If you came here expecting to read something about that single-stage-to-orbit spacecraft that Alan Tracy used to pilot up to Thunderbird 5, you’ve come to the wrong place. I’m talking about the new version of Mozilla’s e-mail client.

I use Thunderbird as my personal e-mail client attached to my dadams.co.uk mail account, and therefore the function I use most of all is ‘Delete’ as I clean up the stuff that isn’t spam but I really can’t be bothered to read (thank you Apple, for all those lovely-looking iPod and Mac adverts). However, I think that some of the new (or improved) features will prove quite useful…

• Searching – an improvement… the thing I search for most often is my British Airways Executive Club membership number. The improved search feature provides a page of results, which means I can easily navigate through them. Nice.
• Tabbed e-mail – if you open an e-mail it becomes a tab within Thunderbird. Lotus Notes does that too, so it feels more familiar.
• Better address book integration – a yellow star by a name in an e-mail shows if they’re in your address book, and you can quickly click on the name to edit the contact details or reply to them.
• Smart folders – I actually have a few private e-mail accounts… smart folders combine some of the standard folders (inbox, sent, archive) into one, which makes monitoring multiple e-mail accounts much easier.
• Attachment reminder – rather limited but quite cool… if you type the word ‘attachment’ into an e-mail Thunderbird will remind you that you may want to attach an attachment.
• Archiving – you can archive e-mails. I doubt if I’ll use this, I just delete stuff.

So there you have it… it’s not a tremendously exciting release, but there’s some nice touches. And hopefully the guy who created the Azerty theme will update it soon so I can get the look and feel I liked in Thunderbird version 2.

A few days ago I read that there was an update coming to the Xbox 360. This isn’t unusual, sometimes it seems like every time I turn the bloody thing on it ties itself up for an hour while it downloads something… but it is a Microsoft product, so this shouldn’t come as a big surprise. But this particular update, rather than fixing a problem I didn’t know existed, promised some new goodies… Facebook and Twitter. Me being me, I started to ponder this. Okay, so here’s a good use for that keyboard attachment for the Xbox controller… because typing 140 characters (for Twitter) would be painful using the Xbox’s on-screen character entry system (and thus making the lead developer of the Wii’s on-screen keyboard feel terribly smug).

But here’s the bigger issue… why would I want to use the Xbox for Facebook or Twitter? I have a 24 inch iMac sitting here permanently on, and it has a keyboard. I rarely get time to sit in front of the Xbox, and when I do I want to shoot people, play football (proper football, not that game involving carrying an egg-shaped ball while wearing body armour) or drive around recklessly in a car. So if I’m honest, my first Twitter from the Xbox will probably be my last. And that’s a shame because it was hopelessly unoriginal…

Twitter on the Xbox – can’t see me using it much.

Then I had a quick go on Facebook. My initial reaction was the same, that I’d rather be playing Grand Theft Auto IV than checking up on where Lewis Turek is going on holiday next or in which pub Wild Bill left his laptop after one pint too many (just two random examples). But actually, Facebook on the Xbox has one major appeal… photos. There’s my photo albums, and I could browse through them on the big plasma screen. It has a very nice user interface (as does Twitter), I don’t think I’ll use it much, but photos is probably the killer application (and doesn’t require the keyboard attachment). Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to wipe out a bunch of rival gangsters with a bazooka.

I was perusing PlanetLotus today and an interesting blog post from Vaughan Rivett caught my eye – what’s the worst email in-box that you have ever seen? Vaughan tells the tale of a user with a mail box weighing in at 11 gigabytes. This is what’s known in the trade as either a) hoarding or b) bad management. Mail boxes of that size could never be tolerated at IBM, because like so many companies we impose a mail quota – your mail box gets to a certain size, some things stop working, and the functionality isn’t given back to you until you’ve fixed the problem. But is that fair? After all, was it the mail box owner at fault?

I’m speaking as someone who recently had to concede that, after more than 10 years with a 150 mb mail box quota, I could no longer keep it within the limit every day – I was spending too much time managing the volume, so I had to apply to go up to the next level, 250 mb. Why, in an organisation with a rich collaborative infrastructure, was this necessary? I put it down purely to my change in role – suddenly I was communicating with many more people and there was an increase in data flying around. It reminded me of a slide I sometimes use on less serious occasions, such as the recent keynote at Collaboration University. Entitled ‘about me as an e-mail user’ it explains that I don’t like having a scroll bar in my inbox and I resent anyone who…

• Forces me over my mail quota
• Sends me two e-mails when only one was required
• Marks everything they send as high priority (yes, I know who you are)
• Starts an e-mail with “I know you’re busy but…” – but what?
• Sends me an e-mail and then immediately Sametimes me or phones me to ask if I’ve read the e-mail
• Continues to reply-to-all way past the point where I’ve ceased to be involved or interested
• Only knows how to use PrtSc rather than Alt-PrtSc

So in summary, just about anyone who sends me an e-mail.

A couple of years ago I did a small survey of some of our customers, not big enough or detailed enough to draw any great conclusions from, and asked the question…

In terms of e-mail efficiency what would benefit your organisation the most – improvement in user practises around e-mail, or operational improvements?

71% said user practises, 29% said both, but no-one (0%) said operational improvements alone. So the conclusion is that end users need to be given the tools in order to become more efficient with how they disseminate information, but they also need some clarity about the right tools to use and when.

I believe that we’ve added the right things to the Lotus portfolio to help end users to realise better collaboration and knowledge management – simple things that make a difference. Firstly, think how your typical e-mail user would share a spreadsheet, document or presentation with a colleague (or group)… we all know the right thing to do is to post it to a collaborative space (which hopefully supports the business activity associated with the content) and then notify people of the content via e-mail. However, most e-mail users have escaped from Utopia via a small hole in the fence, so they’re just going to shove that file attachment in the e-mail regardless of the storage or content revision issues.

That’s why I love the Quickr approach – because it supports the users’ long-ingrained behaviour (shove in the attachment) but at the point of sending it offers to place the file in a document repository. The recipient sees a set of links, and they click to navigate to the content. Simple. So collaboratively we’re doing the right thing, but we haven’t interrupted the user’s normal pattern of work (in my head I’m picturing people grunting like Cro Magnon man did when he spotted a bison wandering across the Paleolithic plains, but instead they’re saying “ugg, file attachment”). The added bonus with Quickr is that you can also take existing file attachments that Cro Magnon man sent to you in the past and offload them to a Quickr place – you can retain the e-mail with the link replacing the attachment.

The other thing I love telling people about is Connections Files. To fully embrace the idea of Connections Files you do have to discard the caveman instincts and post that file… no, not in an e-mail, in your Connections file-space. Yes, I know this goes against years of bad habits, so the important thing is for users to realise the benefits. The first benefit is to other people – you are not contributing to ruining their day by sending that quota-busting spreadsheet. Okay, so you don’t care about their quota, how about a benefit for yourself? Have you ever sent an e-mail with a file attachment and then later someone else wants the file? And then someone else a bit later? This used to happen to me all of the time, but not any more. Rather than having to repeat the process of create another e-mail, type in the subject, find the file attachment in a folder (hmmm, which folder), add an explanation – I just share the file. The file in question is posted in Connections Files and I add another name to the share list. An e-mail is automatically sent, and the recipient grabs the content but doesn’t have to worry about the volume of data. If the file is updated, I simply add the update as a new version and note the changes.

Another great way to share content, in the context of a business activity, is Lotus Connections Activities, but I’ve already covered that in an earlier post.

A couple of interesting articles on the Beeb’s news site caught my eye this week, both of which had the same basic premise… that social networking sites are overtaking e-mail as a communication tool. A couple of years there was an interesting statistic (can’t remember the source, can’t be bothered to find it) that said that the volume of instant messages has already overtaken e-mails, so it’s interesting to see that yet another medium is pushing e-mail out of the way.

The first of the Beeb’s articles reported that 67% of web users were spending time at social sites and blogs, and that in the UK one minute of every six was spent on a social site. And get this – “the fastest growing segment of users turning up and using social sites over the last year was among 35-49 year olds” – oooh, I just squeaked into that age range. Indeed, I do Twitter, I am a Facebooker, and I login into LinkedIn every now and again. I get invitations to Plaxo, but it sounds like a mouth-wash and I think three social sites is enough.

The other article suggested that “Social networks ‘are new e-mail’” and says that people are using social sites rather than actually sending e-mails (which is sort of different to the mantra of the other article). This may apply to many people, personally I’d disagree. My personal (i.e. home use) e-mail habits haven’t changed over the past couple of years. My usage of Facebook hasn’t replaced the e-mails that I send, and I wouldn’t bank on Twitter or Facebook supplying information that I wanted to ensure someone would receive. However I can see that for some groups of people it could ring true.

Also worthy of note is the fact that over the weekend Facebook has changed it’s interface to become more ‘Twitter-like’.

In the workplace we’re seeing that social solutions are of great interest, but naturally businesses are concerned about the public sites being used by the workforce. However businesses want to capitalise on the enthusiasm and possibilities of this new way of working, not to mention that fact that people coming into the workplace are very familiar and comfortable with the concept – hence IBM Lotus Connections is a great way to provide the solution with some control and focus and without the distractions of the public sites.

I don’t think that e-mail will disappear, at least not in the next ten years. I firmly believe that activity-based working (see here and here) is the way forward, and unless you’ve experienced this way of working it’s hard to believe how productive Lotus Activities can be. Too many people are reactive to their inbox – this is the way to break out and focus on your crucial tasks and share information in a controlled manner. However, not every e-mail adheres to a particular business activity – many are ad-hoc – and an e-mail which is associated to an activity you’re working on may not apply to the sender (but that’s okay, even though you receive an e-mail you can drag it into the activity). Instant messaging too will trim down on the volume of e-mail (Gartner say 40% reduction, IBM say 38%). Today people run e-mail clients – the inbox is centre-stage. But I can see a day when e-mail is pushed to the periphery – if you’re a Notes user, think of it being in the side bar while your activities and social updates come to the fore-front. Of course, that’s what’s great about Notes – it’s evolving and can consume these new capabilities and ways of collaborating. If you have something which is just an e-mail client… where’s that going to go? Time will tell….

I’m a late-comer to Twitter. It sounded like a distraction and quite frankly sounded a bit silly (seeing people in Facebook who were “twittering”). While at Lotusphere I sat and had lunch with some guys from a very important Lotus customer, and Mark the CIO asked why I wasn’t on Twitter. One of my reasons, jokingly, was that I couldn’t bear the thought of signing up and having the embarrassment of no-one following me… so round the table I received a number of pledges to follow me if I joined. And join-up I did…

Two weeks later I have 54 followers and I’m following 58 people. Some of the people I’m following are celebs (Stephen Fry, Alan Carr, Chris Moyles) so I’m not expecting them to follow me.

So, is Twitter useful? I’ve got to be honest… not really. Well, maybe it has been a couple of times. Paul Mooney made the point that it was incredibly useful at Lotusphere for letting the gang know where you were, where you were going and so on. But here’s the issue… Paul is following 250 people. How does he cope with potentially so many updates and filter out the useful from the noise and the blabbering?

It is wholly possible that I’m not using Twitter to the best of it’s ability. It was only over the weekend I discovered that I was missing personal replies to my ‘tweets’. My biggest wish-list item for Twitter would be filtering into groups… for example during the week it would be useful to just track a group of work colleagues, or at Lotusphere just those people attending. It’s possible that one of the various Twitter companion tools can do this but as yet I haven’t had the time to look… perhaps someone can put me straight. For now, I refuse to have it on my BlackBerry – I had Facebook on there for a while and the constant alerts drove me mad.

Great, just what the world needs, another free browser. That was my first thought. I have Firefox and love it (along with a few essential extensions). I have Internet Explorer, mostly because it’s installed with Windows but also because occasionally I encounter sites that have been developed explicitly for Internet Explorer. I have Safari, only because I installed it to have a look and then didn’t de-install it. I had Flock for about ten minutes (that was all that was required for me to decide I didn’t need it).

Why would I want yet another browser?

And yet, there was absolutely no way that I wasn’t going to install Chrome and give it a whirl. I’m actually writing this blog post using Chrome right now. It has some great things, it has some major deficiencies (for example, it’s not spell-checkking this as I type). Some of the important things are under the hood – the separate threading which will stop one rogue page killing all of your browser session (nice). And the strengthened sandbox approach to ensuring your personal data isn’t captured.

I guess the important thing is that Google have recognised that browsers, despite having more and more features stuffed into them, haven’t really changed much in ten years – but the Interweb is a very different place. Chrome, if you believe the blurb, sets out to address the changes in the way we work. I think I’d have to give it a more thorough test drive, and I aim to do that for a week or so, to see whether their claim holds up. In the meantime, what’s good about Chrome…?

• The architecture – security, multi-threading, security, all that stuff you don’t see.
• When you create a new tab, it shows you your most-visited sites, recently-created bookmarks, a history search bar and recently-closed tabs – the idea being that you may want to return to some of those things (I’d like Firefox to do that).
• The tab mechanism that lets you pull off a number of tabs and group them in a separate window.
• The address bar goes one better than Firefox – as well as suggesting URLs from your history or bookmarks it also suggest sites you might want to visit based on the word you type. A completely random example, type ‘wyoming’ and it’ll suggest the State of Wyoming Government page.
• Screen real-estate – lots of it. Who needs menus anyway?

But there is some bad news…

• RSS feed support – I couldn’t find any. As someone who uses Firefox’s live bookmarks this is a big omission (granted this is a beta, so it may come).
• Memory usage – the apparent downside of it’s protected sessions is that it uses more memory. At the moment I have five Firefox tabs open and I have the same pages loaded into Chrome… it’s using over half as much memory again as Firefox.
• The toolbar – it’s a bit too minimal, the option to add other buttons would be nice.

In summary, there’s nothing here to make me switch from Firefox but I do find myself liking Chrome. A bit of competition in the browser market (I say market, who ever paid for a browser?) is no bad thing and can only foster further innovation. Time will tell if Chrome addresses the missing features in later betas and the finished first version.

Watch out Microsoft… the boys from Redmond don’t even have to get out of bed to make billions of dollars from Windows, but are those days numbered? Vista hasn’t exactly experienced a stampede of adoption and customers are increasingly questioning the amounts of money handed to Microsoft.

Linux on the other hand is maturing and the barriers for adoption in the corporate market place are steadily falling away. As a server platform (e.g. for Lotus Domino) Linux has been taken seriously for a number of years and has seen wide adoption – I’ve heard quotes like “3 out of 4 new servers deployed in China use Linux” (can’t find anything to back that up admittedly) and Michael Dell said last year “on the server side Linux continues to grow nicely, a bit faster than Windows”.

Adoption of Linux on the desktop has understandably been slower, but with mission-critical desktop applications such as OpenOffice, Firefox, Lotus Notes, Sametime and Symphony offering full functionality I’m sure the adoption will accelerate over the next few years.

Returning to the main post of this post… oh, just read this page.