jennybee.net

Could we be witnessing baby-steps towards more appropriate personal communications methods?

We can spend up to half our working day going through our inbox, leaving us tired, frustrated and unproductive.

A recent study found one-third of office workers suffer from e-mail stress.

E-mail is ruining my life! (bbc.co.uk)

The article refers to Deloitte’s short-lived ‘no-internal-email-Wednesday’ which it reckons has made staff think more carefully about the email they send and whether there is a more appropriate communication method such as picking up the phone or talking face-to-face.

I agree, we should be more considered in our communications but our places of work on the whole haven’t even begun to embrace tools like IM, RSS, collaborative working, online project management, social networks etc etc.

My personal email traffic (both in- and out-bound) has significantly decreased since engaging with some of these tools. I refuse to subscribe to email lists - choosing RSS instead, and I use IM (if I can) to have quick conversations with friends. I use Google Groups to manage extra-curricular projects, Twitter keeps me in touch with friends and acquaintances and I use Facebook to organise my social life.

If only I could (or, more appropriately, was allowed to…) work more like this in my 9-5!

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One of things I struggled with when I signed up for twitter was the lack of easy way to find people to follow.

I remember (unsuccessfully) googling ‘twitter’ + ‘keyword’ in the hope I would find some like-minded twitterers. Eventually I found the twitter fan wiki which is a great resource but quite techy and requires patience.

My suggestion for solving this problem?

Twitter Communities

Twitterers could categorise themselves by subject-based community (technology, music, photography, food, politics etc).

As well as the public timeline each community could have a timeline, along with a list of members starting with most recently joined.

This would be great for newbies as they try and figure out what Twitter is all about and for old-timers and newbies alike as a way of finding people to follow.

What do people think? Is this something that can be set up as a stand-alone app? Does something like this already exist?

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Blogging can help you feel less isolated, more connected to a community and more satisfied with your friendships, both online and face-to-face, new Australian research has found.

Full article

Awww - I concur.

(Thanks to Broadstuff for the link.)

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There have been a couple of posts commenting on the apparent uselessness of web 2.0/social media web apps recently.

Mike Ellis commented that:

None of these tools (Twitter, Jaiku, Tumblr etc) actually adds anything… All of these tools do add huge amounts of noise, but to me none of them add signal… they’re not doing anything useful for me.

All noise, no signal. Lifestreaming is a timesink

And then godofbiscuits79 commented that Google Reader is ‘not bad though fairly pointless’.

The last comment I’ll put down to web 2.0 naïvety (godofbiscuits79 is my little brother - it would be wrong of me not to take the opportunity to tease him a little about this) but both these comments got me thinking.

Genuine human relationships are essentially useless. Most of us don’t form connections with people because of a transactional value (apart from some business contacts perhaps). My relationships with my friends are based on shared interests or opinions or outlook on life. Sure, some of those relationships come with benefits (like knowing music industry people who can source tickets to sold out gigs ;) ), but these relationships still only last if there is some genuine connection between the parties involved.

At the moment, most of the ‘friends’ I have in online social networks fit into the description above - they are people I share interests, opinions or outlook with. This means social media for me is essentially useless as it facilitates relationships that are essentially useless. But that’s what I like about it the most.

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Twitter.com
Jaiku.com
Seesmic.com

Yay to micro-posting but don’t tell me what format to use! Give me a site where I can choose - text, video, audio, drawing…

Perhaps Pownce and Utterz are a little closer to the future reality.

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