by Brian Solis

Sharing your email address on the Web, Twitter, and Social Networks is a risky proposition. It’s almost guaranteed that spam bots will crawl the web and find it almost immediately – flooding your inbox and hampering productivity.

Scr.im is a new service that converts your email address into a short, safe, and customizable link to share anywhere on the Web.

Here’s mine: http://scr.im/solis

Connect with me on:
Twitter, FriendFeed, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Plaxo, Plurk, Identi.ca, BackType, or Facebook

by Michelle Lentz

Every now and then we all send an email that we instantly regret sending. If you’re lucky enough to be on an exchange server, you can recall a sent email. Now you can do that from Gmail as well.

Go to your Gmail Settings and click the Labs tab. There is now the option to Undo Send.

Once you’ve enabled this feature, you have two chances to call back a sent message. You can hit cancel when you see the Sending … message.

Alternatively, you have about 5 seconds to hit Undo when the Sent message appears.

Either way, you have to react quickly. You better regret that Sent message instantly. But isn’t it nice to have the option?

__

Contact Michelle with news, stories, events, and more.
Email: michelle[at]writetech[dot]net
Twitter: @writetechnology, Friendfeed: michellel
Blogs: Write Technology, Wine-Girl.net

by Michelle Lentz

cc:Betty made its (her?) debut at DEMO09 this week. Slightly reminiscent of the now defunct I Want Sandy, cc:Betty helps organize your inbox (and therefore your life).

I have to say I’m intrigued by cc:Betty. Having a Gmail account (or two) has had an adverse affect on all of my email accounts. Whereas I used to subscribe to the Empty Inbox theory, I now keep everything my 4 IMAP accounts throw at me. I rely heavily on Smart Mailboxes and search functions, but sometimes the search fails me. cc:Betty may be the answer to my problems.

cc:Betty creates a mailspace for you. A mailspace is a web page that is constantly updated with your email conversations, making it easier for view, follow, sort and make sense of the 50 emails around that one phase of your project. It threads your email and turns it into a conversation. Before you say it, I realize that Gmail also threads, but not everyone can use Gmail for work, which is why so many people are left with Mail.app and Outlook.

Additionally, cc:Betty creates photo albums for you out of images you send. Dates are turned into downloadable appointments, maps are created for addresses, media is playable from the mailspace, and documents and links are organized for you.

Right now, cc:Betty is free and in beta. To use it, all you need to do is cc: Betty in your email. Need more than that? Sign up for a free account and then cc: betty@ccbetty.com in your emails. Your mailspace will be automatically created for you.

__

Contact Michelle with news, stories, events, and more.
Email: michelle[at]writetech[dot]net
Twitter: @writetechnology, Friendfeed: michellel
Blogs: Write Technology, Wine-Girl.net

by Brian Solis

TWPLY is new service that tracks personal @replies and sends them to your designated email inbox. Seems simple enough and may be ideal for those high volume personal and corporate brands that need to actively monitor inbound tweets without having to stay connected directly to Twitter, Twitter Search, or a third-party service.

I’m testing the service now and will report back with my experience.

NOTE: When you log in, TWPLY will post a tweet to your twitter timeline that reads, “Just started using http://twply.com/ to get my @replies via email. Neat stuff!” Many consider this to be Twitter Spam and unfortunately it’s turning people off to the service.

UPDATE: TWPLY is officially hated by the Twitter community and in less than 24 hours, was already sold on SitePoint. CHANGE YOUR PASSWORD.

Connect with me on:
Twitter, FriendFeed, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Pownce, Plaxo, Plurk, Identi.ca, BackType, Jaiku or Facebook

by Michelle Lentz

Sometimes I need to be reminded that not every startup is in California. ShareThis launched last November (less than a year ago!) from their Cincinnati offices. Today they invited me to see their newly upgraded location and learn about some great things on the horizon.

If you recall, I first wrote about ShareThis back in early June. Back then, CEO Tim Schigel told me that as far as sharing goes, email trumps all. I’ve always had a hard time believing this, but this time around, they had cold, hard facts. In fact, Forrester completed a study for them on electronic sharing and indeed, almost 70% of adults share information (links, cool things) using cut and paste into email. I haven’t had time to peruse the entire report yet, but suspect it will be loaded with interesting tidbits. I promise to share them here once I plow through the report.

Of course, the proof is also in the pudding, as ShareThis is now on upwards of 60,000 sites and they’re adding more at an average rate of 1500 per week. Not bad for a company not quite 11 mos old. They’ve been able to move to a trendy building (a refurbished old school), hire some new folks away from some big companies, and have even bigger plans on the horizon.

For the user, the changes are going to be apparent soon – in fact, a beta starts in October. The back-end changes include speeding up the system. There will no longer be a delay when you click on that ubiquitous green icon. It will instantly appear. They’ve also modified the box so that there will no longer be tabs.

Instead, you have all of your options on one screen.  The Send line even includes shortcuts for the last person to whom you sent something. A lot of power lies in the Post area, where you can post the same item out to Digg, Delicious, your blog, and more without ever leaving the page. If you use a service not originally listed on the front panel (in the image above, I might select WordPress, which is not shown), then WordPress would be front and center the next time I use ShareThis. It learns your sharing preferences as you go.

Personally, I also like the idea of customizing the box with my own logo (your logo here), which every blogger will appreciate. (Branding, branding, branding!)

The Sharebox page, located on the ShareThis web site, has proven to be immensely popular. Everything you’ve shared is located in your Sharebox. The truly nifty thing is the ability to mark things with different levels of privacy – share with everyone, share with specific groups, private, and so forth. After all, maybe you don’t want the whole world to see the new flooring you picked out for your house. In a way, the Sharebox can be used like Delicious, as an online social bookmarking tool. However, since you can share things out from the Sharebox to any of the other sites, including Delicious, it takes social bookmarking a step further.

I’m sure you’ve seen that little green box around the Web. I’ve found it on magazine sites like Elle, on news sites such as the Boston Globe, and even on television sites such as ABC Family. ShareThis is expecting over half a million registered users by the end of the year.

In theory, I’ll be part of the beta when it launches in October. I’ll keep you posted on how things are working and what I think of the new design once it’s in use. Oh, and I’m aware that we’re not yet using ShareThis on bub.blicio.us. I need to get on the tech folks. Brian is using it on PR 2.0 though.

–
Contact Michelle with your news, apps, and events via email, Twitter, Pownce, or FriendFeed. Visit Michelle at Wine-Girl.net and Write Technology. You can also catch Michelle presenting on Twitter at the upcoming DevLearn ’08 in San Jose.

by Michelle Lentz

Gmail, everyone’s favorite web-based email solution, may finally have some competition. GMX Mail recently debuted their web-based mail application in the US and have had over 100,000 accounts created in the last few weeks.

GMX Mail is a subset of United Internet, which also includes 1&1 and Fasthosts. United Internet’s high speed data centers manage more than 10 million domains. The Group’s data centers set extremely high standards worldwide with 40,000 hosted servers and a monthly transfer volume of 4,000 terrabytes as well as over 5 billion e-mails. GMX maintains more than 10 million active e-mail accounts.

GMX Mail doesn’t just want to provide you with another web-based account. It wants to be your complete email application, replacing the inbox on your local machine. For starters, it gives you that “Outlook” appearance, with traditional folders on the left, with email listings and a preview pane to the right.

GMX offers 5 GB of email storage and seven layers of anti-spam security. You can choose your user id/email address from gmx.com/.us/.fr and many others.  In addition, you can have one default account and then create subaccounts from within your email box. For instance, my default account is michellel@gmx.com, but I can also use michellelentz@gmx.com and writetechnology@gmx.com. They all link to the same default account. You can have up to 10 email aliases.

A cool feature is the mail collector. As part of wanting to replace your desktop application, GMX can manage all of your email accounts, whether Gmail or Hotmail, POP or IMAP. You enter your information and with only 2 clicks, you can send and receive from your other accounts as well as your GMX account. The GMX Inbox includes all of your typical mail functions, including folders, filters, and more. My favorite feature? I love that you can work on several email messages at once, in a tabbed format.

GMX Mail is free, of course, and worth checking out. It’s like you’re getting a new organized Inbox, but it happens to come with a new email address as a bonus.

–
Events, news, apps, and more – let me know at michelle[at]writetech[dot]net, via Twitter, Pownce, or FriendFeed. Visit Michelle at Wine-Girl.net and Write Technology.

by Michelle Lentz

A month or so ago, I let you know about Xobni. Spelling “inbox” backwards, Xobni has set out to be a new way to organize and cope with your countless Outlook email messages and contacts.

One of the cool features about Xobni is how fast it performs a people search. However, it has now fleshed out that people search by integrating LinkedIn public profiles. Now if your contacts will display their current employer, job title, link to their LinkedIn profile, and their LinkedIn contact photo.

Xobni has more plans for this feature:

We have plans to extend this feature with more information from LinkedIn that becomes available when you are logged-in to their service. Make sure to verify that your LinkedIn profile and picture are set to “public” so that other Xobni users can see your pretty LinkedIn picture when you send them an email.

I used Xobni for a bit, because I’m a I was a power Outlook user. I had a bit of trouble with the screen real estate it took away from other things, but I admit Xobni is a pretty powerful tool. Now I’m cruising along in Apple’s Mail.app and I would love a version of Xobni to extend this program.

The new version of Xobni also includes Xobni keyboard shortcuts, folder selection, and several performance improvements. The big news, though, is the integration of the LinkedIn API. The application will update automatically if you already have Xobni. If not, you can download it for free.

__

Events, news, apps, and more – let me know at michelle[at]writetech[dot]net, via Twitter, or via Pownce.

by Michelle Lentz

This week, NPR has been running a series on Morning Edition on The Email Age. Two of the pieces, in particular, caught my fancy.

You see, I lived in Outlook. My whole world is loaded into the contacts, email, tasks and calendar. It’s sad really. This week I switched to a Mac and decided to leave the comforts of Microsoft and use Mail.app. It was a fight, but I won by customizing Mail pretty in-depth.  Why was it so important? Because I get hundreds of emails a day from multiple email accounts. It’s ridiculous at times. And I’m not the only one. According to a Radicati Group white paper, the number of email users world wide is approaching two billion. In 2006, the average corporate email user received 126 email messages per day – up 55% from 2003! The Radicati Group estimates that if email traffic continues this trend, the average user will spend 41% of their time managing email by 2009.  That is, in my opinion, a lot of wasted time.

So how do we cope with this? The NPR series brought up two interesting theories: Email Free Days, and Seriosity Attent.

Email Free Fridays have been implemented in several large organizations (US Cellular was spotlighted in the article). Imagine a day at work that is free from internal email. If you want to discuss an idea, set up a meeting, or get an answer, you need to either pick up the phone or go find your co-worker. I rather like this idea. But it doesn’t eliminate email entirely for the day. For instance, if my husband’s advertising agency implemented this, it wouldn’t help him too much – he’d still be deluged by  emails from his clients. Just because company A has email free Fridays doesn’t mean it applies to companies B-Z. But it’s a nice thought and would serve, I would think, to foster communication internally and at least slightly cut down on email for a day.

Attent is a new email productivity tool by Seriosity.  This is a really interesting tool. Attent turns email into its own economy using Serios (think dollars). Each week you are given a set number of Serios. For this example, we’ll use 300. For each email you send, you must attach at least 1 Serio. If it’s a really important email, you might attach 50 Serios; for a less important email, you might attach 5 Serios. In this way, you are taking the time to consider each email you compose and deciding if it’s worth the email or might be just as easily expressed in a phone call or Face to Face communication. Similarly, the person receiving the email can instantly judge whether it is important and should be acted on right away (50 Serios) or if it is something that can wait until later (5 Serios). Like Email Free Fridays, this only will work internally or with other folks who are using Attent.

Attent hosts all of the Serio Accounting information (your Serio Bank Account) on their servers, and all that is required is a plug-in for the email king of them all – Outlook. It’s an interesting experiment. I like that it forces you to consider – is this really worth an email? Watch a Flash demo of Seriosity Attent.

In order to manage my chaotic email, I’ve installed MailTags, MsgFiler, YAI, and more. It doesn’t control the sheer number of incoming messages, but at least it helps me organize them and stay semi-productive. How do you control and organize your emails? Would your company be perfect for something like Email Free days or Seriosity Attent?

__
Events, news, apps, and more – let me know at michelle[at]writetech[dot]net, via Twitter, or via Pownce.