We’re thrilled to announce that MailRank's co-founders will be joining Facebook in December!
We started MailRank to focus on the email that matters, combining powerful technology with a simple interface. It's been rewarding to build a solution to problems people face every day. At Facebook, we'll be working with a first-class team on our favorite types of technology problems while supporting a great product people use every day.
We'll be discontinuing the private beta of MailRank for Outlook to focus on our new jobs. Bryan has posted information about MailRank's open source technologies on our engineering blog.
The past year has been a wonderful journey, and we thank everyone who has helped and supported us along the way: our test users, investors, advisors, friends, and families. You have our sincerest gratitude.
Now off to a new adventure!
~~ The MailRank Team
Bryan has been at the Strange Loop 2011 conference in St. Louis the past few days. He ran a 3-hour "Intro to Haskell" workshop - and you can check out those slides here.
Slides for his talk - Running a Startup on Haskell - are available via github here. It hits the highlights of some of the decisions we've made at MailRank over the past several months... and some entertaining lessons learned in the process.
We are so close to a public beta of our totally revamped MailRank add-in for Outlook 2007 and 2010! Keep an eye on this space, follow us on Twitter, or sign up for email updates via our website.
One significant upside of working in the Mission is the food. There is some seriously great food here, all within easy walking distance: wonderful coffee, delightful sandwiches, excellent pizza, tasty Belgian-style crepes, gourmet ice cream, and of course the ubiquitous Mission burrito in every hunger-taming variety.
For me, the downside is the commute. Instead of enjoying my beloved ferry ride into SF, I'm coming into the city on BART. While efficient, it's simply not the pleasant camaraderie-filled downtime I became accustomed to riding the ferry. My colleagues have heard me kvetch about this enough that they can probably perform my regular rant about BART, word for word. Time to turn it around: I want to make the most of my train time. I've even found a way to turn it into a MailRank-productive activity.
I have become a BART-train people-watcher.
I try to be subtle about it, but I watch people check their email on the train. Yep, I admit it. The BART train is my new research site.
Bear in mind, I'm not reading anyone's email. I'm often too far away to see much more than the shape of the on-screen windows, and what they're writing (or reading) isn't what holds my attention. Rather, I'm focused on how they interact with email, and it's fascinating (to me, anyway). How BART commuters access email on the train seems to be mostly driven by whether or not they are seated. If they are stuck standing, it's all smartphones and BlackBerry devices. Should a lucky commuter manage to snag a seat from an exiting passenger, out comes the laptop! Internet connectivity on the train is spotty, but this seems to be where the majority of emails are actually written (as opposed to tapping them out on a teeny mobile keyboard). Nearly all of these commute-time laptop-emailers are using Outlook, and a surprising number are on Outlook 2010.
When I have line-of-sight, I try to observe how they interact with their inboxes. Do they open each message to read it, or use the reading pane? Start from the top of their inbox, or skim down the list and select one message requiring immediate attention? Maybe they have an elaborate categorization system, or use numerous folders to sort their messages after they've been read. I see few inboxes kept carefully swept clean of all but current work, and many that seem to spill over with unread messages interlaced with their work at-hand - the bands of bold/regular text indicating the read/unread status within the list.
These casual observations are already influencing how we approach use cases for MailRank within Outlook. Sure, it's not even close to a scientific study. For me, these morning/evening studies are still instructive about how people interact with their email inboxes.
Thank you, BART-emailers. You're helping me (and MailRank) more than you know. I look forward to returning the favor.
MailRank is moving into a semi-permanent space today, near the very-temporary space we've been occupying. CrowdFlower generously hosted us the past few months, and I can't gush enough about them. They greeted us warmly, shared their many delicious snacks, and overall treated us like family. We're very thankful to them for their hospitality and support. CrowdFlower hosts meetups on crowdsourcing from time to time, so if you're in the Bay Area and interested in distributed work you should check them out.
We own an older car, old enough that it doesn't have a CD player or satellite radio. It's never been introduced to my iPhone and doesn't integrate with anything via Bluetooth. When I'm cruising around town, I'm stuck with a plain old radio. If you haven't listened to plain local radio in awhile, there are a lot of commercials to navigate. I've driven many miles since we began our startup adventure: meetings in SF, meetings in Palo Alto, meetings in Berkeley. I spend most of my traffic-time hitting the "scan for another station" button. When we lived in Texas, that worked fairly well - there isn't much in the way of geography to interfere with a radio signal so stations have (gasp!) one frequency on which they broadcast. Here in the Bay Area, though, there's plenty of geography and radio stations routinely have two more more frequencies they use for simultaneous broadcast. Nearly every radio frequency has something there, at least enough to stop the autoscan.
Yet when I listen for a few moments, very few of the stations come through clearly. "What is that? Is that The Who? Ugh, can't hear it." I punch the scan button again... and it goes one step up before a crossfade between Banda and Def Leppard. An interesting combination, but it doesn't really work as the Banda gives way to a commercial break. Punch the scan button... and success! I've landed on KFOG, and I can actually hear the broadcast... which is going to commercial. Sigh. Repeat from beginning.
I feel like I'm doing the same thing with my email inbox. Most of the messages I get are some sort of "signal" and not "noise" thanks to pretty decent spam filtering from Google. Not all of that signal is created equal. I decided to keep close track of my personal email this week to get a sense of the email signal - and signal quality - I'm receiving on average.
Oh my! I get a lot of low-quality signal. (In email-nerd lingo, it's called bacn but that breaks my radio-dial analogy.) Still signal - not unlike the Banda/Leppard mashup. It's just not high-quality.
A few findings:
- In one week, I received 452 of these "low-quality signal" emails. Four Hundred and Fifty-Two!
- I use one account to aggregate other old email accounts. I receive many duplicate marketing messages between these different accounts - some to @mac.com, some to @me.com, others to @geekery.org. 93 duplicates in all! When I bothered to keep them for a week, I saw the dupes and unsubscribed where they turned up.
- Most of these are marketing notices, but Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn come in a close second.
With this quantity of low-quality signal, why don't I think of it as noise? Because in most of these cases, I have at least passing interest in the content of the emails. I don't spend time on Facebook every day, but I get notices when someone reaches out to me there. I skim the "changes in your network" email that comes from LinkedIn. I bought some yarn on a whim - the colorway is "Zombie BBQ" so how could I resist? - when I saw it in a weekly email from a favorite shop.
All of this email traffic is opt-in. I choose to receive these messages daily/weekly/monthly. I can always turn them off - this is my personal email account after all.
Now then, what about at work? How many emails come into our work inboxes that aren't really that important to us? At my last gig, I couldn't really unsubscribe from the regular email about parking in the LA office's garages, even though our offices were in San Francisco. A large company's daily sales rollup is very important to some of the people who get that email - but how many on the distribution list just delete it unread? Or worse, I think of the pressure of "institutional guilt" I wrote about last time. Think of all the low-signal work emails that stay in the inbox, unread, piling up and making the process of finding the "good stuff" even more stressful as it grows like a plaque. Funny how something as ephemeral as email can have the effect of weighing us down as it grows.
If you could draw a virtual line in your inbox and know that "everything below this point, I don't need to stress about now," it would be so much easier.
Quick thanks to everyone who participated in our survey! Y'all provided some great insights and suggestions, and we really appreciate your help.
If you participated in our first-ever "how do you use email?" poll, you may have won a $25 Amazon.com or iTunes gift certificate. Check your email!
I'm checking out the survey results and they're interesting. No patterns I'm ready to report (yet), but there's a lot of variety in these responses. Thanks so much for participating!
A few friends have given me a hard time about this blog post about why I don't think "unplugging" is the solution to overload. In short, I don't really want to be "unplugged" even though it's a popular theme in productivity circles these days. This seems like a good time for me to give some background on how I came to feel this way, and why I think "unplugging" isn't the answer to all our overload stresses.
When I see how online communication like email and social media has increased in volume over the past several years, I'm struck by the similarities with how Linden Lab seemed when I started there in 2006. It was a small-scale preview of the stresses of information overload that plays out all over these days. Lindens were notorious for sending huge numbers of email and participating in every group email thread, not to mention the need to stay tuned-in to half-a-dozen IRC channels and spend time in-world (which has its own chat/IM system). The signal-to-noise ratio was just made worse by the way Linden Lab culture strongly encouraged everyone to participate in every discussion. It was common for an email thread about something unimportant to kick off on the "everyone" list - which had between 80 and 250 members during my tenure - and run that topic into the ground with dozens of posts. For some reason, I didn't feel the stress of this information firehose this same way some of my colleagues did, so I wasn't particularly understanding of the insidious pain that overload caused.
Scratch that - it's a terrible understatement. I was wholly unsympathetic. I was terrible. "Use tools!" I would chide when someone made the mistake of complaining about "too much email" in earshot. "Use filters! Think strategically about your communications! It's not that hard - get over it!" Like I said - I was terrible.
At the time, I even felt a bit left out. There was this shared experience everyone else was having, and I just didn't get it. I tried to understand it better by talking with a few colleagues. One engineer summed up the problem this way: "I can't just not read every thread. I can't not be in IRC. I have to read it all. I have to have an opinion on everything. It's like a culture of institutional guilt." He totally nailed it - that's exactly the challenge we were having. That was the source of Linden Overload.
After I left Linden Lab, I joined EMI Music to work on technology to transform the music industry. It was the first company I had worked for in many years that wasn't explicitly a technology company, and the experience was a huge eye-opener. Though the rate of email and social networking communications wasn't at the same huge volume as Lindens had been struggling with, the feeling of pressure and that same "institutional guilt" to be constantly present were if anything greater than they had been at Linden Lab. Sure, everyone in the company wasn't stuck wading through a 50-post email thread bikeshedding whether an engineer had selected the One True Library. EMI users were still deeply feeling that same sense of being underwater with little to no chance of getting back ahead of the flow of information coming at them. There was the constant pressure on US employees trying to get answers from UK colleagues before they left at the end of a very long day. They were hurting. They were stuck. And I had the sinking realization that my glib chastisement to "Use tools!" had been utterly wrong.
That was my epiphany moment. I had been completely off-target about overload when I was at Linden Lab. Here I was in a new company: totally new set of people; totally different industry. Same creeping problem of too much information, most of it coming in via email, and no way for the recipients to combat it. It wasn't really a spam problem - for the most part the anti-spam battle continued along out of view of those not fighting on the front lines. The problem was too much signal, and of varying quality. Besides scanning through the inbox, there was really no way to get to the most pressing messages.
Now here we are, 5 years after I originally joined Linden Lab. What we used to call "Linden Overload" is now incredibly common in all sorts of workplaces. We feel a great pressure to remain connected and respond appropriately. Is that the reason we check and check and check our email again and again?
That's part of it. But there's another factor at play, and it has to do with how humans are wired.
Indulge me for a moment: Last night, I saw Casablanca at the Alameda Theatre. I've probably seen it 35 times. It's one of my favorite movies. Funny how you see different things on the big screen, and depending on what's already in your mind. I found myself fixated on the roulette wheel. "Why are people so attracted to games like roulette and slot machines? Sure, they're games of chance, but there are others that don't have the same magnetism." I think it's the thrill of anticipation. It's not the moment you put down your chips or plug in a nickel into the slot machine that pulls in the player; it's the excitement of "maybe" that gives a little adrenaline boost while the wheel turns and every outcome is still possible. We love the allure of possibility. I read here that 88% of UK lottery winners still play every week. The chance of winning gives a thrill that can be even more satisfying than the win itself.
What does this have to do with email? The same factors are at play when we look at our inbox. "Is there something new in my email? Maybe there will be something fun. Maybe something terrible. Maybe nothing." Email has its own allure of possibility, leading many of us to scan every message realtime as it comes in. I call this "email grazing" - the action of constantly checking and scanning our inboxes looking for someting "good" or "interesting." Email grazing's not so bad when you have a little free time to kill, such as waiting in line at the grocery store checking email on a Blackberry, or when you don't get much email so it's not hard to keep up. When you're meeting a client and you have 20 different things competing for your attention, email grazing feeds major stress buildup.
There's another case where I check my email incessantly - when I'm waiting for an important email. I have intense focus as I skim through my new messages searching for the correct sender or subject line. Though it's stressful to wait for something important to arrive, I actually find this activity less stressful than email grazing. This brings me back to the siren song of the roulette wheel.
Would roulette be as exciting if the instant a player placed a bet, he immediately won or lost? I would love to see some research on this, but I can't find any (so if you know of any please send me the info!). I suspect that without that adrenaline-feeding moment of anticipation, watching the wheel spin, the game would be far less compelling. What if we could apply that same principle to our email? By removing the uncertainty of whether "something important" is waiting, we remove the pressure to scan every email as soon as it arrives. MailRank's discovery of the most important messages in your inbox can eliminate email grazing and the stress (and productivity loss) that comes with it. You won't have to "unplug" to get out of the email grazing trap.
The more we know about how you use email, the more we can make it better. Don't forget to take our email usage survey for a chance to win an Amazon.com or iTunes gift certificate. The survey closes 15 March, so go here to take the survey!
Not all of the talks at InboxLove were created equal. I was surprised by the agree/disagree/agree during the AM discussion on overload in particular. One of the speakers cited a Pew study that claimed "most people don't feel information overload," and other speakers (from AOL and Basex) strongly disagreed. Though consumer-level users don't receive the volume of mail that power users work hard to manage, they *do* feel increased pressure and information overload from the volume cooing into their inbox. The contention seems to lie in "when does a person feel overload?" The productivity loss from false multitasking (a.k.a. "constant partial attention") is insidious -- it steals away tie in a hundred tiny pieces throughout the day so many people don't recognize it happening. Task switching is expensive, and it takes a long time to recover once we mentally wander away from the work at hand.
A few random stats I took down during the presentation:
- People have been feeling the pressure of information overload as long as there has been information. Jonathan Spira from Basex had a few anecdotes on this point, including "even the bible warns of a plague of books."
- The volume of consumer email has doubled in the past 4 years. (AOL)
- Information overload cost 997 billion dollars in the US in 2010. (Basex)
It was good to meet some others working on improving email, and finally put faces to some names. Thanks to the organizers for putting together such a great event.
Bryan and I will be attending the InboxLove Conference on Friday, checking out all that's cool in email development and "The Future of the Inbox" at Microsoft in Mountain View. I'm looking forward to it! We should be able to learn a lot by seeing how others are working in their own ways to improve the email experience.
I was just driving home through pouring rain, listening to public radio. The Marketplace afternoon edition ran a story about "unplugging" from the internet. "Great," I thought, "Yet Another Story about how internet usage is making us scattered... and that breaking the connection is something we should aspire to. Blah blah blah! I'm so over these kinds of stories." To my surprise, this one was a little more balanced than most of them. A journalism professor from Brooklyn decided to try six months without any internet usage, but even she broke down when it came time to research her wedding dress. She found that some relationships suffered and became disconnected when she wasn't in the stream of updates from email and social media. In the end, she broke down and went back online.
I kind of admire that she decided to try to set some boundaries with the expectation of constant-connection we've grown accustomed to. On the other hand, I have no interest in trying something like this myself.
I love being connected.
I love the immediate feedback getting answers quickly - maybe by search, maybe by reaching out to a real person. I also love being able to take my time to respond to a message when it isn't urgent, or to throw out a question knowing that it'll get an answer when the reader gets to it.
I don't love when those things are mixed up - when something that isn't urgent is bounced around like a fireball, for example, or when an important note is lost in the shuffle. Like I've said before, the system is imperfect.
Fixing that system, at least when it comes to email, is the driving purpose of MailRank. I'm not going to give up being connected, but I need my email conversations to be more efficient and less error-prone. I'm ready to make the most of those stolen few moments on the train or between meetings and follow-up on only the most important things.
Do you have a few moments to help MailRank fix email? Please take a moment to answer our survey on how you use email here. We're giving away 10 $25 Amazon.com or iTunes gift cards to randomly selected participants before 15 March 2011, so be sure to double-check your email address!
Thanks for your help, and have a great weekend!
|
