Five things social networks can’t easily do

You know that a technology is maturing when articles such as these start appearing. First is the infatuation stage, where the iPhone or Facebook or whatever can do everything for everyone. So I thought I would lead the charge and talk about the various limitations of different social networks that I use. You are of course welcome to send in your other frustrations.

Be a truly useful publishing platform. I want something that is better than an email list server that you as my readers have to remember to update your address and opt out when you are tired of hearing from me (I hope that day never comes, but I promise not to take it personally). I want something that I can target what I write to different affinity groups, without having to set up separate sub-lists. I want something that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg like iContact to track click-throughs on hot links that I so thoughtfully provide in the body of the message. I want something that the bad guys can’t easily compromise and send out spurious messages to my loyal readers. I know, I am asking for a lot.

There are a lot of contenders, including RSS feed-like elements of Plaxo, Facebook, FriendFeed, Twitter, and others, but they don’t deliver the goods, quite literally, aren’t flexible enough to do more than send link notifications (which isn’t as effective as email), and not everyone on my mailing list wants to use or even knows about these various technologies. Plus, none of these technologies really works as well as an email list for immediacy and response rates, which is why, when all is said and done, I am still using Mailman as my main distribution mechanism of my Web Informant newsletter and essays. (And hopefully will do a better job of backups, see last week’s missive for that tale of woe.)

Workable LinkedIn Groups. With triple opt-in, these are cumbersome at best, and annoying at worst. Ideally, LinkedIn could be my publishing platform, if only they could get their groups act together. But again, these rely on email notifications and only recently did LinkedIn add the ability to do threaded discussions.

Search, I still say that getting search right is the hardest thing about the Web 2.0 stuff, and most of the social networks give it short shrift. They all have some kind of search function, but they are designed for searching for names of people and not much else. LinkedIn has the ability to search for job function and location, and that is probably the one search function that I use more often. Try doing this in other services is more an exercise in frustration. To be truly useful, a social network should be able to create saved searches (you have to pay for this on LinkedIn by installing their spam-tool bar) that you can return to, or search for more recent updates to your network other than the default listing that is provided by the operator of the network. As an example, how about telling me who on my contact list has joined the network since my last login like Plaxo does in its weekly email update? To accomplish this query elsewhere takes many steps and is cumbersome.

Synchronize and update my Gmail contacts. With 9000 contacts, I know that the vast majority of them are outdated, but what can anyone do? Wouldn’t it be nice to synchronize all your social network contacts in the one place that you use them, which for me is Gmail? Sorry no can do kemosabe. Yes, Plaxo Pulse can import from Gmail but not the other way around. Cemaphore’s Mail Shadow G can synch Gmail and Outlook contacts, but that doesn’t really help me out. And while this is probably anecdotal, it seems that those people that update their contact info, the first place that they update it is in LinkedIn because this is the first step towards getting one’s job search act together.

Separate my work and personal identities. So much has been written about this warning people about the commingling of your play and work activities, I won’t add to it here. But, if you are concerned, you right now have not many choices: don’t include any personal information in your social network profile, or set up an alias and be selective about whom you invite to connect with you. Neither really works.

Are these all showstoppers keeping me from doing real productive things on social networks? Nope. But it would be nice to do more. And speaking of doing more, my podcasting partner Paul Gillin has electronic pre-release copies of his book “Secrets of Social Media Marketing” available on his Web site here, and you can pre-order the book as well.

http://ssmmBook.com

Baseline: My Favorite Peripherals of All Time

We need key peripherals to get the most productivity out of our desktop or laptop PCs. So here are a few of my favorites over the years that I have been using for my computing, some of them might be yours as well. Continue reading in Baseline magazine here.

Baseline: Enterprise Printer Fleet Management

The enterprise printer market is anything but organized, even though printers represent a large capital and operating cost for IT organizations. Printers are purchased in a wide variety of ways — including centrally, departmentally and individually. And even if there is some method of centralized purchasing, it is rare for any enterprise to have a coherent plan for its printers after they arrive in their buildings. This makes predicting overall consumables costs difficult to impossible without some form of monitoring and accounting tools.

You can read the entire story in this month’s Baseline magazine here. 

 

The shoemakers children…

You know the saying, about how the ones who supposedly should know better, well, don’t. I was recently reminded of this after a couple of my own experiences. I was having lunch with a friend of mine who owns so many domains that she did a lookup on what she thought was a great name only to find out that she actually already registered it. So let me also come clean here, and tell you how I can also be like this friend and mess up too.  I know it may hurt, but supposedly confession can be good. 

 

So my first tale is about how I almost lost the subscriber list for this newsletter that you are reading in your comfy inbox right now. Yes, I have all sorts of backup routines that I have developed because of what happened many years when my office was above a music store (and a Subway, boy do I miss that convenience). The store had an electrical short that caused a small fire. Just before the fire started, I had ducked out for a few minutes to run an errand, and by the time I came back the fire department had roped off the building. Luckily, nothing was damaged in my office, other than the front door that the firemen broke down to make sure that the fire hadn’t spread upstairs. Now, I had been doing my backups on tape. Where were those tapes you might ask? Sitting right next to my server. Since then I have gotten offsite backup religion big time and make sure that one copy of everything is always somewhere other than my office. 

 

Or so I thought. The one thing – and I hope it is the only thing – that I didn’t have a current backup for is the actual list of my subscribers. Well, I had done one in March, but I really didn’t want to go through the process of trying to update that. 

 

My mail list server used to be located in a friend of a friend’s house. Granted, this person is one of the original Internet Wise Men. But still, even the wisest of wise men have server crashes from time to time, and his server crashed last week, taking my list down for a week. That was all the motivation that I needed to start a new list on a “real” provider (I am using EMWD.com, which offers Mailman hosting for $4 a month for low volume lists. They seem to know what they are doing, they are usually reachable via email queries, and I don’t have to learn yet another list server’s quirks since I have been using Mailman for several years now.) And it is relatively simple to make backup copies of the entire subscriber list: all it takes is sending a single email command to the server and storing the reply. Which I now will do on a regular basis. 

 

What both of these experiences have taught me was that no matter how I analyze my data backup and procedures, there is always room for improvement. You can’t think of everything. And the key to backups is doing them regularly. Sort of like flossing your teeth, which I need to do more often too. But not just relying on the guilt generated from not doing them (in the case of my teeth, by my hygenist) but a regular procedure that can easily and quickly be implemented so that it doesn’t get postponed because something else of higher priority comes along. 

 

Next I want to tell you about my new iPhone. Yes, I know, I am a little slow to embrace this baby, no need to abuse me about it. The story is within about an hour of getting the thing, I was on it talking to my daughter for tech support. The shame, I know. She thought it was funny. But then I had another question shortly after that. And this is after spending hours reading all sorts of stuff about all the 57 different analysts and tech bloggers that are in love with their iPhones and have done all sorts of cool stuff with theirs. Welcome to 2008, Strom. 

 

Finally is my thoughts about WebInformant.tv, my new screencast product reviews site. After putting together the first bunch of videos, I realize that the content sits on four servers:  one where the actual videos reside, one that hosts the Web site proper, another one that has the RSS feed, another server back in my office that has the original copies of the videos. And this doesn’t count the numerous other servers that repurpose the videos, too. 

 

Do I really need such a complex system to deploy this service? Not really, it just grew into this, because I wanted to use the best tools from a variety of places. Yes, I could eliminate the server that delivers the RSS, but the one that comes with the Web site is pretty lame. I know this is often how many of you end up with unsupported systems, but at least I have documented where all the files are kept and the process by which I post a new one (and this is of course backed up in a few places, too.)  

 

So I hope you have enjoyed these tales of torment. Have a nice weekend, and keep those backups safe.

Network Access Control: Lessons Learned From the Front Lines

Not only after NAC technology made its debut, early adopters often ran into a number of complications: cost, complexity and confusion stymied some deployments. Even though NAC has overcome some of its early issues, the technology can still be complex, requiring organizations to do some careful planning before they embark on deployment. This webcast for SearchSecurity.com next week on 9/24 looks at five common pitfalls, drawn from lessons learned by four organizations that have deployed NAC. It also provides guidance for security managers about to embark on a NAC evaluation. 

And here is a tip on how to configure NAP on Windows Server 2008, should you ever want to try that as well.

Yet another reason to keep that birth date private

The talk about Sarah Palin’s Yahoo emails being made public (you can easily find them, but believe me, they aren’t worth the time to read) bring up yet another reason to not post your birh date on various social networks. Granted, a public official is probably an easier target, but apparently access to her Yahoo account was made easier by the fact that she chose information that just about anyone could easily figure out to recover her password.

Of course, why she was using a Yahoo email account for government business is an entirely separate issue. Our governor here in Missouri (who is not running for higher office, let alone re-election) can tell you why that is a bad idea. Perhaps this will motivate a few more people to use encrypted email, or at least pick up the telephone, when they want to keep something private.

Sam Whitmore’s MediaSurvey podcast

I discuss with Sam Whitmore, who runs a nifty service called MediaSurvey geared towards PR pros, about my latest effort with Web Informant.tv. You can click here to listen to the podcast.

The 140-character attention span

Call it GenT, the Twitter and texting generation. We are all becoming ADD, to the point where we can’t spend large blocks of time concentrating anymore. We are so over-stimulated, what with 10,000 Web sites (or is 10 million, I can’t accurately say) a minute being added to the collective cosmos, and updating all of our social network feeds, and whatnot. 

Twitter, for those of you stuck back in the old school world where you still use your computer for communication, is the “micro-blogging” service that sends a 140 character line of text to your friends and followers who subscribe to your postings. You can use your mobile phone or a traditional Web page, and the information is sent almost instantaneously, at least when the service is running. I am not yet a fan. Texting I don’t think I have to explain anymore. 

But with texting and Twitter, what has happened is that we have created the first entirely post-email generation. Look at both of our presidential candidates: one doesn’t use it personally, and the other has gone so GenT that he doesn’t need email to get the word out to his supporters. (An aside: the current issue of Technology Review has an interesting article about Obama’s use of social networks here.)

Those of us that grew up on email back in the quaint text-only, pre-Web days all know the reasons why we went with email: no phone tag, near-time responses, planet-wide connectivity, flattening organizations, micro-targeted responses. Yada yada.

Well, those same reasons are being used by the GenT’ers: in the time it would take me to compose a reasonably simple email message, I could have texted someone and gotten a response, posted it on my Twitter feed and had thousands of my closest “friends” tell me what they think, and moved on to my next activity. Email is so five minutes ago. 

And email tag is just as much of a productivity drag – in some cases worse than voice mail hell. We have all gotten those endless threaded messages where we don’t even remember what the original question that started the whole shooting match was about. Even exchanging Instant Messages is not fast enough, especially if your correspondents forget to turn on their “Away message” when they by chance get up from their chair for a few moments off-screen. You wonder what has become of them, and why aren’t they not answering your IM? 

When my daughter was in her early teens, it was IM that kept us connected. Now if I really need to find my kids, it is via text. Email is usually the worse way to try to get their attention None of them have Twitter feeds yet. I consider myself lucky. 

Another trendlet: Thanks to all of these GenT services, now having a single monitor attached to your PC isn’t enough screen real estate. You need at least two, and sometimes three LCDs to show all your scrolling feeds, IM buddy lists, and up-to-the-moment “tweets” in addition to the normal email and word processing windows. (I keep calling them “twits,” that must be a Freudian slip.) 

When was the last time you sat down for a couple of hours and got into a book? You know, those funny things that you buy from Amazon that don’t have any electronic interface that you actually have to turn pages, and read every word? Talk about quaint, grandpaw. Back in my day, we used to walk five miles in deep snow to school, carrying these objects, too. 

Nicholas Carr talks about this in his article in Atlantic this month entitled, “Is Google making us stupid?” Don’t be misled by the hed. He talks about how his concentration wanes after reading a few pages, and “deep reading has become a struggle. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing.” Indeed, I was fighting just getting to the end of his story, and that was only 4,000 words. Try tweeting all of that! 

But we aren’t stupider, I mean less smart, because of Google or all the GenT tech: we are just more impatient. One network manager at a small college told me how he deals with peer file stealing: rather than turn it off, he just adds a few seconds delay into the connection during the work day, so that the students bail out of the connection and come back at night when he turns off the delays. If he just shut it off, they would be motivated to figure out a way around the block, but most of the students are too ADD to abide by the delays and move on to something else, knowing they can come back at night to grab their files. 

This post-email GenT stuff is ironic for me to say the least, especially to someone who wrote a book on Internet email, let alone reads lot of them still. Years from now we will look back on this period much like we examine other accidents of history, like the Truman Doctrine and the Dred Scott decision: things that seemed important at the time, but now are mostly the subjects of junior high research papers. Yes, email is still around for us old fogies that insist on using all of our hard-learned touch-typing fingers to communicate, but it won’t be long now. In the meantime, you can subscribe to my feed here and keep up with all the important moments in my life:

 

The three business tech risks you don’t know about

Business travelers will soon need to carry the name of their corporate lawyer in addition to their passport when returning home to the U.S., and may also need to bring with them a different business laptop as well. This is because the U.S. Customs can search and confiscate your laptop without any prior cause, according to policies that have been posted online since a Ninth U.S. Circuit Court ruling in April.

You can read more about how the recent federal policies related to privacy and terrorism may force changes in your tech strategy and policies in a story that appeared this week in Infoworld here. It is nice to be back in Infoworld, a publication that I wrote a series of weekly networking columns back in the mid 90s. 

Seinfeld/Gates commercials: whassup with Microsoft

You can see them here. Did anyone else fail to get the joke? As of this writing, there are two in the apparently continuing and very painful series. My friend James Gaskin said that Microsoft has successfully duplicated the painful user experience on Vista over to the TV commercial medium. Given the high priced talent that was no doubt tapped for these episodes, we can truly say that Microsoft is now a master of this domain, not that there is anything wrong with that.