In The Next Version

Last week Citrix held their 7th annual Synergy conference at the Moscone Center in San Francisco with close to 7000 people in attendance. Many of the infrastructure products that Citrix sells ($2B+ revenue in 2011) are outside of my coverage area, but now that they are increasing their focus on providing software that helps people get work done, I was honoured to attend the event. Below are my thoughts around their collaboration portfolio which includes GoToMeeting, ShareFile and the recently acquired Podio.

It's How You Tell The Story

What impressed me the most during Synergy was not their products, but the way they talked about collaboration. Rarely during the keynotes or my 1:1 meetings with their executives did I hear talk of "social", and not once did anyone use the term "social business." There were no tales of how today's workforce is based on a more open culture of sharing, nor how a new set of tools/services is needed to help organizations change the way people work. Instead all of Citrix's messaging was around improving the processes that employees currently use to get their jobs done.

For example, think about a typical web-conference; a conversation begins in email or maybe chat and then an hour is scheduled to get everyone together to discuss and watch someone present slides. The problem with this workflow is that the information which led up to the meeting, the content produced during the meeting, the decisions made and follow up-items assigned, as well as everything that occurs after the meeting are not connected. Enter Podio, which provides collaborative workspaces where people can work together to create and share information and tasks. Add to that files stored in ShareFile (or other 3rd party file stores) and you have project workspaces, content and real-time web-conferencing combined. I think of this as the Citrix Collaboration Platform, which I've illustrated below.





While having a platform that combines these features is certainly useful, it is not unique to Citrix. Several other vendors including (alphabetically) Cisco Quad (WebEx), IBM SmartCloud (formerly LotusLive), Microsoft SharePoint (Lync), Oracle (Beehive) and Saba People Cloud (Centra) have similar offerings based on their collaboration and web-conferencing services. Each of these platforms has its strengths and weaknesses (including features, deployment options and pricing) but one of the things that sets Citrix apart is the Podio applications, which I cover in more detail below. Side note: Adobe Connect is now the only major enterprise web-conferencing service without an integrated collaboration platform, so I expect to see them making an acquisition soon.


There's A (Business) App For That

I've been a big fan of Podio since the moment I first discovered the quirky little Danish startup. While most "2.0" vendors were busy developing blogs, wikis and activity streams, Podio focused on creating a platform where people could easily build (or perhaps a better word is assemble) or download (from an integrated app store) business applications for things like HR, CRM, finance, meetings, etc. These apps do not need to be coded by developers. Instead, anyone can create one by simply drag and dropping fields onto a form (text, date, check boxes, status indicators, videos, maps, etc.), people then create pages based on these forms, and the completed forms are then displayed in views. Does this sound familiar? If so, you'll understand why I've been calling Podio "What Lotus Notes should have become." for almost two years now.

There are several things I find extremely useful about Podio apps, such as:

• They provide structured content versus simply jumbling together all the information into a single field. For example, if you're taking meeting minutes you could have a field for names of attendees and additional fields for agenda, notes and follow-up items. Or a feature request form could have fields for customer name, date requested, details, priority, revenue implications and project status. Providing fields to input information is faster and more consistent that just using free flow text.
• Because of these fields, the views in Podio can be sorted and filtered to show just the information you want to see. For example, if you want to see all the feature requests with status "In Progress" that are from companies over 10,000 employees, a few simple clicks and the view will show you exactly what you're looking for.
• Views have built in reporting capabilities where you can calculate things like count, sum, max, min or average of (appropriate) fields.  For example: In a CRM app, it's easy to quickly see the total revenue from of all the opportunities or you could just report on a subset based on any filters you wish to add.
• Task assignment/management features are built into the core of everything in Podio. Tasks can be generic or related to a specific workspace, application or even as granular as a specific page.
• Podio apps are accessible on Android and iPhones without any additional coding.
• Podio has been excellent at providing integration with other products such as Google Apps, Box, DropBox, Evernote and more.

Getting Work Done  

While many vendors are talking about "Adding social to core business process", that often just boils down to integration of events from one platform into the activity stream of another. To get real work done employees need to be able to create and engage with the people and content that contribute to their jobs. Podio apps are design to "be" core business processes, not just link to them. Also Podio apps have social features like commenting, liking, sharing and task assignment built right in, not added afterwards. Now add to that the integrated web-conferencing features of Citrix GoToMeeting, plus attachment storage from Citrix ShareFile (or other 3rd party file sharing tools) and you have a very powerful platform that employees can work together on to help achieve their business goals.





When Your Benefits Are Your Curse

While I've mentioned several positive things above, reality is that the success of Citrix and Podio faces many challenges. With almost almost two decades of Lotus Notes experience behind me, I know first hand that marketing a platform that can be used in numerous ways is quite difficult. It's much easier to explain the benefits of specific applications like HR, CRM or ERP that it is to sell something that is "the Swiss Army knife of collaboration." Lotus Notes suffered from this as does Microsoft SharePoint today. But times have changed, and people are perhaps more accustomed to the "there's an app for that" philosophy today than they were a decade ago.

Similarly, while "anyone can create applications" sounds good in marketing material, this does not always work out so well in a corporate environment. Sure anyone drag and drop a few fields onto a form and call it an application. But designing a successful app also requires an understanding of workflow, user experience (UX) and user interface (UI) design. Without corporate standards for things like form layout and field naming conventions in place, rouge applications can turn up by the dozens. I assure you, providing people bad applications, or even just inconsistently designed applications can almost be as bad as not providing applications at all. I think there is a huge opportunity for growth in administration and developer tools for the Podio platform.

The Road Ahead

Putting GoToMeeting, Podio and ShareFile together is good starting point for Citrix as they look to provide their customers collaboration tools. Podio workspaces provide a way to turn GoToMeeting into more than just an occasional tool that people use to get together online. Now web-conferencing can become an integrated part of the workflows that people use as they collaborate via Podio applications.  I'd like to see native chat added to the mix, enabling people to quickly get answers to questions, share links, etc. in a less formal manner than using the Podio activity streams or email. Today the integration between the 3 products is quite basic, but over time I expect to see a much more robust set of features evolve. To begin with, I'd like to see unified registration, log-on and directory (people and groups) features that span Podio, ShareFile and GoToMeeting.

Citrix provides the potential to elevate Podio from "niche collaboration product" to a major vendor in the collaboration market, as Citrix can supply Podio the resources to grow the product as well as a huge customer base to sell into. I hope to see several improvements in Podio's activity stream such as filtering (similar to what they provide in applications), embedded attachment viewers, tagging and hide/mute as well as a more robust text editor that allows control over fonts, tables, images and more. I'd also like to see more layout options for Podio forms.

While I don't expect to see an on-premises version appear, I do hope that restrictions such as GoToMeeting's 15 person limit are lifted, or else it will be difficult for Podio to grow beyond small departmental applications to supporting company wide business processes.

From everything I've seen and heard so far, I'm quite impressed by Citrix's vision to help employees get work done.  It's what they have been doing for years with their desktop virtualization products and now I look forward to seeing how they do with collaboration.


For More Information

• All the announcements from the conferences are available here
• Citrix Debuts Podio, the Team-Based Collaboration Platform Designed for Today’s Mobile Workstyles
• Podio is the First Collaboration Platform to Support All Major Cloud File-Sharing Services
• New Enterprise-Class Features for Citrix ShareFile Offer Businesses More Flexibility and Control over Data Sharing and Storage

This image shows how you can attach files from your computer, Google Docs, ShareFile, Box, DropBox, Evernote, Microsoft SkyDrive or SugarSync. The variety of services supported is great, but I'd rather see a configuration screen where you can choose which of these services you'd like have displayed versus them all being available by default.




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Today Jive Software announced a major update to their social business platform, introducing several new features and a new free 30 day cloud based trial. Below is a summary of today's announcements and my thoughts based on conversations I had with Jive's CTO Matt Tucker and VP of Product Marketing Nathan Rawlins prior to the launch.

New Features and Updates and Jive for Teams

• Jive Anywhere: A browser plugin that analyzes the current web page and displays matching "social content" from your Jive environment. Ex: You're viewing Acme Corp's home page, right on the side of the screen you'll be able to see all conversations, pages or people from Jive that are related to Acme.


• Jive !App Experiences: Enables people to access 3rd party applications inside Jive pages. Ex: You can easily insert a file stored in a cloud service by simply typing "!" the same way you insert a name by typing "@".


• Jive Edge: A sophisticated social intelligence engine that optimizes a wide range of social business processes such as search, providing more relevant, precise, and personalized results. Ex: If person A and person B both search for "competition", they will get different results based on their role and their social network.


• Jive What Matters: People can now create their own custom activity streams containing post only from the people and topics they are most interested in.


• Get Started: A guided tour of the key features of Jive, accessible at any time from a button at the top of the screen. The guides insruct you to complete a series of steps, or quests to help you learn how to use Jive effectively.


• Jive for Teams: Cloud based collaboration platform that is easy to signup for and use. Two licensing options are available: Essentials for $12/user/month or Essentials+ for $18/user/month. Each provides Jive's core collaboration platform, mobile, social media monitors (Fathom), Jive Anywhere (embedded browser experience) and Jive !apps. Essentials adds Outlook and Office integration, plus the Ideation module.

Details and My Point of View

All of today's announcements have one thing in common, they each improve the way people can access the things they need to help them get work done.

Anywhere and Everywhere

I don't say this often, but Jive Anywhere has the potential to be one of those rare "game changing" technologies with respect to the way people work. Think about how most collaboration/social networking happens today. Say you're surfing the web and you discover some information that you want to share with your colleagues, perhaps news about a prospect, customer or competitor. You copy the URL and then switch over to your social network and paste it into a conversation. With Jive Anywhere, Jive is no longer "another tool you switch to", instead it becomes an integrated experience that is right there while you're viewing the web page. Not only can you start a conversation about the information you've discovered, but more importantly Jive Anywhere shows you all the people, pages and communities in your Jive infrastructure that are related to the web page you are viewing.

The integration of features and/or information between two platforms can occur in many ways. We've been talking about "collaboration in context" for years, but Jive Anywhere is one of the best examples I've ever seen of this in action. Yesterday I introduced what I call the Integration Maturity Model. In it I outline how integration has two variables: a) where the integration occurs and b) how interactive the integrated experience is. The introduction of Jive Anywhere (plus !Apps covered below) moves Jive Software from a 2 to a 4 on this scale.

I mentioned above that the way Jive Anywhere works is that it analyzes the information on a web page and matches it to the content located inside Jive. Now this can occur on any generic web page, but Jive Anywhere also has what they call "cartridges" which can provide more advanced integration with specific web pages. For example, instead of just bringing in a page's title, with a cartridge Jive Anywhere could know about specific fields on a webpage such as customer name, phone numbers, tracking numbers, flight details, etc. Jive Anywhere is shipping with cartridges for LinkedIn and Salesforce (with more currently in development) plus there will be an SDK that enables developers to build their own cartridges.

The following video shows a few examples of how Jive Anywhere in action. Notice how in each case Jive Anywhere is not a plugin, meaning no changes or installs are required on the website (ex: Salesforce). Instead all the collaboration occurs in the browser's sidebar.

If developers start to build specific Jive Anywhere cartridges and they are made available in the Jive App Store this could result in an extremely powerful way for people to get work done. Enabling people to collaborate right inside all the web-based tools they already use (CRM, ERP, financial, legal, medical, etc.) means they don't have to "learn Jive" and in some cases they may not even know they are using it. Essentially Jive Anywhere empowers any web-based product to become a socially enabled platform.

Appy Appy Bang Bang

In contrast to Jive Anywhere, Jive !Apps (pronounced bang-apps) making apps available inside Jive. What's special about !Apps is how easy they are for people to use. Similar to how social networking has taught us to type "@" when we want to mention a person's name, Jive is introducing "!" as the key to press to easily insert an object into a page in Jive. Partners can build !Apps for things like file sharing, project management, sales opportunities, charts/graphs and much much more.

The combination of Jive Anywhere and Jive!App experiences provides people endless possibilities in the ways to interact in context with the tools they need to get work done.

Search and You Will Find

Based on the technology (and people) from the acquisition of Proximal Labs, Jive has been hard at work creating what they call Jive Edge, their social intelligence engine. The results of which are more accurate recommendations of content and people to follow; as well as search results that are tailored to each individual. So instead of simply indexing content and returning items based on relevance to the topic being searched for, Jive can now display results based on the objects you interact with, the people you follow, the communities you belong to, etc.

I'm a fan of this type of technology, provided I have the ability to override and/or tailor the criteria that influence the results. For example, just because I am a member of a certain community does not necessarily mean that I want results from that community to be weighted higher. In fact, there may be times where I want the opposite, as I'm looking for expertise or information that is not part of the ecosystem I already participate in.

While this is a great feature which will certainly benefit Jive users, it is not unique. In the consumer world Google calls this Search Plus Your World (which was not meet with universal love when it first launched) and other social business competitors such as IBM Connections also offer socially aware search results.

Living The Stream

Continuing on the topic of algorithms making decisions for us, Jive has introduced several improvements to their activity streams, including Jive What Matters, their stream that tries to automatically filter content that is relevant to you. I've been vocal for quite some time about my concerns around activity steams, how I think they can be made more manageable and some of the ways I'd like to see streams evolve.

Jive is doing a good job of making steady improvements to activity streams and with today's release they have introduced the ability for people to easily create their own custom streams based on people and topics they want to follow. The customization screen offers a nice drag and drop interface but is lacking some of the more advanced filters that tools like Tibbr and Bottlenose provide, although that is probably ok for a high percentage of users.

I'd like to see the ability to share custom streams with colleagues. Imagine creating a stream and sharing it will your peers, then in a meeting (phone call, web conference) saying "Ok everyone, switch to your Project Alpha steam and notice that Jane is asking about ship dates."

Currently SAP StreamWork provides the most advanced stream-based experience for getting work done, offering a variety of business objects such as decision matrixes and analytical tools. I'm quite interested in seeing how Jive evolves the integration of !Apps into the stream as a way to compete with this.

Jive for Teams and Getting Started

Since this post is already quite long, I'm going to write about Jive's new cloud based offering in a separate blog post which I will link to here once it is done.

In conclusion, today's announcements show huge improvements and advancements in the ways Jive can help people engage with the colleagues, content and communities that can help them get work done. Jive's overall user experience is now much simpler and cleaner looking; the new search features and improved activity streams make it easer for people to find what they need; and the introduction of Jive Anywhere and !Apps provides unparalleled levels of integration both inside and outside of Jive.

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One of the hottest topics in social software is integration, with each vendor hyping up how they can can integrate with, or integrate into various other systems. To help position the degree of functionality and richness of each vendor's solution I've created the following integration maturity model.





Level 0 = no out of the box integration at all, but do offer an API.

Level 1 = Ok: At the most rudimentary level, the vendor's platform enables events from other products to be broadcast into their activity stream, shown on pages, or similar. For example, events from CRM systems (opportunities, wins, etc) are broadcast into the activity stream or data is displayed on a person's profile. This type of integration is useful as events from multiple tools can be aggregated into a single experience where people can discover them, comment on them, like them, etc. Similarly some vendors offer the opposite type of integration, where their product can be accessed in other places. For example, adding the ability to comment on or share social networking conversations inside SharePoint via a web-part or on a web-page via an iframe. The problem at this level is that information is usually represented simply as links back to the source application, requiring people to click through to access the original object.

Level 2 = Good: Similar to level 1, but in this case the vendor provides both integration of other products within their platform as well as providing ways to integrate their features within other products. This provides customers more flexibility as there are more choices for how to access information and features.

Level 3 = Better: Similar to level 1, but now instead of simply providing links to objects in other products, people can get the full experience of that product right within the context of the social platform. For example, instead of just seeing a link to an expense report, you'd be able to view all the details and approve or deny the report right there.  Another example would be full access to a CRM record rather than just a link that contains the customer name and some basic information.

Level 4 = Best: At the top of the scale vendors provide embedded experiences that can be accessed within their own environment and their features can be accessed within other tools.  An example would be a vendor who enables ERP data to be access within their activity stream and they also provide their features inside email tools or websites.


In the future when I talk about a vendor's integration features I will be referencing where they fit into this model.

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I'm excited to report that Bedford Funding has acquired enterprise collaboration software vendor Socialtext. Bedford Funding is a private equity firm who over the last few years has invested in several companies and assembled them into the talent management platform, Peoplefluent.

As many of you may know, I used to be Director of Marketing at Socialtext, so on a personal level I'm very happy for my former colleagues but I will do my best to keep those feelings out of the following analysis. While financial terms have not been disclosed, I did meet with Socialtext CEO Eugene Lee to discuss several other aspects of the deal.

Unlike most acquisitions in this market, Socialtext will not (initially) be subsumed under the Peoplefluent banner, but instead continue to operate as they do today, retaining their name and branding. This differs from similar transactions such as SuccessFactors' (now owned by SAP) 2010 acquisition of Cubetree or the more recent acquisition of Podio by Citrix.

The current staff will remain employees of Socialtext and Eugene Lee will remain CEO, now reporting to Charles S Jones, Managing Partner at Bedford Funding and Chairman and CEO at Peoplefluent. With this new infusion of funding, Socialtext plans to increase staff in areas such as Development, Sales, Marketing and Support. They will remain headquartered in Palo Alto and plan to move into a larger office as the company size increases.


MyPOV

Integration - The combination of collaboration software ("social") and talent management software ("hrtech") is certainly a hot market, as these two areas lend themselves well to working together. HR functions such as recruitment, onboarding, recognition and succession planning can benefit from collaboration features (sharing, liking, commenting) while the workflows involved in collaborating on core business processes (Sales, Marketing, Development, etc.) can benefit from the people centric functions of HR software. However, I don't believe the initial stages of this deal will focus on tightly integrating the two platforms. Yes, there will be integration such as events from Peoplefluent being broadcast into the activity stream in Socialtext, but don't expect to see a single HCM / Social Networking platform emerge in 2012.

Potential For Growth - The go to market aspect of this deal has benefits for both sides. Socialtext will have the opportunity to be introduced into existing Peoplefluent customers (which they say includes 80% of Fortune 100) and Peoplefluent can now more effectively compete against other HCM vendors whom already offer social networking features. But while both organizations will have the chance to expand their customer bases, there will be challenges. For Socialtext, getting into F100 companies means competing against the incumbent vendors that these organizations already have relationships with such as IBM, Microsoft, Salesforce, Oracle and SAP. They will need to show these prospects the benefits of working with a smaller social business vendor, such as more rapid innovation and delivery of social features. Additionally, other social business vendors such as Jive and Yammer are also competing for customers in the F100 space.

Technology - Not only will the new infusion of funding provide Socialtext the ability to increase the size of their engineering team, it could also provide them access to some of the development expertise at Peoplefluent. I'm thinking specifically of areas such as mobile where Socialtext is currently lacking but Peoplefluent excels as seen by their iPad application. Other areas I'd like to see Socialtext invest in include social analytics and integration with the business tools people use everyday like email, calendar and office documents.


For more details on this deal from the HRTech point of view, please read my colleague Yvette Cameron's post.

Overall I think this is a great deal for Socialtext, Peoplefluent and their customers. Plus, I'll admit that I'm happy for my former colleagues! I look forward to watching how things evolve over the next few quarters. I hope to see some early examples (prototypes are fine) of integration and maybe a mobile app at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston in June. Perhaps we'll even hear a customer story about someone using both products. For now, If you're an existing customer of either company (or both) I'd love to hear your thoughts.



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Today Box announced several enhancements to their platform and partner ecosystem, including:

• 15 new Box OneCloud apps
• Version 2 of their API
• Instant Mode: Enables developers to create Box accounts that link to their applications
• Box OneCloud App to App Framework: a set of tools that makes it much easier for mobile app developers to tie their app into Box OneCloud
• Partnerships with New York based General Assembly and TechStars, who will be providing mentorship and assistance to early stage tech companies

MyPOV

Following the vast media attention that the launch of Google Drive generated yesterday, it's easy to discount today's news from Box as "more features from yet another file sharing and sync vendor.". That however would significantly down play what platforms like Box and Google Drive are trying to provide. These platforms are not just cloud based extensions of your computer's file system. They are more than the evolution of network/LAN drives. Box, Google and similar vendors are trying to improve the way people create, edit, annotate, sign, share, rate and access information.

Box's goal is to create a complete ecosystem where people can work together to accomplish goals. That could be something as simple as sharing vacation photos with family members, or it could be the collaborative processes tied to launching a product, closing a sales deal, or planning an event. Again, these tools should not be thought of as just simple services for synchronizing files from one computer to another, but rather a platform where work gets done.

As more business tools provide integration with services like Box and Google Drive, it will be easier to shift the perception of what these platforms can provide. Box's launch of OneCloud, their new API, Instant Mode and all their partnerships are helping to make these concepts easier to grasp, but it will take some time and good example stories to help people fully realize the benefits they can provide.





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Today Yammer announced several new partner integrations, including Microsoft Dynamics. The MS Dynamics integration allows CRM related events such as new opportunities or updates to account records to be broadcast into the Yammer activity stream enabling people to discover and discuss the event. In addition to the CRM announcement, Yammer also added several HR partners including UpMo, Perks, Ultimate Software and Subscribe-HR ; customer service vendor UserVoice ; project management vendors AffinityLive and Sciforma; and expertise location Senexx.

In addition to the new partner integrations Yammer is introducing universal search, premium groups, official content, email a file and mobile/desktop/web redesigns. More on these topics below and see the Yammer Spring Release web site.

MyPOV

I've often said that one of the best indicators of a platform's success is that other people want to integrate with it or build upon it. Vendors such as IBM, Microsoft, Salesforce, Jive, Atlassian and Box have large partner ecosystems and now Yammer is successfully building their ecosystem as well.

The Senexx integration is particularly interesting as it solves one of the more common issues companies face with social software, getting people to populate their profiles. Via the Senexx integration employees can connect their Yammer profile to their LinkedIn profile, then pull information into Yammer about their background, experience and expertise. That's just the first part of the integration though. The second part is that when someone asks a question in Yammer, the Senexx connector will try and locate the correct "expert" to answer the question and automatically create a reply to the question mentioning the expert's name, thus notifying them of the question. I've yet to see the connector in action, but I'm interested in seeing a) how accurate it is and b) if it is truly useful in getting questions answered or just adds more noise to the stream. (Update April 24 7pm) You can read more about the Senexx integration here.

One of the subtle but important things about the various Yammer integrations is that the events being posted by the other systems are being created as Open Graph objects in Yammer's activity stream. Open Graph is a protocol (most notably used by Facebook) that defines events via user, action and object. So a Microsoft Dynamics CRM event would look something like: Alan (user) updated (action) the account record for Acme Corp (object). These events are then searchable by Yammer's new Universal Search, which indexes not only content from Yammer (status updates, groups, files, pages, profiles, etc) but also from all events broadcast into the activity stream by partner integrations.

While integrating multiple systems into a single activity stream sounds appealing from an aggregation standpoint (and makes for a great Sales/Marketing demo), I am quite concerned that adding too much data in a single place is going to render activity streams unusable. This is a topic I have previously discussed in Making Activity Streams More Manageable. But Yammer is not limiting their integration strategy to just becoming an aggregator, they are also wisely following the path of doing the opposite and allowing Yammer to be embedded into other business tools. Via Yammer Embed, activity streams from Yammer can be accessed from within other systems such as your intranet, blog or any other business system that supports HTML. This is similar to SocialCast Reach. If you're not sure what I mean about embedding, think of how YouTube videos can be accessed in places other than on the YouTube site. This two-sided strategy of being both an integration point as well as being embeddable should provide a great deal of flexibility for Yammer customers.





Additional New Features

• Email a file: Yammer has added the ability to email a URL to anyone (currently using Yammer or not) that takes them to a read only version of a file or page shared in Yammer. The URL is only accessible from one device (so it can't be forwarded to others) and can be revoked at any time. This will make it simple to share content that is stored within Yammer with prospects, customers, suppliers or any other external party without the need to upload the file to another service.
• Premium groups: These groups can be toggled between public and private, pages can be marked read only by the author or group administrators, and content can be flagged as "Official" ensuring it shows up higher in search results. Currently Yammer offers free and premium (Business or Enterprise) services. Premium Groups are designed to fall in-between the two, offering several of the "paid features" from the premium services but without requiring the full package. Business or Enterprise customers automatically receive all the features of Premium Groups.
• Mobile/desktop/web redesigns: On-going improvements to make the various Yammer experiences more consistent with respect to unread counts, groups, access to pages & files and more.

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The amount of information generated in the blogs, wikis, video & photo sites plus the multiple social networks I am part of, is too much to keep up with manually. Thankfully email is here to help keep me up to date with what's going on. Yes, you read that correctly. Email helps me manage information overload.

In Mac's mail.app I've created a Smart Mailbox that displays the daily digests generated by several of the internal and external tools that I use and web sites that I'm a member of.




These daily digest emails enable me to quickly discover what's happening in a variety of different tools without having to manually go to each site separately. So in just a minute or two I can read about the job changes people have made, new videos vendors have uploaded, responses people have made to conversations I'm taking part in, files people are sharing with me, upcoming birthdays, etc. This is much more convenient than going to multiple sites, logging in, then reading through each site's activity stream one at a time.

Update 4/23 9:30am: Based on an online conversation with James Dellow of Dachis Group, I admit that 99% of people probably don't want to, nor should have to, create a folder or Smart Mailbox like I mention above. A much better solution would be if "daily digests" had a standard definition type that email clients, RSS feeds, dashboards, etc. could processes automatically.

That said, of course I still spend some time checking sites like Facebook, Yammer, Twitter and Google+. But when I do, I don't have to process everything from scratch, as I'm already caught up on many of the things that matter to me. Also many sites now provide a visual notification of the things that I should pay attention to. These notification counters are different than the unread numbers in your email. They are not just a simple indication of new items, but instead they reference items such as responses to things you've written or mentions of your name. Click on the notification counter and you're presented with information about the posts you may want to read first. They are very convenient.





Notifications are quite popular on mobile devices and tablets, so much so that Apple has added notifications into the latest version of Mac OSX.

So am I interested in getting rid of email? Absolutely not. It's one of the most important tools I use everyday.

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