosting personal information takes to protect that digital gold becomes increasingly important.

So, you have a cool idea and a prototype you’ve built to show off the idea. It’s time to build the company you have dreamed of. You’ve gone as far as you can on your savings and need to find an investor as you are ready to build a team, a product, and launch the company.

You send some intro emails out and one investor is interested and writes you back asking for more info. You send back what he wants and, Bingo! he asks for a meeting.

At the meeting you give him your business card, which has your Skype name, your cell phone, and fax numbers on it. You encourage him to use whatever mode of communication is best when he has questions and needs a fast response from you.

Later you are at your computer and your Skype chat client goes off and it’s him asking for a phone number for one of your references which you immediately give him because he can see you are online and you want to be very responsive to him.

A bit later he texts you saying he thinks your proposed valuation of your company at $1.5M is reasonable and he is going to give you a term sheet for a new investment valuing your company at that amount. You are so thrilled you can hardly speak and you can’t wait for the fax machine to get a call.

Indeed a fax does arrive on your multi-function printer an hour later and it’s the term sheet. But here the valuation is set at $1.0M and you are surprised, confused and disappointed. Of course, you assume this is just a mistake. You call him but he is not there so you leave a voice mail. 

You have some other meetings and when you check your cell phone voicemail, you have a message from him saying he agrees there was a mistake and he had meant to have the term sheet say $1.2M. Well, that is a bit better but it’s still not what you had hoped for and it’s not what you had agreed to.

You are certain he had agreed to $1.5M and you want to prove it to him. He’s very fair and reasonable and if you can just show him he already agreed to this he will honor it. But with so many clients and so many modes of communication you cannot remember by which mode he said that. You look in your email but nope not there. You look in your saved chat sessions but not there either. Even if you wanted to, you couldn’t find any history of deleted voicemails or text messages so there is no hope there.

Maybe you dreamed that he agreed to $1.5M so now you are beginning to doubt yourself and you decide to just accept his $1.2M valuation. Because you can’t see all modes of communication in one place you just devalued your baby by $300K! And maybe even questioned your own sanity.

Wouldn’t it be nice to have one client for all your modes of communication, where with a click you could see in one place all emails, all chats, all faxes, all voicemails, and all text messages that form a conversation with one of your contacts?

So many people seem confused about what Twitter really is and what it is good for. First, let’s clearly disabuse anyone of thinking Twitter is just like Facebook status updates. It is not that. Facebook status updates are more personal in nature and tend to answer the question “What are you doing now?” Tweets on the other hand answer the question,”What have you learned

Now let’s compare Twitter to an RSS feed. You can sit in your RSS reader (usually a browser or an email client) and the updates come to you,, which is great for blogs and news sites you are already aware of and trust.  

Then there are the sites that are full of information you never knew you were dying to know about.. So how can you possibly know about all the cool content you could know about? The answer:  find someone you trust, who spends their time discovering and reporting on things you want to learn about and follow their every move. They effectively become a human RSS feed for tons of information you would never find out about otherwise. Enter: Twitter.  

Eventually the vast majority of users will realize that Twitter is a personal promotional tool (I promote my content and I also promote what I find interesting elsewhere ), it will become more and more valuable,  providing you with the “Wisdom of Crowds” to get recommendations for what you should spend your time looking at. Once that happens, tools that aggregate the best Tweets from the best Tweeters on a specific subject will become the most important way to deal with not just Tweets, but entire conversations over multiple platforms including email, chats, texts and every other form of electronic communication. Twitter is another step in the process as we try to figure out how to deal with the complexity of so much input of information in our daily lives.

• 4 email accounts
• 2 calendars
• 4 instant messenger accounts
• 1 VoIP (Skype) account
• 2 phones for voice calls (land, mobile)
• 2 voicemail boxes
• 1 text message device (my phone)
• 3 social networking sites that have inboxes
• 2 blogs I write regularly and get comments on
• 2 blogs I read regularly and make comments on
  I also get faxes in my inbox a few times per month

That adds up to 23 different forms of communication using different clients or devices for almost every one. I know people who use more. Many Millennials use more because they are using Twitter and many more social networks than I do.

A lot of people are noticing that this is amping up the complexity and stress in our lives when electronic communication was supposed to ease the stress and improve our lives.

Dr. Thomas Jackson at Loughborough University in the UK studies this intently. He sees email becoming as addictive as slot machines with employees now spending up to half a day in their inboxes. That costs companies billions according to Jackson. Dr. Jackson has also found that its not just that email and how many messages we get that wastes a lot of our time everyday. But it is also this switching from what we were doing to one client and then to another and another just to communicate. After all, communicating is what we humans seem to live for as evidenced by the people who seem unable to drive without a phone pasted to their ears. He found that it takes on average 64 seconds for a human to stop what they were doing and set themselves on a new task using a new application (or client). It takes that same 64 seconds to switch back to what they were doing after checking email or instant messenger or a text message. That is a lot of time wasting especially if you have many clients all of which are ringing, dinging and buzzing as they have messages for you all day long. But there is more to it than that. There is also the added load on us of having to organize important messages in multiple places. Suppose you are in a good meaty email dialog with someone but it heats up more and you both switch to instant messenger to finish things off. Later, could you easily find all that communications? Maybe, but not in one place.

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.