practicehacker

The Problem: E-mail Overload

The Solution: That depends …

Finding too many new messages in our in-boxes is a stubborn, universal problem for lawyers: an occupational hazard if you will. I’ve examined various solutions to this problem, including as Outlook plug-ins ClearContext and Xobni, but was never satisfied with their performance.

Take ClearContext for example. It produces excellent coordination between contacts, attachments, tasks, and appointments, but requires way too much work. Basically for CC to work well, the user must do all the classification and draw the connections. By the time I’m done advising the program of what’s important, I’m already exhausted.

Xobni on the other hand, magically organizes e-mail and attachments by contact without the need for any input at all. It really is impressive at showing you who is who, and the history of your communication with them; but it cannot help me make sense of the 100+ new messages I get every day. And without visual clues as to what is worth reading I can’t even find the important messages, much less put them in context.

Finally, these applications and others like them are designed exclusively for use with Outlook; a notorious memory hog that can single-handedly slow down and crash my system. No thank you.

Then I read about Gtriage in a FriendFeed post a few months ago. Gtriage works with Gmail or Google Apps to identify important messages and give you visual cues with which to find them. Just sign up and within minutes Gtriage learns your e-mail habits, applies its machine-learning algorithms, then identifies and labels messages so you know which ones to attack first. Amount of work required on the user’s end: none. That’s more like it.

Gtriage takes less than 3 minutes to set up. Since it learns automatically there is nothing to do or worry about once you have signed up; but if you are the creative type you might want to see how it can be combined with Gmail plug-ins like Multiple Inboxes for spectacular results (see this example).

Special Offer for Practicehackers: At the moment Gtriage remains in invitation-only beta, but Unblab was good enough to provide the invite code for 10 new accounts. Simply go to http://gtriage.com and be one fo the first 10 readers to sign up using practicehacker as your invite code.

Let me know what you think of Gtriage by posting your feedback, compliments, or hacks right here on Practicehacker.com, send your thoughts by e-mail to mhedayat@mha-law.com, join our Friendfeed Group, or sound off on Twitter.

Posted via email from practice (redux)

"We Didn't See This One Coming"

While the Precogs could not be reached for comment, according to this story on TheNextWeb Google has acquired Recorded Future – a company that, yes, predicts the future. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Posted via web from practice (redux)

See if you can tell who Foursquare is targeting in it’s first TV Spot

Posted via email from practice (redux)

2010 Social Media Influencers – Trend Predictions

… and just like that, Google changes the game.

Let’s face it: Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn squandered their potential. Instead of becoming knowledge or trade hubs, they’re essentially virtual singles bars. All 3 of these networks are so choked with ads, scams, and come-ons that companies trying to turn a legitimate buck have turned to so-called opinion or “thought” leaders (anyone from Ashton Kutcher to Robert Scoble) in order to cut through the chatter. Fair enough, but lawyers still aren’t going to buy a product because it’s being pushed by an actor (even if it’s a dream-boat like Ashton). And as the authors of this piece in Social Media Today point out, professionals get online for reasons not common to the average user, including:

• engaging with others in their discipline
• collaborating on their projects or cases
• learning about innovations in their field
• sharing and discussing their experiences
• reinforcing their referral relationships
• accessing and sharing hard to find info

So why is there such a yawning gap between what professionals want in social networks and what the networks deliver? And to make matters worse, most social media campaigns are basically re-packaged website or blog content grafted onto the flavor of the month; an approach which is transparent and ineffective.

Why don’t social networks and advertisers observe the same rules that we professionals observe among ourselves, i.e.

• trust is built by giving freely
• one good turn deserves another
• value speaks for itself – no BS
• be patient – teach don’t preach
• respect my time and intelligence

If social networks and marketers respect these principals will they gain traction with professionals? How should I know? But I’m sure that if they ignore these points I’ll be gone before they can sell me anything.