Adaptive Path Blog

Yesterday on Twitter, Robert Scoble posted that he is giving up on email in favor of posting in the public forums of Twitter and Facebook. His dialog, including my response via tweet, is below. Basically, Scoble’s argument, as I understand it, is that an message left in a public space may be responded to by anyone. Also, a public message can be viewed by anyone, so we all learn a little. This is what he calls “scale.”

Is he right? Is one-to-one communication dead? I think not.

Email still has a very secure place in our online world. Most of my “important” communication is aimed for just one or two select people. I don’t need to go onto the rooftop with a megaphone if I want to let my colleague know that his work is complete. I just need to email him and the rest of the world isn’t bothered with a message that means nothing to them.

Communication to a single person, or a select group, is still important and will continue to use the mechanisms that serve it best, like phone and email. There’s a place for broadcasting and there is a place for personal one-to-one communication. Using a broadcast tool like Twitter or Facebook to talk to a single individual fills up the space with unnecessary clutter.

Partial transcript of Scobleizer from Twitter, latest at top:

@seekground: but the advantage of public messages is even if I ignore you others can answer your questions. A lot of my email is tech suppor

Translation to the past 20 tweets: I need an assistant to answer my email. Outsource what you hate. I hate email.

………

@dharrels called me a “tool.” OK wiseguy. You want to answer my email? I didn’t think so.

dharrels: Scoble is twittering that he is giving up on email and only using Twitter and Facebook to communicate. What a tool.

Basically this is my gesture to the world: I am not answering my email and I’m not going to start. I’m overloaded. Tweet me.

………

If something really needs to be private than email is great. But most of my email doesn’t need to be private.

I always answer things in public space first. Why? Because those communications scale.

@arikb: yeah, email still has SOME value. But going down all the time. I far prefer people not send me private notes. Scalable communication.

PR people are the worst in the email regard. Speaker planners are close. I don’t answer a lot of my email anymore. If I did, I’d never do.

It’s amazing that in this age of Twitter that people still send email. I hate email. I hate direct Tweets. I hate Facebook messages.

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The Opera web browser for mobile, named Opera Mini, released a beta version this week. The main feature being hyped is the ability to zoom into web pages just like Safari on the new iPhone. Opera even produced their own “Mac vs PC” style video knocking the iPhone.

The zoom feature helps to deal with my biggest complaint about browsing on a mobile…. there’s millions of sites that are not optimized for mobile devices. A page designed to be read on a PC just doesn’t degrade to a 2-inch screen. The zoom feature allows you to view the entire page as it would render on a larger screen and then view a smaller subset of the page when you need detail.

And if you want to get closer to an iPhone, try a replacement contact list manager.

In other mobile news, MSN redesigned their mobile site this week.

I use a Cingular 8525 and the beta was unusable at first. I searched online and found that someone hacked a new Java Virtual Machine (JVM) to work on Windows Mobile 5. After installing the new JVM, Opera Mini worked for the first time and I was able to get in and check out the new zoom feature first hand.

Note: Java on Windows Mobile is not the best. Try out the native Windows version named Opera Mobile. Why a Mini and a Mobile version? dunno…

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Two days ago I visited Yahoo! Photos upon reading that the site’s official closure has begun. I was impressed with the experience offered. It’s clear that the Flickr team is rubbing off on the rest of Yahoo!

It really couldn’t have been much simpler to migrate to Flickr. Since my browser was already signed into both Flickr and Y!, it was just 2 clicks to start the magic of moving my photos.

I also really like that they give you a means to export into competing services Photobucket, Kodak Gallery, Shutterfly and Snapfish. Of course, it’s a bit more complicated to migrate out of the Y! universe, but it shows a good user focus on the part Yahoo! to support alternatives. From the Flickr help FAQ:

“Do I have to move to Flickr?

Not necessarily. Yahoo! Photos has a number of other affiliates that you may be interested to move to, and each of them is ready to migrate your photos for you if that’s what you decide you’d like to do. They are Snapfish, Photobucket, Kodak Gallery and Shutterfly.

You can also download your favorite photos or purchase an archive CD of your entire Yahoo! Photos collection. (There’s more information on these options over at the Yahoo! Photos site.)

I have been wondering how the Y! Photo and Flickr service offerings would mesh upon consolidation, and I’m starting to get some answers. Y! Photos offered unlimited photo hosting and unlimited albums, but Flickr encourages users to sign up for pro accounts in order to store a lot of photos and create more than a handful of “photo sets”. Well, it appears that they are upgrading everyone who migrates to a free pro account until Sept. 13th. I am way over the “free” number of photos and sets, so we’ll have to wait and see what happens in September.

The only quirk I found in the migration was the duplication of my Y! Photos albums. Each album was listed as two identical Flickr sets. This was simple to remedy with a couple clicks, but would have been a real hassle if I have more than 15 sets to deal with.

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