MessageStream with Tags : email

New Features: FatBird and FWDance. MessageDance introduces new way to blog your tweets

Ask Sam (AskSam) — 2008-06-24T11:46:48Z

Well we have been too busy working on new features. We added tons of exciting features. Some of those we are announcing today.

MessageDance is an email service. We like to call ourselves social email delivery. We understand very well issues affecting mainstream email services. There is spam, clutter, asynchronous attention issues, and general pain to deal with attachment pain.

With this new release we decided to address non-work related email attachments. We call it FWDance. I remember how our sys-admins used to send emails emphasizing email best practices. One best practice used to be related to handling big attachments. Your colleague's funny lol cat haz message was usually just one click (and one virus) away from bringing high stakes product rollout plan to a grinding halt!

FWDance is a simple service to offload all those non-work related email messages and attachments. Instead of forwarding big ( potentially toxic!) attachments, you are just sharing a url. Your email administrator will come and hug you for doing this. Hey bandwidth is not all that cheap either, so you are saving your company some money.

Talking about money (how about few dollars to compensate for oil price pain!). Now with FWDance you can make money. We are allowing users to embed their own ad. This will show up on sidebar place. Currently we only allow Google Adsense (160x600 ad units) but we will be expanding this to include other networks.

Best way to test drive this feature is to create account in MessageDance, go to Affiliate module and enter Adsense publisher id. Once done you are ready to send attachment emails to <username> @ messagedance.com.

In short, FWDance is a simple service which lets you forward your attachment emails, share cool stuff with your friends and make money in the process. We think money making part is an awesome twist to the shared email experience!

Along with FWDance, we are also announcing FatBird Twitter phenomena is amazing, it's hard to define but amazingly simple to use. At MessageDance, we love Twitter community, 140 character constraint based tweets creates good addictive environment. Sometimes profound as well. As recent quake in China showed, Twitter can be put to good use. Microblogging format can be used for breaking news.

Twitter fits in nicely with our vision to push all forms of expression in a completely decentralized fashion. We call it anywhere to anywhere publishing. Today we are announcing MessageDance FatBird, a smart way to share browse and share tweets. FatBird allows users to -

- Browse tweets. FatBird does smart url expansion, that creates rich media browsing experience. Current release shows YouTube videos and Flickr pictures. You can even listen to song if tweet has any url pointing to mp3 file. Cool isn't it!

- Take bunch of tweets and blog them to your blog. Yes they come with url expansion.

- Share tweets with your friends. Like someone's tweet and feel like sharing it, now you can do that using MessageDance friend network. Tweet sharing notification will show up in all networks where you have MessageDance widgets installed. Facebook, Myspace, Livejournal, Xanga, Wordpress and Blogger are just some of the destinations where your tweet digest can go.

Also you can do other Twitter-y stuff like REPLY, RETWEET and posting new TWEETS.

I hope you like these new features. As always we would love your feedback. If you are not signed up then please headover to FatBird home page and signup using using Twitter credentials.

Firefox 3: The Next-Generation Web Browser; Email Use Costing $650 Billion a year.

Ivan Skin (collectsstuff) — 2008-06-18T10:49:20Z

Firefox 3: The Next-Generation Web Browser
Firefox 3 boasts new capabilities that will change the way that Web applications and content are developed and used.
READ MORE >>

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10 Project Chartering Tips - Slideshow
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	iPhone 3G: Less Talking?
	Sophos Eyes Endpoint Rivals
	E-Mail Use Costing $650B a Year
	Microsoft Plans New Search Center
	EU Slow to Leave Microsoft

iPhone 3G: Less Talking?
The iPhone 3G cuts talk time in half. Is it worth it?
READ MORE >>

Sophos Eyes Endpoint Rivals
Sophos is looking to expand its product portfolio to take on Symantec.
READ MORE >>

E-Mail Use Costing $650B a Year
Checking e-mail isn't the problem; getting back to work afterwards is.
READ MORE >>

Microsoft Plans New Search Center
Microsoft hopes to spur Live Search investment with a European tech center.
READ MORE >>

EU Slow to Leave Microsoft
The European Commission is still choosing Microsoft over open source.
READ MORE >>

Improve Your Business through Best Practices IT Management
State and local government IT department often face tighter budgets while also being called on to deliver more services. One way to handle this situation is to use best practices to get the most out of existing IT resources and to provide more reliable services.
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Layered Computer Security Approach: Compliance, Data Protection, Recovery
A missing computer can result in compliance and privacy issues that can be very costly for organizations that store confidential data, including enterprise, government, healthcare and educational institutions. This paper discusses the relationship between computer theft, regulatory compliance and data security, and examines how IT professionals can combine policy, encryption, IT asset management and remote data delete capabilities.
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Photobucket Announcing Group Albums

Social Media (SocialMedia) — 2008-06-06T19:20:03Z

You already know that Photobucket is the easiest way to share photos and videos with your friends and family. Now you can create a group album with your friends, classmates, co-workers and family.

Go ahead, start a group album of your recent vacation with all your friends. Just add your photos and videos, invite your friends to do the same, and before you know it, you'll have all the memories of your great vacation in one place.

Been to a wedding recently? Start a group album with friends and family of all the pics and videos from the big day!

Father's Day is June 15th. Make Dad a special gift this year. Order by June 4th for on-time delivery.

Gmail rocks or what!!!

Social Media (SocialMedia) — 2008-06-06T19:16:01Z

Introducing Gmail Labs

A testing ground for experimental new features

Try out features in development and let us know what you think. To get started with Labs, currently available to Firefox 2 and IE7 users, click the Labs tab under Settings. Learn more

What's been keeping us busy...

AIM, colored labels, group chat, and rich emoticons only work in the latest version of Gmail, currently available for Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 2. Please upgrade your browser to take advantage of these new features.

Gmail has a new look on the iPhone browser
Now with auto-complete when composing, automatic refreshing, and faster load times when viewing email. Learn more

More friends are more fun. Gmail welcomes your AIM® friends.
Now you can talk to your AIM® friends using an integrated chat list right inside Gmail. Learn more

AOL and AIM are trademarks of AOL LLC

Colored labels
Better organize your email with new colored labels. Just click the color swatch next to each label to assign a color. Learn more

Group chat
Chat with multiple people without multiple windows. Invite your friends to a group discussion. To start a group chat, click 'Group chat' from the 'Options' menu when chatting. Learn more

New emoticons
Start sending richer expressions to your friends. Learn more

Free IMAP
Sync your inbox across devices instantly and automatically. Whether you read or write your email on your phone or on your desktop, changes you make to Gmail will be seen from anywhere you access your inbox. Another way to use Gmail on your iPhone is through the browser. By going to m.gmail.com you get the full Gmail experience including conversation view, search, and more. Learn how to set up IMAP on other devices.

Set up IMAP on your iPhone. Watch the video

View as slideshow
Now you can open PowerPoint attachments as slideshows, without having to download anything. Just click "View as slideshow" next to the .ppt attachment you want to preview. Since you can open .doc and .xls attachments with Google Docs and Spreadsheets too, there's no need to leave your web browser to check out your Gmail attachments. Learn more
Increased attachment limit-- 20 MB!
Now you can start sharing more of those home videos, large presentations and files you just can't seem to get smaller. We have doubled the allowable attachment size to 20 MB to make your Gmail space even more useful. Learn more
It's a Gmail party and everyone is invited!
You can still invite your friends to enjoy Gmail's spam protection, 5GB free storage and other great features, but now you can also just tell them to visit www.gmail.com and sign up without an invitation.
Get mail from other accounts
Now Gmail can check for the mail you receive at your other email accounts. You can retrieve your mail (new and old) from up to five other email accounts and have them all in Gmail. Then you can even create a customized 'From:' address, which lets you send messages from Gmail, but have them look like they were sent from another one of your email accounts. Please note that you can only retrieve mail from accounts that have POP3 access enabled. Learn more
Embarrassment-reducing new message notifications
Ever replied to a message only to find out that someone sent a better, smarter reply right before you? Now, if someone sends a reply while you're in the middle of reading a conversation (or replying to it), you'll get a notification that a new message has arrived. Click "update conversation" to see what you've missed.
Forward all
When viewing a conversation, use the new "Forward all" link on the right if you want to forward the entire conversation instead of just one message.
Chat even when your friends are offline
Chatting in Gmail just keeps getting better. Now, if you're chatting with a friend who goes offline, your friend will be able to see whatever you were typing the next time he or she goes online.
Get Gmail on your mobile phone
Download it once, and start accessing Gmail on your phone with just a click or two. To try it for yourself, point your phone to gmail.com/app. Learn more
Voicemail
Your friends can leave you a voicemail using Google Talk. The voice message is sent to your Gmail account as an audio file that you can download or play right from your inbox. Learn more
Reply by chat
When you're about to (or in the middle of a) reply to someone, and you see that person online, you can just send your reply as a chat message. And if you've chosen to save your chat histories, then your chat even gets threaded with that original email conversation. Learn more
A picture's worth a thousand words
With contact pictures in Gmail, you can pick ones for yourself, see which ones your friends have chosen, and set certain pictures to show up for specific people in your Gmail account. Best of all, you can even send picture suggestions to your friends. Learn more
Gmail Chat
Get in touch with your friends instantly, from right inside Gmail! It's the biggest thing to happen to Gmail, since well, Gmail. Learn more
Vacation auto-responder
Set an auto-response so that if you're lying on a beach or taking a train across Siberia, your friends will know you won't be checking your email. Learn more
Contact groups
One of our most-requested features is finally here! Now you can send messages to a group instead of having to pick out the individual addresses every time.Learn more
View as HTML
Now you can view Microsoft Office, OpenOffice or .pdf attachments as web pages by clicking the "View as HTML" link instead of downloading. For when you want to see it faster, you're on a mobile device, or you don't want to install software just to view a document. Learn more
Shortcuts on the right
Now Gmail automatically detects addresses and tracking numbers, and displays useful information such as directions and package tracking alongside your messages.
Virus scanning is here!
For your protection, Gmail now automatically scans for viruses every time you open or send a message with an attachment. We even try our best to remove all the viruses we find. Learn more
Export contacts
Export your Gmail Contacts and save them in a file for back-up or to use in another account or service–great if you're using Gmail's free POP access. Learn more
Auto-save
Saves to 'Drafts' as you're composing. Never lose a half-written email again.
Get to Gmail from any web page
Download the new Gmail-enabled Google Toolbar. Search your mail or instantly go to your Inbox from any web page with just one click. Learn more
Gmail on Google.com
See your new messages directly from your personalized Google.com homepage.
Google Talk
IM and make free calls through your computer with Google Talk. Your Gmail contacts are even pre-loaded. Learn more
Customized 'From:' addresses
Customize the address on your outgoing messages to display another one of your addresses instead. Learn more
An application for Macs
The Gmail Notifier for Mac OS X even supports plug-in development.
Free POP access and automatic forwarding
Access your mail the way you want to. Download your messages. Read them offline. Use your Blackberry or Outlook or any POP-enabled device. Or forward new messages to an email account you specify. You can even switch to other email services without having to worry about losing access to your messages. Think of it as email portability Learn more
Import Contacts
Move all your contacts from Yahoo! Mail, Outlook, and others to Gmail in just a few clicks. Learn more
Signature options
From the settings page, create a signature that's automatically added to the end of all your outgoing messages. Learn more

Fw: HELLO.....!

Kiera Jones (cognitivedesires) — 2008-06-02T11:43:19Z

Who sends all these emails?

----- Forwarded Message ----
From: ali_musa01 <axxxx@xxxcom>
Sent: Friday, May 30, 2008 6:45:38 AM
Subject: HELLO.....!

Dear Friend,

With due respect to your person and With much sincerity of purpose I make this contact with you as I believe that you can be of great assistance to me,but first let me introduce myself.
My name is Mr.ALI MUSA, a 41 years old western educated man, from the Republic of BURKINA FASO,West Africa.Presently i work with the ministry of Housing as the secretary in charge of foreign contractors payment.
I am contacting you to seek for your assistance and possibly,partnership for investment purposes in your country.It has always been my mind to plan for the future of my family in a country like yours where there is a free society.

As you are aware,I am from a country where the same can not be said.Should you sincerely make up your mind to assist and also cooperate with me fully to actualize my dream;I promise you will never regret knowing me.
To enable us discuss further on how you can fully render assistance
kindly get back to me soon with this my private contact below meanwhile, for security
reasons!.

Thank you very much for your anticipated cooperation.

Sincerely,

Mr.ALI MUSA.

Transparency Key to Sustain Employee Performance During Recession

Nitin Shukla(Executive Recruitment) (shukla4execjobs) — 2008-06-02T00:31:41Z

Transparency Key to Sustain Employee Performance During Recession

by Kellye Whitney

In the midst of the current recession, prices for food, gas and most everything else are steadily rising. Employee performance, engagement and organizational loyalty, on the other hand, are likely to decrease.

Employers would do well to pay close attention to feelings of insecurity and the resulting performance disruptions that can occur during an economic slump, said Manny Avramidis, senior vice president global human resources at the American Management Association.

"Obviously it depends on the industry and the business that you're in, but usually during an economic downturn, most businesses aren't performing up to their potential," he said. "Employees are more concerned about their future employment and their personal well-being than they are about getting the job at hand done, which can often lead to quality and production issues."

To combat these workplace or work-quality issues, Avramidis said employers can be more proactive in creating a transparent work culture, one that promotes and maintains clear and consistent communication throughout the organization. Every employee should know exactly where they stand, as well as where the business stands, and what the organization's strategy will be to get through the economic downturn.

"Once the strategy is shared, you would hope that management and individual employees or contributors are able to engage and be part of the solution, whether it means creating new products or services or different products that perform better during an economic downturn, tightening belts, managing expenses a little more carefully - whatever it takes," Avramidis explained.

Taking the time to create clear, consistent communication that leads to organizational transparency will promote employee trust and loyalty during rough times and sustain these feelings once the economic situation improves.

"The organization has to be careful not to damage relationships with their employees, customers or shareholders, or whoever the interested party is in an economic downturn, because that's very hard to overcome afterwards," Avramidis said.

Once talent managers lay their business cards on the table, Avramidis said it's an ideal time to either retrain or show continued interest in employee development so, once through the economic downturn, the organization is positioned to come out stronger than ever on the other end.

"Even though unemployment is up and the economy is struggling, unemployment is at about 5, 5.1 percent, which is still extremely low," he said. "When it comes to unemployment of qualified talent, it's a lot lower. We can't ignore that, and we certainly don't to come out of this economic down turn in a situation where all of our strong talent is looking to leave because they didn't like the way we treated them during the downtime."

In an effort to facilitate transparency, some organizations even publicize worse-case scenarios, which Avramidis said can help alleviate some of employees' insecurities. These might include worse-case scenarios for the business, as well as potential employee separation - what they would be entitled to from a severance, outplacement and training standpoint.

"Good talent is still very hard to come by," he said. "Baby boomers are still going to be retiring in larger numbers than what they're doing today and the very near future. We'll still have the same talent shortage during this economic downturn as we will after it."

[About the Author: Kellye Whitney is managing editor for Talent Management magazine.]

Big social media opportunity lies in increasing the size of creators.

Brij Singh (brijsingh) — 2008-06-01T16:45:19Z

It's always refreshing to see good discussion on the big picture. Fred Wilson started this thread sharing his social media vision. "every single human being posting their thoughts and experiences in any number of ways to the Internet." This vision is brilliant in it's simplicity but it's a big shift in the grand scheme of human expression. I am sure there will be enough theories on how far reaching change this simple transformation will bring. We are in first inning here. We have seen the impact of social media on main stream media, we are yet to see that play out on other sectors such education, business (B2B or Enterprise 2.0?) and health. Blogging 1.0 is almost complete and we are go...

Read the complete blog post here

I don't need a special UI for my iPhone, thanks

Geoff Wolfe (rooffire) — 2008-05-23T11:17:15Z

With the Safari browser and the iPhone's sweet touch screen functionality, I can look at any web page and do what I would do on a laptop. Granted, browsing on the AT&T Edge network can try your patience, but when connected to wi-fi (and soon 3G), the browsing speed is perfectly reasonable.

So, it bothers me somewhat when I land on a site and they serve up an "optimized" UI for mobile devices (try MSNBC from your phone). Typically, there is less functionality available to you and in the MSNBC's case, it won't let you switch to the standard UI from a mobile device. I have the same issue with Twitter where the mobile UI doesn't have the functions and details seen on the standard UI such as Reply, Delete, and how it was sent (Twirl, MessageDance, etc.).

If I choose the "Standard" UI option for Twitter on my iPhone, it works perfectly fine. Sure, maybe it's small but two quick taps on the screen and it zooms in.

There was a lot of buzz yesterday about the availability of FF to Go which is an optimized FriendFeed UI for mobile devices. It lacks several of the features found in the standard UI, most notably search. Standard FriendFeed looks and works great on my iPhone.

At MessageDance, we believe in the future that the iPhone has brought us. Web companies don't need to develop special UIs for mobile devices because the browsing abilities on ALL devices will move towards what the iPhone offers today. The same is true for companies that build resident application clients for mobile devices. Why not just take advantage the native applications on the device? All you need is a good browser to access an application and an email client to use as an integration layer. Wi-fi is becoming ubiquitous so being connected all of the time seems less like a dream. Execution is critical; develop your applications accordingly.

It's the blog, stupid!

Geoff Wolfe (rooffire) — 2008-05-23T00:52:40Z

The title is apropos for the election season, but I'm going to propose an idea here and I hope to get some feedback. Lots of people are talking about the disconnect with comments and conversations happening on Twitter, FriendFeed, and their blog. For example, you make a blog post and (with MessageDance automatically) it goes to Twitter (and thus to FriendFeed), people can comment about it on your blog, Twitter, and FriendFeed (and on MessageDance.com). Big-time fracturing of comments. Since you started with your blog, shouldn't you be able to stay on your blog and see all of the comments come back to your blog? There should be no reason why you have to monitor everything to see what people think about what you said -- just have it fed back into your blog.

Your blog is the center of your universe

When you post your blog entry, wouldn't it be right to have it say on Twitter that it came "from {your blog name}"? Not from Twirl, the web, or MessageDance -- it is actually you and your blog that created the content -- you should get the credit! When someone comments on FriendFeed, shouldn't that go back to your blog as a comment, regardless if it was your original post or on a Google Reader reblog by someone else? Same is true for a Twitter reply. Heck, why not make tweets, @ replies, and FriendFeed posts directly from your blog for that matter.

To steal a late 90's term, your blog should be your portal. You start with it everyday and you don't need to leave it to keep up with your friends and your conversations. Your blog is all about you. Keep it all together.

Now explain me how multiple email support saves my time!

Ask Sam (AskSam) — 2008-05-15T11:36:59Z

Well that subject line was a question I received recently. Now our early beta users users know this feature very well but I thought not everybody is aware of it's full impact.

Recently we rolled out an interesting feature where users can set up their multiple email accounts. This multiple email account is like having having multiple passports. You can travel to the wonderful world of blogging and twittering from any email clients.

Now it won't be a big deal if it was just multiple email account configuration, possibilities this feature enables is where it gets really interesting.

Let's look at recent events and understand how these funny sounding technology tools (blogging and twittering!) are really saving lives and making an impact on our ability to express ourselves.

Mercury News recently reported about how Berkeley student survived his arrest in Egypt by making a timely help plea on Twitter. In this case having an option of channeling your distress signal was key to his survival.

We are all familiar with government authorities blocking access to expression tools. Recently we saw how Chinese government is blocking access to Blogger blogs in order to suppress dissenting voices.

Even going beyond state sponsored suppression, we have seen some companies going overboard with their security policy implementations. Now I am definitely not advocating throwing corporate security practices out of the window. All we are doing is connecting more dots which generate more options for expressing yourself. Having multiple ways to reach out to your point of expression is a great option to have.

Going beyond these news items, we have clear productivity objectives as well.

We are uniquely capable of coming up with different ideas based on our surrounding context. Take some of these examples - You are sitting in Starbucks, imagination strikes you and you want to blog using your iPhone. You are sitting in office cubicle and you have strong urge to send tweet, use your Outlook client to send tweets. You are at the airport in some far away country and only tool available is an internet kiosk which only allows Hotmail (you would be surprised once you step out of Silicon Valley!), use Hotmail to blog your field reports. To me this very idea of detaching tool dependency from the urge to express is a big help.

Here is how you can start blogging and twittering (from office mail - @officemail.com!, home mail - @pacbell.net anybody!, airport kiosk, Starbucks, iPhone, Blackberry etc etc) virtually anywhere.

Just put in your multiple email addresses (the ones you will send from) in DanceFloor > Manage Email. MessageDance validates that you are a valid sender and routes your content to where you want it to go.

You can just address your messages to "<you> @ messagedance.com" and have it go to multiple social destinations including Twitter, Facebook, Xanga, MySpace and more! Write a blog post and send it to "blog @ messagedance.com". Send you photos to your private photos section in Facebook by sending them to "photo @ messagedance.com".

If you don't have MessageDance account, please signup for MessageDance beta program and we will approve your request for full access.

http://www.messagedance.com/user/signup

If you are already on Facebook or Twitter, then you can avoid beta signup path and signup directly using following links:

http://apps.facebook.com/messagedance
http://www.messagedance.com/twittermail

Now finding your cellphone email address is not as trivial as you might imagine. I will be publishing list of popular email signatures related to leading telecom service providers. In the meantime please check these links -

http://www.verizonwireless.com/b2c/splash/blackberry.jsp
http://www.oreilly.com/pub/h/3249
http://cellphoneforums.net/verizon/t172216-what-my-text-email-address.html