3 reasons for choosing feeds instead of emails @ work

Some weeks ago I listed 22 problems with emails and said that some of them can be solved with RSS feeds. How?

Freedom: You can choose which feeds you subscribe while you can only choose some of your email delivery lists, others are given and some of them you can never leave because they are based on your organization not based your interest. So while emails are sometimes spam feeds should not be. Keeping the delivery lists up-to-date is taking a lot of time (can you add me to your list? and my team too? please remove me from the list! just add me back after my holidays) while with feeds the receivers do the same work.

Openness: When you receive an email that is sent to hundreads of people you can´t know what the other receivers think about it. It is not acceptable to use reply all feature but one replies only to the sender and then the sender might get the same question over and over again. If the same message is e.g. blogged receivers can see the comments posted by other readers and they don´t need to ask something that is already answered. And it´s not only comments - readers can sometimes contribute by voting or giving points to good entry.

Saved disk space: People are archiving their emails (and it might be difficult to find them again depending on the folder structures) - the same 1 MB email might be saved by thousands of people. The feeds from wiki pages or blogs are saved in one place (and if the writers are using categories and tags they can be also easily found afterwards).

PS. The summer vacation period has started in Finland so I wish you nice&relaxing vacation and when you go back to the office think about your communication. Could you do it better?

22 problems with emails

Back in April I was giving a training in Lahti for Lappeenranta Technical University. I asked the students (people from middle management from several companies doing their MBA or Information Management studies) to share their email problems with me. The reason for asking is that quite many of the problems can be solved by using web2.0 tools - or just by using the emails with a proper style.

Problems with emails:

1. Emails are sent without a proper purpose and for too wide audience
->everybody has their inbox full of emails and they need clean it all the time
2. It is slow
3. It takes a lot of disk space
4. Paper wasted (! some people are still printing their emails)
5. The important emails are not noticed (e.g. everybody is now using the importance High)
6. Emails are hidden by spam filters (or rules)
7. Updating the delivery lists is a hard (and never ending) task
8. You need to wait for the answer (How long should you wait? A week, a day, an hour, 5 minutes?)
9. People are using emails with different styles, others are very formal and others chatty
10. Emails are not always protected and people feel too secured when using emails
11. People are "washing hands" by forwarding the emails (but I told you...)
12. Overuse of forwarding/cc'ing (your boss is not interested of everything you do)
13. Cc field: there are people who are ignoring all emails sent them as cc
14. Email may be sent to wrong people (e.g. there are a couple of Johannas in my office and we keep getting each others emails from time to time)
15. Someone may forward your message to people whom it is not meant
16. Long threads
-> it takes time to go it through to figure out why it was sent to you in the first place
->there might be something confidential in the message that you are forwarding
17. Answers to sender only - the others don't know what has been discussed
18. You can get rid of some delivery lists
19. Managing filters is painful
20. Attachments are clumsy when the emails are read from a mobile
21. Syncing the phone crashes if you have big attachments
22. Email titles are misleading (or missing)

Anything you'd like to add?

Yahoo vs Google

Yesterday I told you about the bookmarking by Yahoo. After that a friend mentioned that Google is also offering bookmark support and that made me to think about Yahoo and Google and their services.

I started to Yahoo very long time ago. My first email address was in the university, second one in Nokia and the third one in Yahoo. During that time it was not possible to read my university emails from Nokia office or from home and vice versa - I could not read my Nokia emails where ever. So I needed an email address that I could reach everywhere and Yahoo was the answer (the other option was Hotmail). Ever since that I've been using Yahoo for my private emails.

Then I found Yahoo Groups, Yahoo Photos (that was terminated when Yahoo bought Flickr), Yahoo's website builder Geocities and Yahoo's blogging service 360. I'm also using Yahoo's bookmarks and My Yahoo which is a portal where I can manage several Yahoo services (e.g. email, address book, calendar, weather, Flickr, news, notes, maps - even Facebook).

But Google was chasing after me. First my friends sent me invitations to Gmail and I created an account. Searching the emails works really well but still I was not tempted to start actually using the email - all my friends were using the Yahoo address and I was too lazy to inform them.

When the Yahoo Photos ended I moved part of my photos to Flickr but as you can show there only 200 pictures for free I took also Google's Picasa into use. It works like a dream too. (I'm going to talk you about the different photo services later.)

Then there started to be problems with 360 and most of my friends changed to Google's Blogger. I was loyal to Yahoo and kept waiting the blog change they have promised for 2 years now... I still have 2 blogs there but I have also 2 Blogger blogs and they work like a dream.

Google has a home page too, it's called IGoogle and I took mine into use today. The variety of themes was amazing (compared to Yahoo) and there was a lot of services too: bookmarks, maps, weather, Google Reader, Gmail, YouTube and Facebook.

So why do I still hang around with Yahoo? The main reason: because my emails are there. Maybe I should move to the next level and really compare these portals and choose the one that does the tricks for me...

There's also one interesting portal by Nokia: Ovi. There you have your contacts (easy to move them from your mobile phone), your calendar, maps, music, games, files, Flickr and my favorite: Share. I use Ovi for sharing my pictures and videos but have only tried the other features.

But hey, can I finally get the first real comment to this blog if I ask How do you choose which portal you are using and what are the killer applications for you?