Five Creatively Obnoxious Things to Do With Social Media

We're all too familiar with trolls or people who spout nonsense to get a rise out of you. The art of trolling is one much-perfected by few, and typically, despised by all. But there are less "in your face" ways to have someone scratching their head, trying to figure you out. Some are undoubtedly amusing, and I've been tempted to do them myself, if I didn't unfortunately have an inner moral conscious crying out for me to stop. This list is by no means inclusive, but none would be all that difficult to pull off, if you're in an incendiary mood.

1. Respond to very old e-mail as if there were no issues.

We've heard many people espouse the idea of "in box zero", but for most of us, it's not realistic. I've got e-mails I never answered in my in box going back a good part of two years. Sometimes, I think it'd be fun to start at the top, and respond to the old e-mail, without apologizing for my lateness, and continue the conversation from where it left off. Imagine the hilarity!

2. Pick somebody random on Twitter who is fairly active. Follow them, and then block them immediately.

Most Twitter users will give a new "follow" at least a cursory glance, and many will reciprocally follow. They'll likely be scratching their heads when it turns out you've blocked them and it's impossible for them to follow you back.

3. Use Twitter or FriendFeed to shout out someone's name with no context.

I've seen this happen a few times, when people accidentally post a name instead of searching for it. (For example: here) If you saw somebody post your name to Twitter without any reason or follow-up, wouldn't it drive you a little nuts trying to figure out what they were thinking?

4. Put somebody on a custom FriendFeed list that contains profanity or an odd name.

Earlier this month, resident crank and good friend Steven Hodson of WinExtra noticed somebody had added his data to a custom feed called "curmudgeons". As you can set up any names you wish, and there are no known filters, you can let your imagination run wild with just what you can name the lists. Then put people you know obsess over their stats and click through like mad.

So far, I haven't thusly been abused. Some of the referrals I've seen have me in "gurus", "noisy", "personal", "thetechnologylife", "professional", "sm-bloggers", and "pay-attention". So far, so good, but there's no doubt this could change. I'm just trying to stay off Mark Hopkins' "irksome" list, myself. (See also: Hutch Carpenter: How to Mess with Bloggers’ Heads Using FriendFeed Lists)

5. Set up a custom e-mail account for Disqus with an auto-responder.

If you have a Disqus account, leave a comment on a blog, and get a reply, you should receive an e-mail notification saying the conversation has continued. If you create a new e-mail account just for this, say from OtherInBox, you could set up your e-mail to reply to all new messages, saying you're out of the office, or something akin to "I receive a lot of e-mail and will answer yours in the order it was received".

This response will itself be placed in the comment thread of said blog, and be the owner's responsibility to delete, or could even lead to them responding to your out of office and have it continue. Heck, if you make the auto-responder creative enough, they may think you actually typed it yourself!

These are of course just scratching the surface. What other annoyances have you seen, or done yourself, that can be pulled off without being too destructive in nature? Have you done any of the above, and will you start now?

TweetBeep: Twitter Keyword Alerts to Your E-mail

On yesterday's micromedia panel here at the Blog World Expo, I said the way that companies can start using microblogging tools is to first be aware of them, and second to monitor them, before jumping in deep with both feet. The idea would be to understand the nature of the community, and to see how your business or industry is being perceived on the service before sending off tweet after tweet. As one of the best tools to follow your company's mentions online is to use Google's News Alerts or Google Blog Search and have them delivered by e-mail, TweetBeep intends to do the same thing - following terms you specify and sending them to your e-mail, either by the hour or by the day.

Using TweetBeep, as you would expect, is fairly simple. Sign up for an account with TweetBeep, and then add alerts, by hour or by day, register your e-mail address, and you will get notified by e-mail when your search terms come up.


Adding a new alert for #bwe (Blog World Expo)


My active TweetBeep alert list
You might be wondering why you would use TweetBeep instead of Twitter Search (formerly Summize), but relying on TweetBeep takes the manual intervention out of it. Instead of searching yourself, the alerts are automatically delivered. And for an enterprise corporate setting, e-mail is easily understood.


TweetBeep delivers results via e-mail
While TweetBeep isn't new, having launched back in May with Orli Yakuel on Go2Web20, there's no doubt this tool is being under-utilized, relative to other alert tools. So if you want to keep track of what's being said about you or your company in the Twitterverse, set up an account and get started. It just might be a tool you can use to get your boss to understand how the microblogging community is thinking about your product in real time.

GMail and Apple's MobileMe Holding an Outage Contest

Apple's replacement for .Mac, MobileMe, has been roundly mocked for its spotty uptime since rollout last month, drawing the company's CEO, Steve Jobs to apologize for the lack of quality in an internal memo. But even following an internal reorganization and the public thrashing, users, including me, were unable to access their e-mail for a good portion of the afternoon - even as the company's MobileMe Status page shows no updates since the end of July.

Not to be outdone, the most popularly cited alternative to MobileMe, Google's GMail, has also suffered outages this afternoon, locking its many users out of their e-mail, again, including me.


At the beginning of the issues with MobileMe Mail, Apple famously said the outages were only impacting a small 1 percent of users, despite widespread complaints throughout the Web. Today's outage, which Apple reported lasted about a half hour, cited only that "MobileMe members were unable to access MobileMe mail", so that indicates a full outage.

GMail, on the other hand, says, "We’re sorry, but your Gmail account is currently experiencing errors," without going into detail as to how widespread the issues are. GMail even goes the extra mile to promise "your account data and messages are safe." A discussion sparked by Shey Smith on FriendFeed shows the outages don't appear to have hit everyone.


The 1-2 punch of the outages has made discussion of the downtime the top conversation starters on Twitter, even higher than the Beijing Olympics or the Russia/Georgia skirmish. People must really hate having their e-mail interrupted!

There's No Whale, But Apple Mail is Trying to Fail

Over the last dozen years, I've amassed more than 36,000 stored e-mail messages in my Apple Mail. Through upgrades from Mac OS 8 to 9, OS X and all the ensuing system updates, and from Eudora to Microsoft Outlook Express, Entourage and eventually Apple Mail, I've managed to import all the items, losing almost nothing in the process. And I've been a happy .Mac customer (now MobileMe Mail) since almost the day it debuted. But now, I'm beginning to think I need to start making more frequent backups and deleting old messages, as my index is threatening to die.

Since the update to MobileMe Mail, at any point during the day, whether I am receiving new mail, or moving mail from the Inbox to hierarchical folders, I've sporadically gotten an error saying Apple Mail needs to "repair its information", then forcing me to quit. This has happened practically every day over the last week-plus.




When trying to reopen Mail, I get a note saying I need to reimport all my messages, which takes about 20 minutes, and then, all should be well.





So far, as much as I can tell, no messages have been lost. But some of the metadata is definitely awry, as old folders long left untouched show that messages sent several years ago are now marked as having gone out today, with the timestamp of when my index was rebuilt.

Over the years, I've rolled up a lot of messages, and my e-mail archive is a great resource for me to find old conversations with family members (going back to 1996), or searching keywords to find the first time something came to my attention. My e-mail folder with my father, for example, has more than 3,100 messages in it. My "Blog" top level folder has 3,600 messages, "Commerce" has 3,200, "Comments" another 3,000. There are about 2,500 in the folder for messages to and from Mom, and between 2,000 and 4,000 apiece for Twitter and FriendFeed.

There's no question that alerts from the social services I use have accelerated my e-mail glut, and I'm a pack rat when it comes to saving my mail. But now that I'm starting to see more failures on my Apple Mail, which has been rock solid for more than a decade, I'm starting to "think different" about saving everything. I just might backup again and then go on a deleting run. Hopefully, I can get this solved before it's too late and I lose anything significant.

FriendFeed Friday Tips #8: How To Post To FriendFeed Via E-mail

By popular demand, I've been asked by other FriendFeed users to highlight how I use the popular social lifestreaming site. So far the series has covered the "Hide" function, the bookmarklet, advanced search, how to integrate with Google Talk, how you can incorporate comments, determine an item's original source and how to learn more about your fellow users.

Since FriendFeed debuted their API this spring, the number of third party applications authored for the fast-growing aggregation service has been rapidly increasing. There have been different Web-based services to give a new look to FriendFeed, from FriendFeedMachine, MioNews and NoiseRiver, a mobile version from FFToGo, and other add-ons, including GreaseMonkey scripts and blog comments integrators. But sometimes, it'd just be a lot easier to start out with the original social network - e-mail.

Gary Burd, a long-time Microsoft employee, and now a member of FriendFeed's small staff, introduced a service that lets you post directly to FriendFeed, using your e-mail, including the attachment of photos or graphics, called Mail2FF, back in late May. He debuted the service prior to joining the Mountain View-based company, and its arrival was well accepted by co-founder Paul Buchheit, who wrote, "Cool! Did you create this Gary? This has been on my "things I personally want" list for a long time."

Using Mail2FF is quite simple, as you can see from a Mail2FF tutorial produced by Ross Miller, an intern at the company for a summer.

Step 1: Write Your Message

Open your e-mail application and compose your message, just like you were sending a regular e-mail. The subject line of your e-mail will be the subject line, and the body of the message will be posted as a comment on your own item.


Step 2: Add Pictures

Attach any photos or graphics you would like to accompany the item. They will be placed as part of the item in their full resolution, hosted on Amazon Web services. Up to two images will be displayed on the item, with a blue arrow being displayed if more than two images are attached.


Step 3: Know Where To Send It

Mail2FF uses your own API remote key, which you can find here. To send the message to FriendFeed, you would send it to:

username+remotekey@mail2ff.com

For me, assuming my remote key is purple456monkey, I would send it to:

louisgray+purple456monkey@mail2ff.com

The end result would be displayed like this:


Step 4: Sending the Message to a Room

If you want to get creative, you can even send your message, and images, to a FriendFeed room, rather than the main feed. This is done by adding the room name ahead of your username and remote key.

For example, if the room name is "babyfeed", one I've been using lately, I would send it to:

babyfeed+louisgray+purple456monkey@mail2ff.com


The result would be just as it is in your own feed, complete with subject line, body content as the first comment and attached images, but sent to the room itself. (See above or the actual posting)

Mail2FF was so clearly a success, it was integrated with FriendFeed's native version for the iPhone released at the end of June. (See: VentureBeat) And when I was stuck at the hospital, finding many of the Web sites I used completely blocked, like Flickr and FTP, Mail2FF was the only way I could send the very first pictures of Matthew and Sarah the world had ever seen. (See: Matthew and Sarah: First Photos (More Coming))

When entries are posted to FriendFeed via Mail2FF, you will see a tag "via Mail2FF", and the items are shown as "internal" FriendFeed postings. You can see some that I've done here, here and here. To get started, head to www.mail2ff.com and give your e-mail a shot.

I Woke Up to My First Disqus Comment Spam Attack

In the two and a half years I've written on this blog, comment spam has been an occasional problem, but nothing alarming. When I was using Blogger comments with Haloscan, I could moderate and delete when needed. When I used Blogger's native comments, I had the occasional piece of spam, but it was unusual. Now that I'm using Disqus, it's still very rare. But this morning, when I checked my e-mail, and found 94 new messages, I knew something was wrong. I'm simply not that popular.

Sure enough, somebody had broken through.

In less than an hour's time, the poster had added more than 30 comments to Disqus, all on different blog posts, all very old -- a clear example of a blog comment spammer on autopilot.


My In Box this Morning (Click to Enlarge)
And like any good spam these days, its message made very little sense, with a note to "make money" and dozens of lines in Farsi (or Arabic, I'm not an expert).

The good news is that Disqus gives me a way to delete the garbage. Usually, the service will alert me that a comment is flagged as spam, giving me the option to e-mail my desire to "delete" or "approve" the note, but this gibberish made it through the filter entirely. So I had to go to my Disqus dashboard, and delete each entry one by one. There was no way to delete the whole group or delete all by a specific author, as far as I am aware.


I know Wordpress bloggers swear by Aksimet and other solutions. Some even eagerly trumpet the thousands of spam messages blocked. So far, I've never had the need. Are you seeing spam commenting pick up, and if you're using Disqus, how do you handle it?

TinyURL Adds Custom Alias Feature To Shortened URL Service

The URL shortening service TinyURL was first useful for sending longer URLs to friends over e-mail to avoid line breaks that would often disable links in many e-mail programs.

With the advent and massive growth of SMS and microblogging services, like Twitter, TinyURL and other services like it have become omnipresent, an integral part of sharing blog posts, news, and other items.

In fact, Steve Gillmor of TechCrunch recently wrote, "Who controls TinyURL... controls the high ground in the battle for the Internet platform."

But until Friday, the URL was always a string of gibberish, a simple link to tinyurl.com followed by an indecipherable string of letters and numbers. You typically had to trust the person or service sending the TinyURL, or preview it to be sure you weren't being sent to a Rick Astley music video or a malware site.


Now, TinyURL added a new wrinkle, the ability to make a custom alias for any shortened URL you make, making it just as easy for people to read as Web browsers. Now, instead of always showing links to my blog posts that read as http://tinyurl.com/55aml3 or http://tinyurl.com/6px3kc, I could in theory, make them read like: http://tinyurl.com/lg70508 or http://tinyurl.com/tweetdeck.


This might seem like a small update, and it is, but it could make the service more mainstream, especially in the enterprise where slower adopters are more comfortable sharing items that are branded, or in a consistent format. It could also be another step in helping TinyURL compete with smaller URL shortening sites, including Snurl. With the exception of automated TinyURLs generated from TwitterFeed, I'll be trying to make my own custom aliases to links I share via Twitter, E-mail, or FriendFeed.

Web Service Notifications Outnumber Live Bodies In My E-Mail

E-mail used to be about connecting people, regardless of distance. With time, it developed new capabilities - sending attachments of ever greater size, acting as a marketing vehicle, both solicited and otherwise (see: Spam), displaying pictures and HTML, and of course, serving as a repository for status notifications for commerce, news, and social media. Now, there's no question for me that updates from online services greatly outnumber the amount of person to person communication I get each day in my personal e-mail. (Work e-mail, of course, is another story)

For me, e-mail is where I want to be updated for all things finance, be it bank statements, credit card invoices, stock trade transactions, or the electricity and cell phone bills. As I see it, every e-mail note there saves paper, and saves me digging through the mail to sign something off and send a check.

I also, despite getting them at an increasing rate over the last few months, still get notifications by e-mail when somebody chooses to follow me on FriendFeed, LinkRiver, Shyftr or Twitter, for starters. I also get notified if someone befriends me on other services, like Facebook and Digg. At times, especially when a particular topic is driving up conversation, I can hear the sounds of new e-mail hitting my computer every couple minutes, invariably drawing a sarcastic comment from my wife, who helpfully adds, "Well, aren't you popular?"


Twitter and FriendFeed follows come in pretty often these days...
While I could, of course, turn off these notifications, it helps to see if the person following is someone I'll be soon watching in turn, and it also alerts me to if I'm getting name-dropped somewhere. Usually, a quick visit to Summize or Google Blog Search can help with that.

Curious if others using Web services as I do were seeing a similar onslaught of Web notifications taking over their in box, I posted a question to Twitter, which also hit FriendFeed. So far, the response is certainly mixed.

Susan Beebe claimed 85% of her e-mail to be from "real people", but otherwise, the FriendFeed voting came out 16-2 in favor of services, while Twitter replies also came out with services ahead, 6 to 1. Bwana McCall wrote, "I get more Bacn than real email. It's sad.", while Hutch Carpenter said it simply, "Notifications by far."

While many people are fighting with the e-mail data deluge, striving for the proverbial "In Box Zero", handling online notifications is like any other system. You just need some good hierarchy. I've set up a folder called "Blog" in my e-mail for all correspondence related to the blog, from people pitching stories, to working with entrepreneurs and other bloggers. I have subfolders for some of the services where I've had the most updates, and of course, for real-world work, I have a "Commerce" folder, which surprisingly, has all my stock trade notifications from eTrade going back to the year 2000, and every Amazon.com order ever. Thank goodness for e-mail search, something Apple's Mail program does extremely well.

While robots may have taken over the inbound side of my e-mail, I still own the outbound side, and take every effort I can to keep up. But the mix has definitely changed.

My Social Media Consumption Workflow

Amidst watching some talk about how they are reducing time in Google Reader due to information overload, or switching away from one service for another, whether due to its features, the friends, the noise or the content, I've been thinking a bit about how I consume social media, and specifically, the order of how I do it, to be sure I've caught up on everything quickly.

There's no question the amount of information I consume can be daunting. Glancing quickly, as of this morning:

1) I have 270 RSS subscriptions in Google Reader, sending between 500 and 800 items a day.
2) I follow 490 Twitter users.
3) I am subscribed to 269 FriendFeed users.
4) I have 210 Facebook "friends".

On the back of all this information coming this direction, I am pushing out information:

1) Posting one or two items here daily (1,300 so far)
2) Updating people on Twitter (334 updates so far)
3) Comments and Likes on FriendFeed (1,135 and 643 respectively)

In addition, there are a number of ways to engage and act on the data.

1) Adding bookmarks to Del.icio.us (630 so far)
2) Tracking activity via Technorati and Google Blog Search
3) Tracking comments here and elsewhere via Disqus
4) Trading e-mail with readers, entrepreneurs and peers

Add the above to a way a typical non-robot views the Web, including viewing news, sports and entertainment, not to mention everything to go with work and family obligations, and it can be hard to know where to start. While there's no question I'll vary from this process from time to time, below is a good idea of how I start the day in social media.


1) It always starts with e-mail. E-mail helps me know what's actionable. From e-mail, I can find out and act on:
a) New Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook connections
b) Direct Messages from Twitter
c) New comments on the blog via Disqus
d) If Google Blog Search has uncovered references to the blog
e) If there are conversations about upcoming posts or new services to check out.

When e-mail activity is completed, I open the Web browser. While FriendFeed is my home page, I usually leave it on the first visit of the day, and head to Google Reader, to rapidly consume the Web.

2) Reading Google Reader, I can catch up on the night's blog posts, add items to my link blog, or open posts in a new tab to bookmark or comment.

3) I'll open Twitter and do a quick scan of the first few pages of "tweets" from those I'm following to see what the discussions of the day are. I'll also check the replies tab to see if anybody tried to send me a message where action is required.

4) I head to FriendFeed.

Why is FriendFeed last in this order? It's because unlike the first three, which feel like work, where there is an action that needs to take place, or a task that needs clearing, FriendFeed is more like the finish line, where I can finally relax and engage with peers. I don't necessarily want to be rushed when I'm on FriendFeed, but can take time to see what others have done throughout the Web, make comments and respond to others who have commented on my own activity.

Also, visiting FriendFeed last here means that my feed is "properly" filled, with shared items from Google Reader, bookmarked items from Del.icio.us, any updates on Twitter, etc.

5) Additional activity

All other social media activity is optional, and comes when it makes sense. That would include:
a) Submitting items to the Elite News Tech Reddit
b) Digging items from the Upcoming list of Digg's Technology section
c) Visiting Shyftr and posting comments or responding to conversations.
d) Seeing what's popular on LinkRiver, ReadBurner or RSSMeme.
e) Checking trends and news on TechMeme and the TechMeme River.

Everybody has their own route to how they consume and act upon social media. This is how I tend to do it, so I feel I'm on top of things. Am I doing it wrong? How do you go about your social media workday?

Getting the Word Out in 2008

A few years ago, reaching the greatest number of people with news, in the quickest amount of time, would seemingly be an easy task. Get a list of people to call, prioritize, and then start dialing, starting with the most important, and eventually, reaching the last person on the list, before going back to the top of the list and calling those who didn't pick up. And if you didn't want to talk to the person face to face, you could type out a letter and send it out, leaving the time between sending and receiving it in the hands of the postal service.

For news like that we posted last night, announcing a near-term addition to the family, this pre-2008 process could take hours, and eventually seep into days.

Thank goodness those times are behind us. Last night, I essentially took 4 ways to get the news out. I first posted it here, on louisgray.com, then followed on by posting the news to FriendFeed and Twitter. When I'd hit all the instant routes, I then crawled through my address book, and sent out an e-mail to those who likely wouldn't be at any of the online media. Sure enough, even as I was creating the e-mail, I started to get comments flowing into my in box, as those RSS-enabled subscribers wished us well.

All told, I sent the e-mail to 57 people, and got 22 replies, for about a 40% hit rate. The blog did just as well, with 24 comments (so far), and FriendFeed surprised me, with a solid 15 responses. Twitter was the lagger, with 8 replies. In aggregate, we got about 70 friendly notes of congratulations, and after a few quick calls to my grandparents, who aren't as Web connected, I think we got just about everybody, and it was a lot easier than getting a crick in my neck after a telephone marathon.

As for why I sent the notes out in so many places to so many folks, as I reminded my wife, I majored in "Mass" Communications, not "Minor" Communications, so that's the way we do things around here.

Friday Fanmail

From an author behind a new service yet to debut:

"You're doing a fantastic job covering the next generation of content consumption and aggregation services. I think that by now you pretty much cornered this market :) To me, at least, your blog has become a must-read ever since you broke the ReadBurner story."

Stay tuned to see what they've got in mind. You'll hear more in a few weeks... and yes, I'm not used to such nice notes, so I thought I'd share.

Feedblitz Bug Sends My RSS Stats Through the Roof

Today has been a big day for louisgray.com. For the first time ever, I had two posts atop TechMeme at the same time (one | two), with my question around Twitter generating a ridiculous amount of buzz, garnering over 1,000 visits, more than a dozen comments, and several different articles through the blogosphere. All told, it was the second-highest traffic day ever.

But not even this good news can be credited for my huge spike in RSS feed subscribers reported by Feedburner. That... unfortunately, is a bug.


Did your RSS Subscribers Double Overnight?
Overnight, I saw my total RSS subscribers nearly double, from 287 yesterday, to a whopping 570 today, an increase of 283. The culprit? My blog to e-mail service, Feedblitz, which somehow reported to Feedburner that instead of 18 e-mail subscribers, I somehow had 305. Simple math tells me Feedblitz added my 287 number to the 18 to come to 305, but regardless of the reason... it's just wrong.

While I'd like to think I'm Mr. Popularity, I'm still Mr. Small Potatoes.

The Feedblitz blog says its "probably just a previously unknown defect (ok, a bug) somewhere in the code." It might be related to Blogger's feed redirection, and it might not. Who knows? I had hoped the double TechMeme hit plus organic momentum had made me an overnight sensation, but it was not to be. Dang.

At least I wasn't the only one with a temporarily oversized ego.

See also:
Franzone.com: Subscriber Count Madness
BizTechTalk: Feedburner - Analyze Feed Subscribers
Authority Blogger Forum: Feedburner Messes Up

Want to Subscribe to this Blog by E-mail? Use Feedblitz.

Feedburner reports there are nearly 200 people who have added louisgray.com to their RSS feed subscriptions. The vast majority of these subscribers use an online tool, like Google Reader, Bloglines or NewsGator. But there is still a core group out there who would prefer to use e-mail, and get a daily update, rather than be sure they are caught up to the very minute.

That's where Feedblitz comes in. I've been a consistent user of Feedblitz for almost two years, and just over a dozen folks, myself included, are used to getting updates from my blog every day. But, in 2007, I didn't see this number move much, even as my total subscribers jumped by more than 600%.

So, with my latest blog template tweaks, I removed Feedblitz. But, in a conversation I had with Fred Wilson of A VC, he reported 10% of his subscribers used Feedblitz, and they tended to be "a very active 10% because it's delivered to the inbox."

So, with his comments, and in support of Phil Hollows, the company's Founder and CEO, who e-mailed me to see if there was anything he could do to help, we're both polling you, and offering the opportunity to subscribe.

Do you want to get louisgray.com by e-mail? If you do, then sign up here, or from the top right corner of any page on this blog. There's just one mailing, maximum, per day, around 11 p.m. Pacific time, which usually contains two posts.

Has the ease of online feed readers eliminated the need to send blogs by e-mail? I thought they had. Let me know what you think.

Importing PST Files: GMail's Would Be Secret Weapon

If you listen the rumbles in Silicon Valley, you would think Google's office suite and Apple's Mac OS X operating system were taking over the world. But the further you get outside the Valley, and often within the Valley itself, you see that Microsoft Windows is still the dominant operating system, as are its application counterparts, Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft Office. If you're a real enterprise, it's basically assumed you're running Outlook.

But the biggest drag on using Outlook has got to be the stupid .PST files. With any kind of serious e-mail archiving, they top out at 2 Gigabytes apiece. Keep the same e-mail address for any kind of time, and you're left not only with multiple .PST files, each being 2 Gigs or so, but it's a new job just to keep track of what .PST files correspond with what amount of time.

Running desktop search software, like Google Desktop, helps to find the old e-mails, but often, clicking a link saying to "Reveal in Outlook" leads to a dead end. Sometimes the archives don't open well. Sometimes Outlook chooses to archive to your local desktop instead of to the network, and any kind of bug could leave you with huge gaps.

Meanwhile, with this playing out in companies everywhere, Google is offering about 5 gigabytes of storage space to consumers everywhere through GMail. Just this evening I was told I'm using "221 MB (4%) of your 5123 MB." For business customers, this number is upped to 25 gigabytes of storage. While that's fantastic for new businesses, anybody already using Outlook has to honor the old .PSTs if they want to get to old messages.

But what if you could import old PST files into GMail, honoring the folder hierarchies you had set up, and had the ability to search through all your e-mail, through all its history? While there's no doubt the import of a single 2 Gigabyte PST file would take a good amount of time, the end result - a single, searchable, Web-based e-mail archive for all your messages would be the holy grail. I believe that with all the issues surrounding Microsoft Outlook - including licensing, viruses, and... the PST files, the prospect of moving to GMail would be quite inviting. But until GMail can help migrate away from Microsoft altogether, real growth will be stunted.

Other comments: PST Files to Gmail, Anyone know of a PST to gmail or mbox converter?

E-mail Faux Pas Showcases Old Message

When it comes to e-mail etiquette, I'm quite particular. I tend to roll my eyes and think less of people who don't know the difference between "Reply" and "Reply All", I'm not all that forgiving with typos, and think that the way e-mails are written should be in line with your own capability for writing or communicating. So when I goof up, I'm particularly annoyed. Today, I most certainly goofed.

Late last September, I had tried to send a message at the office via the Microsoft Entourage desktop client, as Webmail was having issues. For some reason, that didn't go through either. After a few hours of struggles, I ended up sending the note from my personal e-mail account, using Apple Mail, and hadn't opened up Entourage since. Until today.

Prompted to revisit Microsoft's sorry excuse cousin to Outlook for the Mac, I fired up Entourage and set it up to synchronize, so each folder would be updated. As the app sluggishly whirred to life, filling my inbox with the latest, a familiar "Sending Mail" sound echoed. Oops. Seconds later, my message from September hit an internal distribution list and I was made to look like a fool, as the note gave a snapshot in time from 10 months prior. In the age of instant receipt and Blackberries, there was no good reason to recall. Instead, I just sighed and apologized to all for the error.

I hate that. The next step is to just make sure I never open Entourage again.

Update: Ars Technica in parallel has posted a note on curing "sender's remorse"...

Feedblitz Adds Twitter Support

One of the most exciting things about blogging is finding how content is distributed in new ways. Through a single post, my content can be read on the blog directly, through RSS feeds, via e-mail summaries, and now, even by mobile phone, thanks to Feedblitz' new partnership with Twitter, announced today.

While I'm no huge fan of Twitter so far, Feedblitz has, for more than a year, been a great way for me to update passive visitors to the blog, who can routinely expect updates on a daily basis, as the Feedblitz e-mail goes out anywhere from 11 to midnight, containing posts from louisgray.com from the last 24 hours. The e-mail comes to their mail box to be read at their leisure.

Meanwhile, despite my protestations, Twitter is growing like a weed, and has gathered tremendous buzz in the blogosphere. (Early adopters include Steve Rubel and Robert Scoble, which helps...)

Feedblitz is smart to extend its content distribution to subscribers who have let it known they would rather be updated through Twitter than by other methods. Additionally, Feedblitz has added an intelligent, necessary, twist. Rather than submitting the full content of my feeds to the Twitter customers, who often pay their mobile carrier by the character, Feedblitz offers recipients a fast summary, and then a "TinyURL" that links to the full story. TinyURL, quite simply, turns long URLs (e.g. www.domain.com/directory/date/topic/story_name.html) to "tiny URLs" (e.g. www.tinyurl.com/77apr08) This will save their customers money, and reduce potential barriers to entry. This in turn fits within Twitter's 140 character limit.

As the Feedblitz site says, "Twitter syndication from FeedBlitz posts the relevant entries to the subscriber’s Twitter timeline as “tweets.” The subscriber can then get SMS text or IM alerts, as will anyone following that timeline." If you're a Twitterer, so to speak, and you want to stay updated on this blog, this just might be the holy grail.

Sign up to Feedblitz now and get louisgray.com by e-mail or Twitter

Unlimited Is the New Black

Earlier this week, Yahoo! made headlines for eliminating any restrictions on its Yahoo! Mail users. (Coverage: GigaOM, Richard McManus, Jeremy Zadowny)

Previously capped at 1 gigabyte of storage apiece, trailing Google's GMail offering, which queued up 2.8 gigabytes of e-mail space, Yahoo! took the plunge by moving to an unlimited model, in a hope of capitalizing on its strong user base, and possibly to start getting attention away from Google, who has been the assumed technology leader since the company's debut.

The move away from limited to unlimited has been seen time and again in the technology space. After all, it wasn't all that long ago that AOL and other dial-up ISPs charged by the hour you were logged on.

When AOL did switch away from offering hundreds of hours a month on widely distributed CD-ROMs, and moved to unlimited, it was a major change. You may remember that AOL in the first days of the promotion went almost completely inaccessible as the most hard-core users would dial in and never hang up, or set up autoscripts that would artificially keep them logged in after periods of inactivity.

The move from metered to unlimited is also taking hold in traditionally penny-tight industries like cellular phone service. While most plans offer several hundred minutes a month, others, including MetroPCS, are moving to basic monthly fees, regardless of usage. The business model there assumes that most won't exceed a certain threshold, effectively overpaying for the minutes they actually used, while the busiest of users won't bankrupt their provider.

On the Web, unlimited makes sense. Web hosting providers typically limit their customers to a standard amount of capacity space, and megabytes of data transmitted per month. But on the most popular of days, sites may be brought down because they had unforeseen traffic. That's like punishing your most successful customers. (See: Tom Foremski of Silicon Valley Watcher)

I expect that the Web providers who will win will offer unlimited accesses and capacity, and those offering limits will only be limiting their own potential growth. That Yahoo! saw this trend, and wanted to be part of it, is smart. It doesn't mean I'll ditch my .Mac e-mail address for Yahoo! Mail any more than I did for GMail, but some might.