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The only messaging platform that really works: E-MAIL

05/09/18 / pcsontos / Management / management, social media, teamwork

I’m working at a quite large company, and experience shows that establishing a single “new, fancy” team collaboration / messaging / chat tool is probably too big a challenge.

Being in the software business, we actually have our own product for such a purpose. It’s a great thing (what else would I say), but it has just enough limitations (primarily being a web-based discussion forum and document sharing tool rather than a “modern” chat platform) that only parts of the company (albeit quite big parts but anyway) are using it as their primary messaging platform.

It took a while, but finally our IT department realized that they had to do something about the fact that lots of people were using “public” Skype, “public” Slack, Facebook Messenger and God only knows what other chat platforms to discuss work related issues, which I suspect didn’t fully comply with the data protection and security policies of our company. This is nothing I directly observed, just hearsay and rumors of course. Then they did this fantastic thing (probably intending to please everyone and over-do the thing a bit): they introduced the corporate version of Slack and Microsoft Teams at the same time, leaving it up to everyone to decide which tool they use for what purpose. Of course I know these two can serve different purposes, there’s a perspective from which you can say they don’t compete but rather complement each other, blah blah et cetera, but still kind-of funny.

The result: People are either in the Slack camp or the MS Teams camp or still in the “our own thing” camp or undecided and not really using any of these solutions or trying to multi-task across all of these in random ways. This ends up in the phenomenon that if you’re in the latter group of people trying to use all these tools in a context-dependent and smart way, you always have to make conscious decisions about whom to interact with which tool, keep evaluating the likelihood of that person actively using a certain tool is, realizing that you were wrong in your assumptions and repeading differently next time, and so on. This leads to a lot of trial-and-error and inefficiencies.

 

OOOOOOOOOOOORRRRRRRRRRRR:

 

Fall back to good old e-mail.

I know this is un-cool and everything, but if you seriously think, e-mail is still by far the most commonly used single online communication mechanism. Only some extremist hipsters neglect all their e-mail boxes completely, so your chance of reaching a random person’s attention via sending an e-mail to her/his mailbox you suspect the person is actively using, is practically 100%.

Of course there are people like my boss, who are very busy dudes, who *claim* they don’t read e-mail at all because of getting too many incoming messages and not having time to read / respond to everything. However, probably even those people “quietly” keep an eye on their mailbox, as it has been proven in case of my boss at several occasions.

Unless someone invents something better with a similarly globally unique “address book” and a similarly globally accepted set of network communication protocols and a similarly efficient globally distributed message routing network, kind-of independent from single vendors, e-mail can’t be replaced, no matter how cool our new toys may be.

Dear Twitter!

09/01/17 / pcsontos / Uncategorized / social media

The ONLY reason I’m using Twitter (alongside other social networks) is the ability to continue browsing tweets from where I left off last time.

This is the ability that makes it useful as a universal newsfeed (Other social media are not good for this). As Leo Laporte put it recently in the This Week In Tech podcast, Twitter kind-of killed RSS as it is doing almost the same thing just better. This may not be the only thing people are using Twitter for, but I think it’s one of the top 3.

This phenomenon makes it especially strange that in the 10 years of Twitter’s existence, they haven’t been able to further exploit this ability. It is not only unable to make me use my feed in a cross-device manner properly (my Google search “How to use twitter on multiple devices in a way that they remember where I left off?” has just provided zero meaningful results), but when I upgrade the Twitter app on my phone and launch it next time, it opens showing the top of my feed. Very annoying.

If there are UX researchers at Twitter, they could take a look at this.

Life, the universe and everything about lean software engineering

Blog by Péter Csontos,
a nice guy from Hungary

twitter: @pcsontos

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