I don’t know why, but I’ve never liked picking up my voicemails. My entire communications system revolves around my email, so I’ve never understood why voicemails don’t show up in my email box.
A number of providers can do this for you — it’s likely that your phone company offers this kind of service, where people leave a voicemail and the audio is emailed to you.
I use a great service called PhoneTag that goes one stage beyond that — it actually transcribes the message for you. You forward any calls you miss from your office or cell phone to the special number PhoneTag gives you. To the caller, it sounds like any normal voicemail, complete with your voice prompting callers to leave a message. When they do so, a human being somewhere transcribes their message and that text is sent, along with an MP3 of the actual voicemail, to your regular email box.
Google Voice and others offer something similar, but their systems rely on a computer program to try to decrypt what someone is saying. As such, it doesn’t know when a comma or period goes, can’t figure out when someone is spelling out a name, and so on. The people at PhoneTag are usually very good at trying to accurately transcribe the message. They’ll even put [?] after guesses if it’s not clear. If you’d like someone else to take a whack at transcribing the voicemail, just hit Reply and Send.
I’ve found voicemails come to me transcribed less than five minutes after they were left. I never, ever actually “dial in” to pick up my messages.
The other advantage to this is that because it arrives in your email box, you can store the message and audio forever. Search your email for someone’s name and you’ll get their emails and voicemails sent to you. It will even put their actual name in the From line of the email if you upload your address book to the system.
PhoneTag comes with unlimited voicemail box storage, you can still dial-in and pick up messages if you like, and 24/7 customer support. You can pay in any of three ways:
Whether you are in a meeting, showing off a home with a client, or on the golf course, you can instantly see who called, what they said, and you won’t have to listen to all of your messages to find out about an important missed call. I often hit Forward and reply via email to the person who left the voicemail. They’re often pretty amused to see their words in text form.
With everyone distracted by the various shiny tech objects out there (Twitter, Facebook, and so on), we’ve been neglecting our loyal — if a little rusty — friend: simple email.
Email, as we know it today, was developed in the early 1980s, a derivative of code from ARPANET made ten years prior. It went through a handful of iterations and today, most of the Internet relies on a solid little performer called sendmail. Sendmail is, surprisingly, quite a simple and small program. It sits in millions of Unix servers around the world to ferry email messages to and fro.
Sendmail is a great program. But it’s old. It’s still mostly the same program it began as. That’s no good.
Meanwhile, commercial email systems, like Microsoft’s Exchange or Novell’s Groupwise, have filled the functionality gap and added new functions that make electronic communications far more effective. And yet, we still slog along with the tired old sendmail. Email should do more than it does. And there’s no reason why we can’t start now.
Everyone who’s reading this article has had this experience: You compose an email, perhaps a little hot-headed, and hit the Send button. That’ll teach him, you think. An hour passes. You realize maybe you shouldn’t have called your boss a pig-headed douchebag after all. Lucky for you, he’s not back in the office until tomorrow. If your message were sent as a post-it note, you could walk into his office and throw it away. Not so with email. Barring breaking into his office, you’d best use your time thinking of grovelling strategies.
Commercial email systems like Exchange have been able to retract emails for years. You just track down your “Dear douchebag” email in your sent items, and click the “Retract Email” button. Done. Gmail has a slightly different take on it — you can send the email from your computer, but Gmail will hold onto it for up to 10 seconds before it actually sends it along (you have to turn this option on in Settings / Labs).
But the vast majority of email users should have this kind of functionality.
An email currently in my inbox contains two sentences. And ten screens full of the past conversation. Gmail can hide this conversation, but it still gets sent through servers worldwide. I’d venture a bet that 85% of email traffic on the Internet is actually this back conversation. This may have been a great feature to have in the early 80s when email clients didn’t really exist as we know them now, but it’s just silly these days. We already have the back-conversation because we’ve been in it. We need a “Show Me This Conversation’s History” button that constructs the conversation flow from our records.
Email 2.0 should not permit anyone to send attachments. You read that right. Emails are a lousy distribution method for sending large binary files.
Anyone who’s used an online upload service, like drop.io, can see where this needs to go. Rather than attaching a video file (or whatever) to an email, where that file literally travels with the email en route to its recipient, the Attachment button should instead place that file on one of these systems.
This has a number of benefits. Since attachments will live elsewhere, those attachment-hosting services can add more value. File conversions can happen on the fly. Send a Word DOC file, and I can download it as an Apple Pages document, PDF, ebook reader, or whatever I want. No more “I can’t open this file! Can you export it as a blah blah and send it again?”
We’d also have more control over the security of the attachment. Attachments can self-destruct after they’ve been downloaded. Or you can set them to only be downloaded from a certain IP range (within your company, for instance). That way, even if someone steals your notebook computer and gets into your email, they won’t be able to get access to critical files that were sent to you.
This is a common workflow for me:
Email needs to provide a reminder service that’s optionally tied to a specific date. If I email my agent and I need to hear back from her by Friday, the only way I can be assured that I’ll keep this email active is by putting a note in RememberTheMilk.com or writing myself a reminder.
This should be built directly into email. When you send an email, you should be able to set a date when you want the email to “bubble back up” from your sent items if you haven’t heard back from the person at the other end. When you do hear back from them, a simple “Close this thread OR Set a new bubble-up date” prompt would make me far more efficient.
Gootodo.com claims to offer this kind of functionality — bcc’ing 4D@gootodo.com will have the service send you the email back four days (“4D”) later. It’s rudimentary and, um, doesn’t seem to work. At least when I’ve tried.
What email functions do YOU wish existed?
UPDATE: November 12, 2009
Has the Twitter brand death-spiral begun? ComScore today released numbers showing that visits to Twitter.com declined eight per cent. Why visit Twitter.com when its API lets anyone access tweets from anywhere? Has the death spiral begun?
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Perhaps the most difficult part of forecasting technologies’ pace is discerning which technologies will be short-lived fads and which will become ingrained in our lives. Often, millions of dollars are at stake — should the I.T. department hold steady or invest in a promising solution that may indeed become the next Pointcast. It’s not an easy game and for that reason many technology commentators steer clear of any kind of forecasting.
But despite the infrequent unpredictable breakout hit, technology’s growth curve is actually quite predictable. (The oft-misquoted Moore’s Law is probably the most well-known reliable long-term trend in computer hardware.1 )
There is indeed a tipping point in technology timelines — the moment when a fad evolves into being a secure part of our lives — and it is the point at which a technology becomes invisible. Not literally invisible, of course, but practically invisible in our day-to-day lives.
Think about your home thermostat. When you actually stop to consider what it does — measure the room temperature and automatically adjust the heating/cooling automatically — it’s actually quite an amazing technology that’s had a large impact on our standard of living.
One can imagine the attention the invention received when it was first in use in the late 1800s. Today, though, it’s pretty much invisible in our lives. Sure, you can see it, but when was the last time you actually thought about your thermostat? Nobody has come to your place and stopped to remark about “that awesome thermostat” of yours. It’s simply slipped into the wider growing conscious of the technology around us.
This, then, is the litmus test for tech fads and technology’s influence in our lives. When a technology blends effortlessly into our daily living and becomes essentially invisible to us, it secures a permanent place in our environment.
And this is how Twitter will die.
I’m not suggesting, of course, that we’ll be without the ability to tweet any more, just that the mechanism by which we do so will become so ingrained in our lives that we may not even know it as “Twitter” in the future.
Consider the ways Twitter has evolved beyond being a hyped-up web site:
Facebook completely redesigned its site to become more “Twitter-like” (much to the chagrin of its user base)As more developers take advantage of Twitter’s API, the need for anyone to go to Twitter’s actual web site lessens. Now, we access through phones, airport and mall kiosks, and even toilets. A small industry is developing around linking ‘real life’ to Twitter. An inexpensive do-it-yourself kit hooks everyday appliances to Twitter so they can tweet about their daily energy consumption. And, in what screenwriters would call a beautiful “envelope ending,” modified thermostats can now tweet their average temperature points.
Contrary to the opinions of most tech pundits, in the coming years I expect the Twitter brand will decline in mindshare. Consider that most venture capital money is historically speculative and short-term in nature; V.C.s quickly grow tired of funding rounds devoted to building mass brand awareness, a very expensive strategy. This is partly why many buzz-attracting tech brands of the past today operate happily in the background, quietly earning consistent returns without the brand front-and-centre.
In fact, this trend toward invisibility is already happening to Twitter — newscasters tell viewers to “send a tweet” today, not “Go to twitter.com and send a message” as they used to. The act of tweeting will stay with us now, even if the brand fails.
As Twitter becomes less a web site and more simply a platform for short messages, the more its brand will recede from our mind. If history is any guide, this will be the point at which Twitter, as we know it today, will disappear. Its feeder parts, like cell phone apps and social networking sites, will then devour its functionality, pushing its growth into the stratosphere, making it immortal.
Twitter will die. And, in so doing, will live forever.
