Category Archives: Collaboration

Would you trust confidential information to Google Docs?

“Can I trust Google Docs with confidential information?”

That was essentially the question posed to me yesterday by someone I know. He was/is thinking of using Google Apps and Google Docs for his business, but he was concerned about the security of Google Docs. If he uses it to write up documents containing “internal” information about customers, how safe is that information stored up in Google Docs? Is there any chance that his documents could leak out to someone else? What security is there? Could he trust Google Docs to keep that information confidential?

Essentially the key question of these times: “Can you trust the security of ‘the cloud’?”

Sadly the best answer I could come up was:

I don’t know.

Of course, engaging my ultra-paranoid security-guy personality, the answer is very clear – ABSOLUTELY NOT! I mean, Google makes it explicitly clear in section 14 (2) of the Google Apps Terms of Service that there is no guarantee of security:

14. DISCLAIMER OF WARRANTIES
YOU EXPRESSLY UNDERSTAND AND AGREE THAT:

1. YOUR USE OF GOOGLE SERVICES IS AT YOUR SOLE RISK. GOOGLE SERVICES ARE PROVIDED ON AN “AS IS” AND “AS AVAILABLE” BASIS. TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, GOOGLE AND PARTNERS EXPRESSLY DISCLAIM ALL WARRANTIES AND CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, WHETHER EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES AND CONDITIONS OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NON-INFRINGEMENT.

2. GOOGLE AND PARTNERS DO NOT WARRANT THAT (i) GOOGLE SERVICES WILL MEET YOUR REQUIREMENTS, (ii) GOOGLE SERVICES WILL BE UNINTERRUPTED, TIMELY, SECURE, OR ERROR-FREE, (iii) THE RESULTS THAT MAY BE OBTAINED FROM THE USE OF GOOGLE SERVICES WILL BE ACCURATE OR RELIABLE, (iv) THE QUALITY OF ANY PRODUCTS, SERVICES, INFORMATION, OR OTHER MATERIAL PURCHASED OR OBTAINED BY YOU THROUGH GOOGLE SERVICES WILL MEET YOUR EXPECTATIONS, AND (V) ANY ERRORS IN THE SOFTWARE WILL BE CORRECTED.

3. ANY MATERIAL DOWNLOADED OR OTHERWISE OBTAINED THROUGH THE USE OF GOOGLE SERVICES IS DONE AT YOUR OWN DISCRETION AND RISK AND THAT YOU WILL BE SOLELY RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY DAMAGE TO YOUR COMPUTER SYSTEM OR OTHER DEVICE OR LOSS OF DATA THAT RESULTS FROM THE DOWNLOAD OF ANY SUCH MATERIAL.

<snip>

No guarantee of security. No guarantee of availability. Really just “best effort”. From a “pure” security point of view, NO, I would not trust confidential data to Google Docs. That kind of information is best kept “inside the firewall” on the corporate LAN and on corporate servers under careful control.

And yet…

… the hard part of “security” is not being the one to always say no and instead work on “getting to yes”. The reality is that there is the age-old balance to be struck between “security” and “convenience/access”. Sure, the person I know could keep his confidential info on his own network, safe inside the firewall, and have all his remote employees in home or branch offices access it via VPNs. But inside the firewall there isn’t a collaboration option quite like that in Google Docs. Sure, he could find/buy/install a solution, but that then requires IT staff on his part as well as the commitment to keep the software up-to-date, fix issues, etc., etc.

The promise of “the cloud” is to get away from all those premise IT issues and costs.

The beauty of Google Docs is that his staff can all access various documents from wherever they are on the Internet. No need for VPNs. Just login via a web browser and… ta da… they can be writing documents, commenting on documents, etc. From anywhere. Home computers. Corporate computers. Mobile devices. iPhones. Whatever. People can collaborate faster… turn around proposals/deals… and ultimately probably win more deals and make more money.

But at what risk? Google Docs uses HTTPS (SSL/TLS) for login, but after that you are usually switched over to insecure HTTP. I’ve noticed that I can go and manually change the URL to “https://” and that works. I guess you could just send around https URLs and have people go into the docs that way… but that’s a manual interaction that won’t always be remembered. So odds are that your transport is not always secure. And the security of documents at Google’s site? No real idea.

Obviously, as indicated above, Google provides absolutely no guarantee of security, but from a practical point-of-view, you’d have to think that it is 100% in their best interest to provide such confidentiality and security. They are in a colossal battle with Microsoft for the ultimate control of your data… Google wants people to move away from Microsoft’s server/LAN-centric vision and “embrace the cloud” and is making a compelling case for people to do this. (And Microsoft realizes this and is responding with their own online offerings.) From a PR/marketing point-of-view, Google can’t have a breach of confidential information as that would play directly into Microsoft’s hands.

So what does one do? Do you take the security purist view and keep all your information behind a corporate firewall? Or do you “embrace the cloud” and let the convenience of access and the cost savings (vs premise IT) of Google Docs overrule the security risks?

I don’t know.

In the end, it’s really all about your level of tolerance for risk – and how confidential you really deem those documents to be. As we move more and more “into the cloud” this is a key question we all will need to grapple with.

What would you do? (or do you do?) Do you put confidential company data (memos about customers, sales proposals, budgets, etc.) up in Google Docs or other similar services? Or do you keep this kind of data “inside the firewall”? How secure do you think Google Docs really is?

Technorati Tags:
google, google docs, cloud, cloud computing, cloudcomputing, security, saas

The Economist’s “MUST READ” Special Report on the “new nomadism” and how our world is changing…

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It’s not very often at all that I say that there is something out that I think that people really “must read“. In fact, the last thing I can really thing of that I recommended this strongly was The Cluetrain Manifesto, but that was back in 2000!

So I find myself a bit surprised to be making that recommendation for a piece in that most mainstream of all business publications, The Economist…. but in my opinion it really is a series of articles that people should read, contemplate, and talk about.

The Special Report, titled “The New Nomadism“, looks at the changes happening in our society as we arrive at this fascinating intersection where we have incredible amounts of network bandwidth available wherever we are – and smaller more powerful devices that can take advantage of that bandwidth. When we can work wherever we want, whenever we want, what does that mean for our society? for our work environment? for our work/life balance? for our communities?

The piece has 7 main articles, several of which go on for several screens:

(FYI, the Economist has made this report available for purchase if you would like it in print form.)

There is also an introductory piece, “Our Nomadic Future“, which is also worth a read.

All together the pieces ask some of the excellent questions that I think we need to be thinking about. I intend to write some further thoughts in the days and weeks ahead. We also discussed this whole piece at some length on the April 16th Squawk Box podcast and it was something I covered in my report into yesterday’s For Immediate Release podcast.

Here’s a taste of the first article in the series:

Urban nomads have started appearing only in the past few years. Like their antecedents in the desert, they are defined not by what they carry but by what they leave behind, knowing that the environment will provide it. Thus, Bedouins do not carry their own water, because they know where the oases are. Modern nomads carry almost no paper because they access their documents on their laptop computers, mobile phones or online. Increasingly, they don’t even bring laptops. Many engineers at Google, the leading internet company and a magnet for nomads, travel with only a BlackBerry, iPhone or other “smart phone”. If ever the need arises for a large keyboard and some earnest typing, they sit down in front of the nearest available computer anywhere in the world, open its web browser and access all their documents online.

Another big misunderstanding of previous decades was to confuse nomadism with migration or travel. As the costs of (stationary) telecommunications plummeted, it became fascinating to contemplate “the death of distance” (the title of a book written by Frances Cairncross, then on the staff of The Economist). And since the early mobile phones were aimed largely at business executives, it was assumed that nomadism was about corporate travel in particular. And indeed many nomads are frequent flyers, for example, which is why airlines such as JetBlue, American Airlines and Continental Airlines are now introducing in-flight Wi-Fi. But although nomadism and travel can coincide, they need not.

Humans have always migrated and travelled, without necessarily living nomadic lives. The nomadism now emerging is different from, and involves much more than, merely making journeys. A modern nomad is as likely to be a teenager in Oslo, Tokyo or suburban America as a jet-setting chief executive. He or she may never have left his or her city, stepped into an aeroplane or changed address. Indeed, how far he moves is completely irrelevant. Even if an urban nomad confines himself to a small perimeter, he nonetheless has a new and surprisingly different relationship to time, to place and to other people. “Permanent connectivity, not motion, is the critical thing,” says Manuel Castells, a sociologist at the Annenberg School for Communication, a part of the University of Southern California, Los Angeles.

This is why a new breed of observers is now joining the ever-present futurists and gadget geeks in studying the consequences of this technology. Sociologists in particular are trying to figure out how mobile communications are changing interactions between people. Nomadism, most believe, tends to bring people who are already close, such as family members, even closer. But it may do so at the expense of their attentiveness towards strangers encountered physically (rather than virtually) in daily life. That has implications for society at large.

Anthropologists and psychologists are investigating how mobile and virtual interaction spices up or challenges physical and offline chemistry, and whether it makes young people in particular more autonomous or more dependent. Architects, property developers and urban planners are changing their thinking about buildings and cities to accommodate the new habits of the nomads that dwell in them. Activists are trying to piggyback on the ubiquity of nomadic tools to improve the world, even as they worry about the same tools in the hands of the malicious. Linguists are chronicling how nomadic communication changes language itself, and thus thought.
Beyond technology

This special report, in presupposing that a wireless world will soon be upon us, will explore these ramifications of mobile technology, rather than the technologies themselves or their business models. But it is worth making clear that technology underlies all of the changes in today’s nomadic societies, so that its march will accelerate them. Wireless data connections, in particular, seem to be getting better all the time. Cellular networks will become faster and more reliable. Short-range Wi-Fi hotspots are popping up in ever more places. And a new generation of wireless technologies is already poised to take over. Regulators have grasped that the airwaves are now among society’s most important assets. America, for instance, has just auctioned off a chunk of spectrum with new rules that require the owner to allow any kind of device and software to run on the resulting network.

Cumulatively, all of these changes amount to a historic merger, at long last, of two technologies that have already proved revolutionary in their own right. The mobile phone has changed the world by becoming ubiquitous in rich and poor countries alike. The internet has mostly touched rich countries, and rich people in poor countries, but has already changed the way people shop, bank, listen to music, read news and socialise. Now the mobile phone is on course to replace the PC as the primary device for getting online. According to the International Telecommunication Union, 3.3 billion people, more than half the world’s population, now subscribe to a mobile-phone service (see chart 1), so the internet at last looks set to change the whole world.

<snip>

The most wonderful thing about mobile technology today is that consumers can increasingly forget about how it works and simply take advantage of it. As Ms Canlas sips her Americano and dives into her e-mail in-box at the Nomad Café, she gives no thought to the specifications and standards that make her connection possible. It is the human connections that now take over.

It is truly a fascinating time that we live in right now, and kudos to the Economist for a strong piece that looks at the larger societal implications of all these changes.

What do you think of all these changes going on?

Technorati Tags:
economist, nomadism, internet, culture, society, mobility

Front Porch Forum uses the Internet to connect neighbors

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How well do you know your neighbors? How often do you see them? Do you know what’s going on in your neighborhood?

The reality today is that our lives seem to be getting increasingly busier and we very often don’t know our neighbors all that well. Even when we do know our neighbors, we may not see them all that often as our schedules may not overlap. Plus, there are often times of the year when we stay indoors as much as we can (winter in the north, summer in the south) and may see our neighbors only in passing. (Unless, of course, you have a dog, in which case you may see your neighbors a great deal if you walk said dog.)

Here in Burlington, Vermont, we’ve had an ongoing experiment for the past couple of years in using the global Internet to connect people in their local neighborhood. It’s a service called Front Porch Forum (FPF) that started here in Burlington, has expanded to cover the entire county here in Vermont and is now looking to expand into other parts of the country/world.

One of the interesting aspects is that FPF uses that very decidedly unsexy and un-Web2.0 medium of…

email!

Yes, indeed, the killer app for connecting people in their local neighborhood turns out to be… email mailing lists that are restricted, moderated and digested. You have to live in the neighborhood to join. All messages to the mailing list are moderated. And only one message is sent out every day or so (depending upon volume) containing all the other messages. Think of it as almost a community “newsletter” sent to all members.

I have to say that… it works! You know (or come to know) the people in your community There’s no spam. It doesn’t flood your inbox. There’s no special website you have to go to… you just get the message in your inbox wherever you read your email.

Simple. Easy.

And that is perhaps the key. These days it’s extremely easy to get set up with an email account, and that’s all you need. You can read it whenever you can… so you don’t have to be right there.

Here in Burlington where, according to the Front Porch Forum folks, some 30% of all households are subscribers to their neighborhood forum, it’s been an incredibly useful service. I’ve learned of upcoming events (and posted some). Volunteers have been found for local events. Community associations use it to put out info about their activities. The city of Burlington has taken to sending out notices. Local politicians have posted notices. We’ve had some debates/arguments about certain aspects of our neighborhood (like “should we put a lock on the gate to the beach area?”) Advocates for various causes have posted notes about their views. All sorts of notices, requests, questions, debates… (you can read some testimonials online).

Having been active in our local neighborhood (and on the community association board for a year), I’ve certainly seen the value. People will say “Oh, yeah, I saw that on the forum.” I’ve had neighbors, some of whom I didn’t know, contact me specifically because of notes I’ve posted. Sometimes by email, sometimes by phone and also in person. It has connected our local community together more – and it’s been an interesting experiment to watch.

Now is there any real difference from FPF and just a plain, old, mailing list for a neighborhood using something like Google Groups? On one level, no, not really. It’s just a mailing list after all. The difference really is that with your own mailing list, someone has to administer it. Someone has to deal with spam, either by approving memberships or moderating messages. And the list has to be publicized. The FPF crew takes on the sysadmin issues and moderation tasks. They also make it easy for people to find your local community mailing list because all you need to do is enter your street address.

To get a sense of the project, here’s a video that was recently produced about Front Porch Forum:

Front Porch Forum is also up for a Case Foundation award along with some other great projects and is looking for votes. 🙂

Sadly, when we move to Keene, NH, in a few months I’ll have to leave the FPF behind (at least until they expand into that area). I’ll leave, though, having seen an example of a really old electronic media (email) playing a really neat role in connecting neighbors to neighbors.

Do you have anything similar in your neighborhood? (BTW, you can sign up at Front Porch Forum even if you’re not in Vermont and the FPF folks will contact you if/when they expand into your area.)

Technorati Tags:
neighbors, neighborhood, front porch forum, local, community

Don’t Make Me Go To Your Website! – The 5 Ways I Consume Information In The Web 2.0 World

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Do you ever go to a website on a frequent basis to see if it has been updated? Do you go to a bookmark you have or click on a toolbar icon or even just type in the URL into your browser address bar?

Do you do that for this website? Do you NOT subscribe to the feed but rather just come here from time to time to see if anything new is here?

If not this site, do you do this for another site? How often do you go and visit the site? Daily? Weekly? Monthly? Randomly?

I had an exchange today with someone I greatly respect and in the course of the conversation I realized that the reality is:

I don’t really go to any websites these days on a regular basis.

I don’t go to friends’ websites. (Sorry!) I don’t go to my employer’s website. I don’t go to any organization’s websites. I don’t go to my city’s website. Every once in a while I might hit CNN’s web page or a weather site, but that’s about it. I do go to Facebook’s page and Google Apps pages, but I think of those more as applications and communications services.

I don’t have time in my daily work or home schedule… even though going up to my Bookmarks menu, choosing a link and then waiting for the page to load isn’t a whole lot of time, it is some time… and if I get there and nothing has changed, it is wasted time. So I don’t do it.

The only reason I visit a web site these days is generally if either:
1. The website turns up in a search result.
2. I get notified that there’s something interesting there that I should look at.
3. Random times when for some reason I decide to go there, perhaps remembering a URL for a site I wanted to check out.

That’s it. (Note that I do get the content of many websites through the ways I mention below, but I don’t actually go to those websites and see their page.)

As I think about it, my consumption of information online really comes down to five ways:

E-mail, although I get too much of it read it all.
Twitter, where I see links from people or services that I follow.
RSS feeds where my reader pulls it in and I quickly scan through the posts.
Skype persistent group chats where I’m connected to several different groups of people on various topics.
Searching for data, typically using Google.

The key thing is that, with the exception of search:

All the data comes to me!

Email is in my inbox, either on my laptop or my Blackberry. Feeds end up in my newsreader. Twitter I usually read in an IM chat window where I can scan it and search it. Skype groupchats I obviously read in Skype. I whip through and scan the info fast, clicking links if I want to see them and potentially firing off replies. I visit web pages only because I’ve seen an email with info and a link, or someone’s twittered the link or posted it in a Skype groupchat… or because of a link in some item in my RSS feeds.

For better or worse (and I can argue philosophically that it might be worse), that’s how I consume data. Funny thing is, I know I’m not alone. This is the “Web 2.0” way. Let me pull your data in some way and I’ll consume it.

Don’t make me go to your website to get updates. I won’t.

So if a website has an RSS feed (or a Twitter feed), I’ll subscribe and see when there are updates. Otherwise, I’ll probably just only go there on random times when I think of it. Which, unfortunately, won’t be often. I’m living in the blur.

Are you?

Technorati Tags:
twitter, attention, tools, web, web2.0, RSS, feeds, communication, collaboration

Facebook brings the twin taboos of politics and religion into the workplace

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Some time back I became a Facebook “friend” with someone I had known professionally for several years. I did not work with the person all that much, but had great respect for the person based on the several dealings I had had with them. However, now that we were “friends” I was almost immediately exposed to two pieces of information that they had included in their Facebook profile: political affiliation and religion. As it happened, this particular person’s views were pretty much completely opposite to my own and before I could really think about it I experienced a deep knee-jerk reaction of “Oh, you’re kidding, he/she is not really one of them?” For a brief moment, until my brain could re-engage, my respect for that person plummeted through the floor. A moment or two later, the rational side of my brain kicked in and reminded me that I had had a great amount of professional respect for the person 10 seconds before and nothing had changed that should have altered that. Still, there was that deep emotional response.

Politics? Religion? In the workplace? With professional colleagues? Huh?

At least here in North America, those are two topics that are generally taboo in the work environment. Verboten. In fact, in most areas you are not legally allowed to ask employees or potential employees about those topics. Within a work place there of course may be lunchroom discussions about recent politics and so you may learn of others viewpoints. Religion might come up, but again probably with people with whom you work closely.

But with customers? Or partners?

Never. At least in my experience.

And why should it come up, really? When you are buying a product/service from someone, or selling it to someone, what do politics or religion matter? (or gender or race?) If you are partnering with someone to deliver a service/product, again, why does it matter? What matters is whether both of you can work together and deliver the product/service – and presumably make some money through the deal.

Religion and politics should not matter in business dealings.

Now, of course, there are “business directories” that many churches offer trying to connect people within the church community, but that’s a different matter as it is within that community and trying to help each out. There are also websites out there that can help you steer your business toward companies with similar views as yours. But in general, the political leanings and religious preference of a supplier or customer do not factor into the normal course of business.

Yet here we are in Facebook choosing (or not) to provide all that information to (potential) customers.

I recognize that there are a good number of folks out there who are apathetic about all things related to politics and/or religion. They don’t care at all about what someone’s religion is or what their politics are. I’ve met many. Often they say they don’t care about religious/spiritual issues, haven’t attended a church (or spiritual service) in years (or ever) and haven’t voted in any elections. Religion and/or politics mean nothing to them and so they take no offense or don’t even notice when someone states their political or religious preference.

Leaving the completely apathetic aside, though, most people have some opinion about politics and some view about religion/spirituality. The stronger those views, of course, the more deep the emotional reactions. A hard-core liberal in the US may have (or at least appreciate) a bumper sticker “Friends don’t let friends vote Republican”. A hard-core conservative may view all liberals as traitors and the source of all the country’s problems. A strong “born again” Christian may see that the problems of the world are because people have not accepted Jesus Christ as their lord and savior and need to do so. A strong atheist may see that the problems of the world are because of the very existence of religion and that it is the root of all evil. These are deeply-ingrained views:

Politics and religion are part of our core identity that helps form who we define ourselves to be.

When that part of our identity is confronted by a polar opposite, we naturally react. Conservative Christians will have second thoughts about atheists, and atheists will have second thoughts about conservative Christians. Ultra-liberal Democrats will instinctively distrust ultra-conservative Republicans – and vice-versa. It’s just part and parcel of being human and building these beliefs into your identity.

Within the work environment, though, these twin areas of politics and religion have not been part of normal discourse… but yet, if you choose to fill out those fields in Facebook, they are suddenly exposed to all your “friends”.

It works the other way, of course. Some time back I added another “friend” whose politics and religion closely aligned with me. Again, without any rational thinking, the thought popped into my brain “Oh, he/she’s that. No wonder why we got along so well.” In the mass of people out there, we seek out those communities of like-minded people… those affinities that we can use to build stronger connections.

Which is why having fields for politics and religion make so much sense for Facebook’s original audience of college students. You are about to land in a campus of 10,000 people, of whom you know basically no one. How do you find new people? How do you find potential friends? Searching on “interests” is one way… but searching on political views or religion is another great way. Odds are that if they claim a similar religious view (or upbringing), they probably have a similar world view to yours. Likewise if they have similar political leanings, you probably have more in common upon which to potentially build a friendship. It makes total sense in that environment. Likewise, if Facebook is just used among your “friends”, odds are that they probably already know these views about you. But today we are overloading the term “friend” and so now it encompasses true “friends”, family… and business contacts.

So it’s one thing to share political/religious info with friends, family and classmates, but in business? I don’t know… on the one hand there is the greater “transparency” and the chance to make connections with other people. On the other hand, there is the strong chance of potentially alienating others.

In any event, the fields are there in your Facebook profile if you choose to fill them out (and many people seem to during the process of signing up). Of course, you are limited to the choices that Facebook provides for politics. They don’t offer the “It’s Complicated” choice that they have for relationships, which would be quite useful. The “Religious Views” field is free text entry, so you can really write whatever you want there. It seems to me that you really have four choices:

Leave them blank – probably the safest choice, but potentially then losing out on some networking possibilities.
Enter generic choices – you could be safe and choose “Moderate” and write in something vague for a religion.
Fill out only one – you’ll see I have a political entry but not a religious entry.
Fill them both out – embrace full transparency and let the world know (or at least your “friends”) your affiliations and beliefs.

To me this is just yet another one of those areas where we don’t fully understand the full impact of the profiles of Facebook and, in fairness, all the other social networking services. In the rush to join these services, we just fill out all sorts of information, not necessarily taking the time to think about the potential impact exposing that information may have.

What do you think? If you are a Facebook user, have you filled out those two fields? Do you think people should in an effort to be more transparent? Do you think we understand the full ramifications of exposing information like this? (Or do you think the issue I raise here is really not an issue?)

Technorati Tags: culture, facebook, politics, religion

Facebook brings the twin taboos of politics and religion into the workplace

Somewhat reluctantly joining Plaxo’s Pulse…. (and some initial thoughts about feeds, grouping contacts and lifestreaming)

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Somewhat reluctantly, I have now joined Plaxo’s “Pulse beta”. If you are a Pulse user and I know you, please do add me as a connection. It’s precisely this last sentence that is why I have been reluctant to join Pulse, despite the many raves in the blogosphere of late – I have to rebuild my entire network in yet-another-social-network.

Now, granted, Plaxo makes it easy to find other people through importing various different lists of contacts: GMail, AOL, Yahoo… take your pick. You can even buy the Premium version (or do the 30-day free trial) and import your LinkedIn contacts.

But I don’t really want to go through the aggravation. I’ve been a LinkedIn user for now about 5 years and have a nice network there of contacts. In my daily life these days, it seems that Facebook, Twitter, and my various blogs are the communication tools/sites I use. Do I really need another one?

Not really… but over time I admit to have become curious enough based on comments from people I know (such as Robert Sanzalone) to break down and open an account. There’s a couple of reasons. First, with my interest in identity, I’m admittedly a sucker for a major site that allows OpenID use:

but that alone is of course no reason to try out the site. More, I was intrigued by Plaxo’s “PulseStream”, which seems to be a much more open and useful version of Facebook’s “Newsfeed”. With just a single glance at a page, I can see the information from the people I find interesting… what their latest blog posts are, what their tweets are if they use Twitter, new contacts they have made. All aggregated on one page. Simple and easy.

I also do like that Plaxo allows a more granular segregation of “friends” than the other sites. Right now, with Facebook, for example, people are either “friends” with full access to the site or you can make them a “friend” but give them only access to your “limited profile”. That process though is a bit klunky, in my opinion. And you have basically one “limited profile” for all your “friends” (if I understand the process clearly). However, in Plaxo, contacts are divided into three categories: Business, Family and Friends:

Note that you can put a contact into multiple groups, which is nice. As you work with the site, this segregation has a couple of benefits. On your “Pulse” page, for instance, as shown at right you can choose to only see updates from the appropriate groups (or everyone, or just yourself). It is also extremely easy to only expose certain information to one of those three categories but not the others. For instance, in the picture on the left, I am choosing to include my Flickr stream into my “Pulse Stream” and specifying that it is available to the public, but note the various choices that I have. (I am assuming that if I choose “Nobody” it will only be available to me when I view my Pulse Stream.)

I am sure there will be folks who want more than three groupings. And there will be undoubtedly some who say “I never use this site with family members, so why can’t I remove that group?” Allowing grouping like this will surely just invite people to say that they want more groups or want to create their own arbitrary groups. (Which, to a degree, are we then getting back into groups like Facebook has?)

Regardless, it is nice to be able to group contacts accordingly rather than just labeling them all with the overloaded term “friend”.

Now, it’s intriguing to think that Plaxo’s Pulse might be a tool for “lifestreaming”. It certainly allows the aggregation of feeds (like Tumblr does)… but it’s still a walled garden like Facebook. In order to see the “Pulse Stream”, one has to login to Plaxo Pulse. Does this make it any better than Facebook’s NewsFeed? Not really. Now I’ve heard rumblings that there may be an RSS feed in the works for your PulseStream, which would then let you pull it outside the Pulse Walls and do something useful with it like put it on your blog or in a widget. We’ll see.

In the meantime, I’m there on Pulse, at least for some period of time. If I do know you, please do feel free to add me as a connection.

Technorati tags: plaxo, plaxo pulse, pulse, social networking, lifestream, walled gardens

Facebook: All your email belongs to us! (Inside of the walled garden… and do your recipients know that the Facebook ToS lets them do anything they want with your email?)

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Back in May, when I wrote my “Facebook is a walled garden” post, I wrote this:

We’ve gone from the closed communities of email services to the complete openness of Internet e-mail and now seem to be returning back to those gated communities, with email/SMS helping keep us aware of updates.

I was talking at the time how Facebook let you only send messages to those within Facebook.

Well, today Facebook took an interesting step. As noted as in the Facebook blog, you can now send email to people on the outside who don’t have Facebook accounts:

If you’re like most people, you may have a few stubborn friends who haven’t joined Facebook…yet. This can make reaching friends complicated—there are some friends you can send a Facebook message, and others you have to email. Not anymore. Now, when you’re writing messages, you can send the message to people on Facebook, and to people not on Facebook.

Now you can enter a friend’s email address into the To: line when you send a message or share an album, and Facebook will email them the message. Your friends will be able to reply without signing up, and they will be able to see content you share with them. Keep in mind that all rules of privacy still apply; some Facebook content that you share (photos, groups, notes, etc.) won’t be visible to your friend.

It does work, as you can see in the screenshot below (click for a larger image):

Over in my Gmail account, it comes out like this (click for a larger image):

The sending email address shown for my Facebook message is: “notification+o46j2=yc@facebookmail.com“. I can reply back and the reply winds up in my Facebook inbox.

On the one hand, I applaud Facebook for allowing communication to go out through the walls and come back in. However, two points:

1. You still can’t forward messages from inside Facebook out to external recipients. Perhaps this is part of the whole “privacy” thing, but there are times when it would be great to get something from inside out to someone on the outside; and

2. Do your external recipients realize that anything they send in becomes the property of Facebook? The Facebook Terms of Service are still dated as of May 24th, and that’s well before I posted my note/warning about all your content belonging to Facebook. Now I’m not sure what Facebook would realistically ever do with all the content… but I think it’s fair to be sure that people on the outside realize that whatever they send in becomes the property of Facebook to do with it whatever they want (if they so chose).

The Facebook blog entry concluded with this:

As we continue to make Facebook more useful for everyone, these changes mean that there’s no need to switch between Facebook and email for your daily communication needs.

Translation: Just use Facebook as your portal for everything. No need to go out to those pesky Gmail, Hotmail, AOL accounts…

Luke, a Facebook engineer, is never using email again. Ever.

But, of course, Luke is using email… just email inside of Facebook. We’ve gone from walled gardens of email to open standards and then back into walled gardens of email. Strange world we’re in.

Technorati tags: facebook, social networking, walled gardens, email, webmail

Disruptive Conversations

Dan York on the intersection of PR/communication and the "social media" of blogs, podcasts, wikis, Twitter and more – and the way our conversations are changing…

Category Archives: Collaboration

Would you trust confidential information to Google Docs?