I am a serial (incorrigible?) entrepreneur who, like you and everybody I know, uses a lot of different modes of electronic communication and am quite frustrated with the current state of affairs. When I personally take into account every different UI I use to send or receive communications here is what I have to include: 4 different email accounts; voice calls on home phone, office phone, mobile phone, and Skype; voice mail messages left for me on home phone, office phone and mobile phone separately; text messages on mobile phone; faxes which require a special client even though they come to my email InBox; IM/chat on Skype, Yahoo!, Gchat, AIM; Inbox messages on Facebook, LinkedIn, Plaxo and Spock; comments I need to read and respond to on 2 different blogs I maintain; blogs I read regularly that I occasionally want to comment on; not to mention multiple calendars and miscellaneous things like To Do lists and on-line note pads. I come to the total count of 29 and the vast majority of them are in different UIs. I try to unify things as much as I can. For example I use Adium to combine three of those Instant Messaging services into one client. You have to agree this is a mess! And with lots more social networks coming into our lives all the time where they try to do everything they can to keep you on their site, this is actually getting worse. And very little has been or is being done about it. So a lack of a unified Inbox is my hot button #1 I will be talking about in this blog.

What about confidentiality? Do all those people using Gmail (and I have to admit this statement applies to me sadly) realize that the philosophy “there are so many billions of email messages going through those servers no one will notice my solitary little message” is just as silly as it sounds? Even I have sent very important and very confidential attachments completely in the open through those servers hoping no one stops to notice.  By the way, this is why to communicate with my doctor she requires me to log in to her site with a password and communicate securely using her server exclusively (oh that makes one more client to add to paragraph 1 above!). Why hasn’t encryption of messages taken off? Long topic we will also discuss here. But this has to apply not just to email but to chats, and most especially to your social networking content as well. So private / confidential communication and very tight control over your profile information is my hot button #2.

Now we get to control over how people communicate with you. Why should the caller decide what modality I must use to receive their communication? We as the callee have only the tinniest of control over this as in when we screen the caller on our phone’s Caller ID display and decide not to answer. But I’d rather have a lot more control than that. So this idea of callee control over communication modality will officially be my hot button #3.

My email system and I am sure yours too, is great about letting me sort my Inbox and other folders by any column heading I wish. So that lets me see all the messages From someone or To someone or by Subject and so forth. Some are pretty good with “threads” of communication and show me all the messages related to a certain subject. But none of the major email clients I know of realizes that when I am communicating it’s usually more important to know who than what (i.e. subject) and I need not just to see the messages from someone to me but I want to see *all* communication I have had with that person at the same time in the same place. I would call that relationship-centric which is what communication is all about isn’t it? When I communicate with someone it’s because I have a relationship of some sort with them. And by the way, what if I have had a good dialog with someone via email and then we have a particularly hot conclusion to this dialog via IM. How easy is it for me to see *all* the communication with that person in one place regardless of the modality we chose for each particular conversation? That goes back to hot button #1. There is a lot more to this idea of relationship-centric which we will get into in this blog over time. But suffice it to say relationship-centric communication is my hot button #4.

I have saved perhaps the most annoying thing for last: the sorry state of social networking today. Sure I was a very early user of LinkedIn back when it started in 2003 because it swept through the high tech professional demographic like a Santa Ana wind when it first came out. About the same time, to keep everyone informed of any changes to my contact info, I like everyone I knew also started using Plaxo (which was never thought of as a social networking site until very recently). During those early years, my kids were in high school and then college. First they were diehard IM users and would be on it for hours per day. They communicated directly with people as you would expect but they used their away messages as a broadcast medium. My son would put little dirty ditties up there and my daughter would say things like “in the shower, leave one”. Once in college they like all their friends just about dropped IM like a hot potato as Facebook came on strong when it was limited to only people with a .edu email address (had to be a college student). Now they were on Facebook constantly. IM worked in high school because they all had the same schedule so when one kid was free to IM they were pretty sure the person they wanted to talk to was too. In college this rule was broken and Facebook was a better medium especially because by now, digital photography had gotten mainstream and sharing photos (especially, it seemed, of them doing drinking stunts) was the thing. When Facebook opened up to the world, I got on to make sure I as someone starting companies for this demographic, knew what it was really like. My kids at first didn’t even want to friend me as I was an unwanted interloper to them. I was not the only unwanted interloper. It is amazing to me how they have turned against Facebook. They say it is getting creepy, too complicated, too chatty, and too commercial. They all know friends who had things up on their site that hurt them while applying for a job. Meanwhile, LinkedIn is a good on-line resume but I do not know any of my peers who have gotten more than that out of it. So what is my point? I think people want both more and less out of social networks. I think they want more value and less noise. They want more control over who sees what. They want more ability to build a powerful resource of contacts because everyone getting into the workforce or moving within the workforce realizes who you know really helps in those transitions. But that is not what these social networks are offering. So my hot button #5 is about how to get social networking back to its core value of helping people network.

Stay tuned and we will get to each of these hot buttons over time. I hope readers find this blog interesting.