Voicemail. Email. Instant Messaging. SMS. Real-time. Near-real-time. We review the user experience and commentary on advances and issues affecting users.
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Written by Peter Brockmann
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  I have written about how various folks are attempting to use Twitter for business in our January 2009 report, Twitter in Business and in general, it's not particularly successful.
I've experimented with Twitter myself in early 2008/9, but found it to be too onerous to stick with it. Ergo, my followers are only about 5 dozen friends, family and people who searched me out (scary thought). But, now I have figured out how to use Twitter in a way that integrates the service with my firm's web publishing engines - www.brockmann.com and www.mobileUC.net.
Using one of two commercial components that I have implemented on our sites, the Joomla plugin from TriniTronic called Nice Article Tweets Plugin, I have managed to send a tweet, automatically whenever I publish (or optionally update) an article on these sites. The post to Twitter incorporates the flag New-, the title of the post and a tiny url that links back to the article. Very cool.
In this way, Twitter becomes a kind of RSS stream. I'll see if my list of Twitter followers actually grows as a result, or better yet, if the typical average traffic to our site improves. Stay tuned...
UPDATE: February 23, 2010: I've also implemented a 'follow me on Twitter' feature that should help build up my twitter following and therefore reach more visitors who want to come back and visit again and again. I'll post later if I experience the same kind of phenomenal growth indicated by the graph from Twitter's blog on their tweet growth.
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Written by Peter Brockmann
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 I've been a fan of Sendio email security technology for many years.
The appliance is a rock-solid email processing server that scans all outbound messages for addressees to add to the accept list and scans against nasty viruses we may inadvertently try to bombard the world with. The appliance performs simple processing on inbound emails as well, which can include, if administrator so chooses, scanning for viruses, attachment policy compliance (no .exe please), sender comparison to an accept list, and even send a challenge-response message to the sender confirming that I have not yet received the email and requesting confirmation from the source in order to deliver it. Administrator can turn these features on and off for specific accounts too.
Even before the Sendio ESP accepts the message, it applies 'graylisting' where the server determines whether or not the sending IP address has ever communicated with the appliance before. If not, the ESP presents a standard 'I'm busy, try again' message in which well-behaved email servers try again in a few moments while spambots move on.
 Two weeks ago, we rolled out the latest release of Sendio ESP 5.0 on our server. The upgrade went seamlessly and returned to service without disruption. Significantly, the daily queuing option, allows users to see the messages being held in the queue (received pending confirmation from senders). In the previous release, users were presented with three practical options:
- the option to accept the message (A-MSG) which would pass only that message to the user's email account.
- accept the sender in (A-SND) which case all messages from that sender would be released.
- do nothing which kept the message in the holding queue.
The upgrade introduces two new options for message disposition: drop the message (D-MSG) and drop the sender (D-SND). Now, these options allow users to remove messages from their holding queues for closer inspection or dropping them completely. Dropped senders are simply deleted directly by the ESP and never seen (via email) again.
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Written by Peter Brockmann
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 Who'd have thought that the Swiss would innovate in an otherwise declining market and perhaps accelerate the decline by integrating the physical delivery world with the virtual online world? Mail has been in a decline as more and more people and companies around the world use email and web for communications and billing details and promotional initiatives.
Positioned as a service for those who are frequently away from home but never far from the Internet, the Swiss Post Box service scans sealed envelopes addressed to customers and e-mails the envelope image to users. With a few clicks, they then decide what happens to the item next.
On request, the item is opened, scanned and emailed as a PDF file. It can also be physically forwarded to any address.
Swiss Post Box is priced at €14.-- per month. For business users such as Siemens Mobility (Switzerland and Germany) and Microsoft Switzerland the service operates in much the same way as a fax-server workflow where an employee views the PDF and forwards to the correct person's email account complete with instructions how to electronically retrieve the rest of the document or where to send the original. The integrated service will be expanding throughout Switzerland, Germany, France, Austria and Italy by the end of July 2009. |
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Written by Peter Brockmann
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The kick-off speaker at this year's Enterprise 2.0 in Boston (June 23-25, 2009) did a fabulous job setting the bar high for others.
Of course, Jascha Franklin-Hodge is in the social media development business. His company (BlueStateDesign) offers design and strategy consulting and used the nation's biggest success in web 2.0 to great effect in his presentation. (If Obama-team paid for their services, extra great for F-H, but if not, it was still worth a great deal since it gave F-H's company such a huge dose of credibility to speak from).
Some stats on the Obama election campaign were shared:
- 1 billion email messages sent to 13 million addresses (an average of 77 messages/person - no doubt some got more, some got less)
- 1 million SMS accounts
- 200,000 off-line events planned
- 35,000 local volunteer groups
- 14.5 million YouTube hours of viewing (similar paid-for-advertising would have cost about $50 million)
- $770 million was raised
F-H said that email marketing was key... and I would hope so - 1 billion messages! Clean copy, simple and professional graphics and controlled corporate branding everywhere.
Website offered action-oriented payoffs - volunteer, make calls, learn more. The highest priority item had the biggest button for action.
As is the case with any community website such as Facebook, users tend to invest a lot of time tending their gardens, without necessarily accomplishing much. However, F-H and team made campaign-relevant activities worth points, and even integrated the accomplishment of activities (25 calls to undecided voters in VA, for example) with Facebook so a Obama Community member's Facebook friends knew that the member had accomplished something relevant to the campaign.
Even the iPhone application sorted and rank-ordered your contacts list according to whether or not the contact was in a swing state or not.
Members that achieved certain campaign participation levels were granted access to strategy videos that were real, nerdy campaign managers, low production value YouTube videos, further reinforcing the campaign's personal and authentic flavor.
Sarah Palin's RNC speech was the #1 fundraising speech for the Dems. Within 24 hours, they raised $11 million. Their outbound email accused her of being mean-spirited and demeaning of community organizers, whom they said were the concerned citizen's response to out-of-touch politicians, and 'let's not let people like her into the White House.' Effective.
Measurement was a huge part of the workflow which demanded experiments on copy, subjects, graphics and the like. |
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Written by Peter Brockmann
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 Recently, a number of spam messages (like maybe 5) got past my challenge-response anti-spam defenses and deposited a number of nastigrams in my inbox. I did a source view of the message and extracted the source IP address. Then I typed in the IP address to Google and one of the options presented was the trustedsource.org website, which offered me a three part report on the subject IP address. I suppose this measures the number of compliants against the address.
Part 1 is a view of the instantaneous web reputation ranging on a five point scale from trusted, neutral, unverified, suspicious and malicious. In this case and on this day it was marked as neutral.
Part 2 is the mail reputation report (shown here). This compares the typical volume of email over a 3-hour slot (or so). Sites that suddently have very high volumes of outbound email are probably under spambot influence.
This site had suddenly generated 775% more email than usual, suggesting that it had recently been infected with some spambot.
Part 3 of the report includes a GoogleMap geographic locator and a link to the Spamhaus report on the address in question. Spamhaus reported that the address in question is infected with the cutwail2 spambot and that it is on the composite block list. Originally the site ran afoul of the automated spam analysis mechanisms that populate the XBL feature of Spamhaus.
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Written by Peter Brockmann
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 Lotusphere 2009, which happened just last week gave IBM the opportunity to make a big deal about the cloud. Starting with the 2008 announcement of Bluehouse , the company's initial multi-tenant hosted service implementation, IBM announced the acquisition of the email assets of a white label hosting service provider powerhouse - Outblaze - to emphasize IBM's big move into cloud computing.
When the deal closes in 1Q09, IBM will integrate the operation into Bluehouse, the Lotus multi-tenant service, currently in beta, and will aggressively boost their market position from probably less than 1 million users (IBM never reported numbers of the beta), to over 40 million accounts spread throughout the world, complete with extensive relationships with carriers, ISPs, universities and other major consumers of email services.
This strengthening of IBM's distribution strategy which is based on selling software to enterprises through business partners, selling software/services through service providers and selling an appliance (Foundations) through business partners, is a solid step forward and puts them in range of Google and Microsoft's applications services.
IBM is also building an ecosystem with Salesforce.com, Brainshark (Brockmann & Company is a Brainshark Content Network provider), Skype, Prolifiq, Synaptris and Nortel. They plan to publish an API to expand the list of participants.
LotusLive
Initial hosted offerings are Meetings, Events, Engage, Connections and Notes. Events and Meetings use the Unyte web conferencing service, Engage refers to files sharing, chat, activities, surveys, profiles features of Lotus and Connections refers to a subset of Engage features. LotusLive iNotes are web-based email service with personal calendar and shared contacts.
Free beta now underway.
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Written by Peter Brockmann
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The Canadian Adam Guerbuez and his company Atlantis Blue Capital were found liable for statutory damages and aggravated damages totalling $873 million to Facebook for sending some 4 million spam email.
Often times, the spammer forges other people's identities. This is usually the best evidence that they are an illegitimate emailer.
Although it is unlikely that Facebook will every see the judgment, it does suggest that there is finally a cost being assigned to these nasty and ignorant abusers of the email service. Note that last week the cessation of ISP interconnectivity for McColo by Global Crossing and Hurricane Electric significantly dropped the total volume of spam.
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