Links: 8-25-2010

The 9X Email Problem
In most companies, groupware didn’t solve the problem; it wasn’t that much better than email. … But that’s not really the critical consideration. The critical consideration is brutally simple: are these tools 9 times better than email for collaboration?
Consider how high this sets the bar. Email is freeform, multimedia (especially with attachments), WYSIWYG, easy to learn and use, platform independent, social, and friendly to mouse-clickers and keyboard-shortcutters alike. It’s the ultimate example of what Dion Hinchcliffe calls a ‘comfort app‘ (a phrase I love, and plan to steal (with attribution) shamelessly). It would actually be a pretty tough competitor even if it weren’t the universally-used incumbent, and so the beneficiary of the 9X problem. In short, it’s not going anywhere.
(categories: email socialsoftware activitystreams ui ux )

Links: 8-23-2010

Buzz Kill : LOL: The Life of Leo
Quote: "It makes me feel like everything I’ve posted over the past four years on Twitter, Jaiku, Friendfeed, Plurk, Pownce, and, yes, Google Buzz, has been an immense waste of time. I was shouting into a vast echo chamber where no one could hear me because they were too busy shouting themselves. All this time I’ve been pumping content into the void like some chatterbox Onan. How humiliating. How demoralizing."
(categories: socialsoftware twitter )

Scaling startups
Wow.
(categories: culture risk engineering entrepreneurship startup speed )
inessential.com: Flexibility and power
Quote: "I don’t expect we’ll make software that looks and feels like iOS apps (we shouldn’t), but I do expect we’ll learn from iOS apps how power is the real goal, and that flexibility is just a tool to use exceedingly sparingly, only when it substantially increases power."
(categories: ux customization design )
What Happened to Yahoo
(categories: leadership culture entrepreneurship engineering )