Is E-Mail Here To Stay?

Is E-Mail Here To Stay?:
Given the recent rise in popularity of social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, with quick, short messages between users like those popularized by SMS messages, some believe that e-mail may be dying out. After all, it’s so much easier to type in a person’s name, write out whatever it is off your chest and hit “Send”. You don’t have to worry if the email address is correct or up-to-date, and you can be pretty much guaranteed that they will have seen it, even if you don’t get a reply straight away.
It’s pretty surprising to say, but even today, 12% of the American and 39% of the European population still don’t have access to the Internet, according to the latest penetration figures for 2011. As those users, and the kids growing up today, come online, it would seem that they’ll adopt to using social networks by default, skipping email entirely and hastening its demise. But I believe that e-mail certainly isn’t dying out – in fact it’s more popular than ever.

Social Networking is Still Great … a Great Addition to Email

Now I’m not putting down Facebook and Twitter at all – I use both frequently and both of course have their advantages and disadvantages. But I would certainly feel a bit worried if I wanted to send private information via these networks. With email, you’ve got (in my eyes) slighly better security and although it’s by all means not impossible to hack into both a user’s Facebook or Twitter profile and an email address, I feel slightly more assured with email that my private conversations are kept just that – private.

I personally trust the security of my e-mail over the security of my Facebook and Twitter accounts.

Even aside from secure communications, the death of e-mail is a long way off. Think about businesses. Although some, such as the French IT company Atos, which is replacing internal e-mail with instant messaging and good old face-to-face chatting, are switching towards other methods, e-mails are still the main way to communicate in business. The average employee sends and receives around 112 e-mails a day and e-mail marketing is still extremely profitable – on average $1 invested would return back $44.25 in 2011.
You’d have thought that with the introduction of Facebook’s new Social Inbox, with one place for all your messages, e-mails (with your @facebook.com e-mail address) and chats that this would have started the demise of providers such as Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo, but far from it, in my eyes anyway. I hate Facebook’s messaging feature (but unfortunately, there’s really no other option to talk to your mates on Facebook) and I would certainly not replace my beloved Gmail account with it. There’s no support for attachments and even the basic concept of sending messages back and forth screws up every now and again.
Editor’s Note: Plus, comically, you can reply to Facebook messages and comments with emails, letting you actually manage your social networks via email – something I actually do. Even for business networks, such as Yammer and Basecamp, I often find myself replying to in-app messages in email, since it’s just quicker for me in Gmail or Sparrow.

Facebook's new Social Inbox feature, which was designed to facilitate sending messages and e-mails to each other via a free @facebook.com address.

Email Still Makes the Most Sense on Mobile Devices

But recently, there has been a big transformation for e-mail from the desktop to the mobile platform. In 2011, there were 1.2 billion mobile broadband subscriptions and 85% of all handsets shipped globally included a web browser, or capable of receiving e-mail. Go down to your local AT&T or Verizon store and have a look through the phones on offer – they are almost all smartphones from Apple, Samsung, HTC, RIM or whatever. I check and respond to short messages via my iPhone (Sparrow FTW!) and for anything longer, I turn to my trusty laptop.
E-mail is, in my eyes, still powering along, especially when you consider its advantages over other forms of communication. There is almost complete compatibility with the recipient no matter which e-mail client or service is being used (unlike IM protocols such as iMessage or WhatsApp) and e-mail allows you to manage your time better – you decide when you reply to it rather than instant messages or phone calls, where an almost instant response is expected.

Instant messaging is great if all your intended recipients can actually receive what you send them.

E-mails also give you the chance to structure your thoughts a lot easier due to the pretty much unlimited space and the formatting tools available to you, and it still works even if the recipient isn’t there at the time of sending – all your messages go into an inbox for you to sort out later. E-mail can also be recorded and referenced easier, depending on the architecture used. And in a weird twist of fate, emailing a file to yourself can often be the easiest way to move a file between apps in iOS, thanks to its lack of in-app file system access.

Conclusion

Is e-mail here to stay, then? Well, yes it is, just like our readers predicted in our recent poll on email usage. We are sending more messages than ever before (3.15 billion in 2011, up from 1.88 billion in 2010) and although both Facebook and Twitter have a combined 1 billion users between them, I personally think that there’s going to have to be a pretty good alternative before we ditch our beloved e-mail. The popularity and ease of it, along with the great options offered by some providers (Gmail‘s 10 GB of free storage, for example) make it still the most popular way of communicating using the Internet and one that will surely remain for many years to come.

Cloudify Your Life Memories with ThisLife

Cloudify Your Life Memories with ThisLife:
If you have kids, you can probably relate to my dilema of the fact that I have a ton of photos of my kid and not a convenient place to store them. There are many options out there, like putting them on an external drive, uploading to the cloud, burning them onto DVD’s. All of these options have good things about them and bad.
One solution that has always intrigued me is cloud storage for photos. The nice part about this solution is that you don’t have to worry about drives breaking or losing DVDs. It also saves you from having to worry about precious hard drive space on your computer. There are a variety of cloud services that you can use and I had the opportunity to test out one called ThisLife for the past couple of weeks. I have to say, I haven’t seen a cloud service like it and I was impressed.

Uploading Pictures and Videos

When you first get signed up for ThisLife, there are a few of ways for you to add pictures and videos to your collection. The app asks you if you want to connect to a variety of services that will then import your pictures from those services. They include the following, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, Picasa, Flickr and a few other photo sharing sites. Once you are connected to these sites, you can decide what pictures you want to import over to ThisLife. I love that they have this feature, especially since I have pictures in most of these places, so to be able to select what I wanted to pull into the app was a great idea.

List of services you can connect ThisLife to

Your other options to upload your media are that you can manually add them using the upload feature on the site. They also have a Mac application where you can upload from iPhoto and other devices like your iPhone or iPad. ThisLife also gives you the option to email your photos and vides to your site by giving you a specific address to send them to.

Uploading pics to ThisLife

Organizing and Sharing

After you import all of your pictures and videos that you want either from your computer or from the different services you can connect to, you can now begin to organize and share them. There are two different views to look at your photos on ThisLife, a library view, which has all of your media that you imported sorted by date in a grid style. In this view you can click on a picture and you can add details to it by adding the location, the people, as well as the activity you were doing. Once you are done with this, you can then share it with friends on Facebook, Twitter or by email.

Adding details to pictures and sharing features

Each picture and video has a heart symbol where if you tap on it, it will be added to your Timeline, which is the second view that you can use to see your pictures. This view is a little different in that you now see your pictures that you have selected to be on here in a timeline fashion. This is a cool way to see the important dates in your life or your child’s life. Just like the Library view, you can also add details like location, people, and also share it.

Timeline View

Some of the other features is that you can see all your pictures and videos by location, which is pretty cool, especially if you do a lot of traveling. What is nice is that your media can also be downloaded to your computer in high quality. This is nice because a lot of times, when you upload pictures to cloud services like these, they tend to lose their quality and then when you want to redownload them, they don’t look the same. Their facial recognition feature is also pretty good and is a welcome one to have in the app.

Library View

Pricing

ThisLife starts you off with a free account where you can upload approximately 1000 photos or 1 hr of video. If you need more storage, they have two different packages that you can choose from. There is the Adventure Box, where you can store up to 20,000 photos or 10 hrs of video for $80 a year and then there is the Family Box where you can store up to 50,000 photos or 25 hrs of video for $150 a year. I honestly don’t have much to compare it to, but these seem like pretty decent pricing for the features you get.

Pricing

Conclusion

After getting to play with ThisLife for a couple of weeks, I have to say I came away very impressed by the feature set. There are a variety of features that you can use within the app that make it really useful as you are storing, organizing and sharing your media. The nice thing about this is that you can use it for a couple of different reasons. It can be used as a place to just store photos and videos or it can also be used as a homepage for your memories that you can share with others. On the flipside, I did find that maximizing your experience by using all the features was not very intuitive. It definitely was one of those apps where you have to play around a bit and read about how to do things in order to get the full experience.
Overall, my experience with ThisLife was good and I plan to keep using it as my go to cloud storage for my photos. They have a pretty generous free plan where you can really get the look and feel on whether or not this will work for you. Right now they are currently in beta, but if you go over to their site and sign up, you should be able to get in pretty quick. When I signed up a few weeks ago, I was able to get in within 24 hrs. If you are looking for a site where you can not only store your photos, but you want to do more with them, this app is definitely worth checking out.

Tumblr + Facebook/Twitter = RebelMouse

Tumblr + Facebook/Twitter = RebelMouse:
There are many things that I share on the world wide web with my friends and other people that I may or may not know. I share things on Facebook, Twitter, pictures through Instagram, posts here on Web.AppStorm and iPhone.AppStorm. I am also sure that many of you have your variety of social sites that you share things to as well. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was one place to go to get all of your status updates, pictures, videos and anything else that you share instead of having to visit four different sites?
Well, a new web application called RebelMouse gives you this opportunity and much more. It is right now in beta, so it can be a little rough around the edges at times, but it is a very cool service. Think of it as Tumblr meets Facebook and Twitter, sound interesting? Well, read on to learn more about this cool little app.

Combining Your Social Networks

When you first go to the site, you really can’t tell what the service actually does, and you are asked to sign in with Twitter or Facebook. Trust me, you are going to want to sign in with either one and check out the service. With that being said, you are going to want to connect your Facebook and Twitter to RebelMouse if you use both services.

My RebelMouse Landing Page

RebelMouse will do all the magic after that in which it will take your Facebook posts as well as your tweets and organize them into a good looking splash page for you. You can customize the page by deciding what Facebook pages you want to post and also what tweets you want to show as well. You can also change the design and layout of your page with any one of the templates that the app provides for you.

Selecting what tweets I want to show

There is even deeper customization where you can change specific posts from Facebook or Twitter that you have on your RebelMouse page. For example, you can move posts around on the page, and you can also freeze a post so that is stays in that specific position. Posts can also be edited if you want them to, and so if you have a post from Twitter that is on your page, maybe you want to change the title, you can do that. Lastly, Rebelmouse also gives you analytics on that specific post by telling you how many times it has been clicked and whether it has been shared to other social networks.

Analytics for a specific post

Create Your Own Posts

RebelMouse is definitely not a one trick pony in that you can post more than just from your Facebook or Twitter. You can also create your own posts where you can add text, photos, videos, and a picture album. Combine this with the fact that you can create numerous sites, this definitely opens up the possibility of making your own blog similar to Tumblr.

Adding a post

Rebelmouse also has its own bookmarklet, where you can use to add interesting articles to one of your pages. For example, lets say you created a page on RebelMouse that is strictly to do with this year’s presidential election, when you come across an article that you want to put on that Rebelmouse page, you can use the bookmarklet to easily get it to post to that page.

Using bookmarklet to add a post

Potential Uses

Speaking of uses, the more I started to play around with RebelMouse, the more ideas I could start to come up with for using the service. There are a variety of things you can use your RebelMouse page for. You can be as simple as you want and just connect your social networks to it and share that out with people. But, you can also create your own blog if you want. I have toyed with using it as a landing page to put all of my pictures of my son so that way my parents and friends can just go there. Like I had also mentioned previously, it can also be used as a way to collect interesting articles from around the web. I can definitely see using something like this in my classroom, where my students can use it as a bookmarking page to save all their articles for a research paper. There really are a ton of ways you can use the service and that is one of the greatest things I love about it.

Final Thoughts

Once you start to play around with RebelMouse, you can definitely see that it is still in beta. Although the service does work decently well, there were times, when I would try to do certain things and it just wasn’t happening for me. But, that’s okay and that is why there is a beta stage. In the future I would love to see them add editing features for potentail blog use and possibly more templates with some design themes. I would also love to have the option to add more social networks if at all possible.
Overall, it is a cool service and one that I haven’t seen before. I definitely think this web app is heading in the right direction and they have carved themselves out a nice little niche where they are not necessarily like Facebook or Tumblr, but a combination of the two. Go and check them out here and have fun creating your own landing page.

Hojoki: A Place For All Your Cloud Apps

Hojoki: A Place For All Your Cloud Apps:
Cloud services are a dime a dozen these days, and all of them promise you wouldn’t have to carry a flash drive in your life. But how do you keep track of them? Sure, most have mobile versions of their apps and you can always use that on the go. However, seeing them all in one tool seems to be asking too much – or is it?
Hojoki is a web app that allows you to see a feed of all activities in your cloud apps, bringing together your Dropbox, CloudApp, Zendesk, and Basecamp, and more. It’s in Public Beta and is free for now – with a future pricing plan in store. So how does it work? Read on to know more!

Gather and connect

The first thing you need to do after signing up for this service is connect your cloud apps. Different apps have different ways of verifying your account. For instance, connecting Dropbox involves having to enter your RSS Feed, rather than signing in with your user name and password.

Connecting your cloud apps

Once all your apps are connected, your main feed (My Cloud) should now be updated with your most recent updates in all of them. Here are the main parts of a feed:

Anatomy of a feed

Click on a name and it filters all things done by that person. Click on a cloud app (icon on the bottom of a post) and it filters all posts from that app. And so on.

Collaborate

Each post has a Reply, Share and Delete option. These actions, however, are only visible within your Hojoki feed and will not change or delete the actual information from a cloud app. For example, deleting a post in Twitter from your Hojoki feed does not delete it in Twitter itself. These buttons are not there to change anything in your cloud app, but a way to interact with other Hojoki users.
This brings us to the next feature of the app: Workspaces. On the left pane, there’s an option to Create Workspace. This allows you to make a group for specific people that you work with. Give your workspace a name and assign a color. You can also add members right from the same pop up box. Additional settings include options to choose which data to include within that workspace.

Existing contacts in all of your cloud apps can be added to a workspace. Note, however, that adding a contact who isn’t on Hojoki will be notified through e-mail.

Customize

One of the great things I noticed about Hojoki are the many ways you can customize your feed by applying a wide variety of filters.
On the feed itself, clicking on an app logo filters your feed so it shows only activities done within that app. Clicking on a person’s name will bring a new feed with all their activity, and so forth. When an object is clicked, the previous feed slides to the left as it gets replaced by the filtered feed. To go back to the main feed, simply click on the My Cloud header on top.

Applying a filter for Dropbox

Aside from narrowing down content from the main feed, you have even more options on the right sidebar. Tasks and Events, for instance, lets you view tasks that were either started, finished or reopened. Other filters are self-explanatory, while others may require a bit of testing on your part so you can figure it out.

Sidebar filter options

Extras

In addition to its artsy feel, you can also change the wallpaper just in case you’re feeling more adventurous. Simply go to the Settings icon on the top right corner and click on the Theming button. Choose from 14 cool backgrounds and you’re done!

Change the scenery

I was surprised when I tried the Chat box. There’s actually some who replied and helped with my question – and quite quickly at that. This is a very impressive feature, considering this employs human resources. Below is my quick chat with Adam.

If there’s one thing this app requires from you (aside from signing up for a free account), it’s a fast internet connection. Leaving the app idle in less than satisfactory connections can drop you out. When this happens, you’ll have to hit the Reload button to start it back up again.

Conclusion

For a free app, Hojoki is feature-rich, super useful and a great way to get your apps organized into one unified platform. For me, I found it brought things to my attention which I missed seeing on the actual cloud app. It also cut down my browser tabs from ten to one.
Although it’s a great way to access everything you do in the cloud, there are still certain things you can only do within the individual applications themselves – like create a new note in Basecamp or reply to a tweet. And this is completely fine. Hojoki is not a replacement for any of these apps, but a linking agent for all users to be able to collaborate without having to access the actual app. That, for some, might be a more convenient way to manage multiple cloud applications.

Find the Perfect Playlist With Songza

Find the Perfect Playlist With Songza:
Finding and choosing music to listen to is an easy task for a lucky few. For the rest of us, choosing music is often an annoyance. Whether you are tired of your collection or just don’t know what you’re in the mood to listen to, sometimes it’s good to step back from iTunes and let someone else do the heavy lifting. That’s where an app like Songza comes into play.
Songza labels itself a music concierge. It’s an online playlist based music application, full of playlists for different events, moods, decades and genres. Songza is 100% free AND audio ad-free, a rarity in the world of online music streaming. Read on to learn more about this new music application, like details on how it works and what I think of it thus far.

Finding Music

If you decide to give Songza a go, my guess is that the first thing that you’ll want to do is find a playlist to check out. This is easy to do with Songza, and you’re presented with three different ways in which to do so. The first option is to try out the music concierge option. This is definitely the most unique feature.
First, the app asks you to input the date and approximate time. It does utilize location to automatically select the correct time, but you can change it as you like. I put in Tuesday, late morning, and was presented with 5 different options – work/study, brand new music, just waking up, popular genres and taking the day off. I chose just waking up and was presented with some genres to choose from – pop, hip-hop, indie, country and oldies. After selecting pop, I was presented with three last options to choose an actual playlist. The concierge is a great way to let Songza do the heavy lifting for you, presenting you with just a few select options.

Here, I’m utilizing the music concierge. I’m down to the final step – choosing the actual playlist.

Next up is the ability to explore by popularity. This option is simple and limited. You are presented with the 20 most popular playlists and have the option to view by currently trending, popular this week or popular this year. If the concierge isn’t suiting you, this is the easiest way to just select an arbitrary playlist to play, especially if you are in the mood for top 40 type music.

Currently popular playlists on Songza.

Last but not least is the ability to browse or explore all of the music. If you click on the browse all tab, you can view playlists by genre, activity, mood, decade, culture or record-store clerk. Genre is self-explanatory, with a laundry list of genres. Activity is great if the concierge doesn’t provide whatever activity you are participating in at that time. Mood offers playlists for instances when you’re feeling angsty, seductive, gloomy, spacey and more.
Decade is easy enough to understand, offering decades from the 1930’s up to today. Culture includes a variety of playlists based upon various “best of” lists, holidays, sporting events and cultural phenomena. Lastly, record-store clerk provides the quirkiest collections, with playlists that fit into categories like “this will piss off your parents” and “world music you can’t play at a cocktail party.” I really enjoy the browse all section of Songza. It’s got quite an interesting variety of ways to find and select music, great for when I don’t have a particular artist in mind to search for.

I’m exploring all the different ways playlists are categorized.

Even though it’s not a major feature, you can still search for a particular artist and find playlists that they are featured in. Just use the search bar at the top of the screen.

Enjoying Music

Now that you have poked around and found a playlist you like, it’s time to give it a good listen. I’m listening to a Playlist by the Songza team itself (as many playlists are), called “Songs From Apple Commercials.” While listening, all of the playback controls that you expect from an online, streaming music application are available. You can play or pause at will, and also skip forward (but not backward). The traditional thumbs up and thumbs down options are also available, but do not have as much impact as you might expect. Songza is a playlist-based application, so even if you give a song the thumbs down rating, it still appears in the playlist. The thumbs up and down ratings do, however, have an impact upon music suggested to you by the concierge.

The various options to look at when you are listening to a playlist. Playback controls are in the top right corner.

Another great part about Songza is the limited role that advertisements and licensing restrictions play in your listening experience. On Songza, advertisements are limited solely to visual ads. Your listening experience is never going to be interrupted by an ad, which is fairly rare these days. Licensing restrictions are present in a few different ways. First, you can skip only six songs per hour. This is also why you can only skip forward, never backward. Licensing restrictions also mean that you can’t listen to any playlists that you have contributed to Songza. All in all, however, it’s not too much of an impact.

Ads are scarce and rarely invasive – here you can see the small bit of ad space on the screen.

Lastly, I want to mention the social aspects of Songza’s listening experience. First, share options are present throughout the page where you listen to the playlist, making it easy to share what you are listening to via Facebook or Twitter. Social comments are also present on each playlist page, done via Facebook. Facebook Connect is also utilized to show you what your friends are listening to at the moment. Additionally, the playlist you are listening to continues even as you explore other pages within Songza, so you can also choose to explore the profile page of the playlist creator. There, you can explore their details, check out their other playlists or even follow them.

Exploring Songza’s creator profile – you can see all the playlists they have created to this point.

Contributing Music

Last but not least, let’s talk about contributing playlists. If you ever feel so inclined, it is quite easy to add a playlist to Songza. You just have to create a list of at least ten songs, by at least six different artists. You find songs to add by simply typing in the song name and/or artist name on the playlist creation page. It is absolutely the easiest that making a playlist can be. You don’t even have to upload an image – it’s all compiled from the album art comprising the playlist. A major downside is, of course, that you can’t listen to your own playlists.

Creating a playlist is a piece of cake. I just wish I could listen to my own!

Another downside of making a playlist on Songza is that you just don’t get a lot of potential views and listens. Songza’s music concierge focuses primarily on the 3,000 or so playlists created by the Songza team. User-generated playlists are harder to find, and there really just isn’t as much of a focus on them.

Final Thoughts

Songza is one of my new favorite music streaming applications. A lot of the time, I just don’t know what I’m in the mood for. On days like those, I can now turn to Songza. The concierge is a great way to find a variety of music for many different occasions. I can also search by holiday or event to find a ton of playlists for any situation.
Unfortunately, Songza is not always going to be my go-to application. While Songza is great when I don’t know what to choose, sometimes I know exactly what I want and would like a bigger variety of choices. In that situation, I would not choose Songza as their limited selection of featured playlists can sometimes get a bit old. Additionally, if I want to make a playlist that is sure to get some listens, Songza is definitely not my app of choice. There are other playlist-based applications out there which offer a much better system to showcase a variety of playlist creators.
Those are my thoughts on Songza. I’m curious, however, to hear yours. Have you tried Songza? What do you think of the service? Share your thoughts in the comments below.