In one corner of my apartment: my fixed telephone line. In another my printer/scanner/fax device. Challenge: run a wire from one to the other, every time you rearrange the furniture.
Recently I investigated web fax services like eFax, WebFax, RingCentral but for a low volume user like me they’re too expensive. You pay a lot of money for having a dedicated phone number for you, regardless of the number of faxes you send/receive. But I already have a dedicated telephone number, only it is completely disconnected from my ‘normal’ workflow: email, web, news reader. I would like to receive my faxes in my Gmail, because I never delete mails. With 7GB+ email storage, I don’t need to.
So what I would like to have, and what I don’t think exists yet: a Fax 2.0 device at home, let’s call it the FaxaPorta. It needs power and a phone connection, and … that’s all. So let’s make it look like this (not uninfluenced by the Apple Airport Express):
Here’s how it works:
- You plug the Faxaporta in a power outlet and connect to the phone plug.
- The device has built-in wifi and will connect to the internet in that way.
- You associate the device with your account on the Faxaporta website.
- Now you can configure how it is supposed to work:
- Incoming fax: send it to an email address as a PDF file, print it (you can connect a printer to the USB port)
- Incoming voice call: take a voice mail and send it to an email address as a MP3 file, forward the call via Skype
- Outgoing fax: behave like a network printer, or you upload a PDF file to the Faxaporta web site (it is then downloaded by your own Faxaporta device and sent over your own phone line).
- But because your fax is now part of your web-connected world you can do cool stuff like:
- When you get a fax/voice call, the Caller ID (phone number of the sender) is being matched with your Google contacts to add name, company and email of the sender.
- The faxes your receive pass through Faxaportas service and are OCR’ed so that you can copy/paste the text on it (cf. the ScanR service).
- The voicemails are run through a speech recognition service so that you get a text transcript together with the MP3 file. (Google Voice has this)
- The whole configuring of the fax/voice service is no longer done on a silly small screen on the fax machine with 15 cryptic buttons, but online, from anywhere you want. New response message? Upload the MP3 file! New front sheet for outgoing faxes? Create it in a WYSIWYG editor!
- You have an RSS feed for your incoming fax messages, one for your incoming voicemails.
You could even make a ‘better’ (more expensive) service for companies:
- try to route a fax to the right person (depending on who sent it, on names that were OCR’ed in the document)
- set up a Interactive Voice Response system through the browser (“For Sales, press 1”).
- create a searchable fax archive
- How about a fax ‘out-of-office’ service?
Does the Faxaporta exist already?
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Just the other day I was reminded of the existence of Wordle (via the Music Zeitgeist project). Wordle makes an esthetically pleasing word cloud of any assembled text you throw at it. “The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text.” Ithought: let’s see what that gives with movie scripts. So I made a tool that will read a .SRT subtitle file and return just the pure text. I can then copy/paste that text into Wordle.
Try to guess which movies these are (click on the image to see a high-res version):
#1
#2
#3
And for #4 and #5 I’m gonna give a hint: it’s science fiction!
#4
#5
Wordle is really cool!
The answers:
- Casablanca
- Vicky Cristina Barcelona
- Lucia y el sexo
- Star Wars III
- Star Trek
So I decided to let Facebook check my Gmail contact list to see if I had missed some contacts (people using aliases, etc …). After carefully selecting a couple of FB friends to invite (a buddy from the army, …), I clicked ‘Select’ and then ‘OK’ on the next screen that I supposed was a ‘Confirm’ window. I didn’t even read what was written on it. Some minutes later I saw emails starting to come in on different email aliases I had created in all my years of Internet activity. Apparently I allowed Facebook to send email messages to all Gmail contacts with email addresses that were not yet ‘known’ in Facebook. I have about 1500 addresses in my Gmail, let’s say some 500 already have a FB profile: so I just allowed Facebook to send out 1000 ‘unsollicited commercial emails’ or *spam* on my behalf. There is no way for me to know how many emails went out, nor to whom. I feel strongly embarrased, since I have been a strong opponent of spam for years, and since I have no idea who I have bothered with this bulk mail.
A company like Facebook probably has a whole team concentrated on user experience and workflow streamlining, so I can only assume that this strategy is by design. They probably have to keep the monthly exponential growth numbers so they use every opportunity to collect new email addresses. This is plain wrong. The default should be ‘opt in‘, not ‘opt out‘ (that is, select those you want to invite instead of unselect those you don’t wanto to invite).
So dear Christopher Cox and/or Chamath Palihapitiya at Facebook, while you will probably say that ‘but it is clearly written on the page that they’re about to send an invitation to (in my case, 1000??) contacts‘, you know that you are wrong on this one. You’re spamming. Big time, like real jerks. Since you’re probably not going to do anything about it, Google: any ideas?
http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/gmail/thread?tid=46004a5733eee4f0&hl=en
http://blogs.zdnet.com/social/?p=266
http://www.smartmobs.com/2007/09/02/facebook-friending-spam/
Seth Godin came up with a visualisation of ‘means of communication’: bandwidth vs sync(chronicity). He took a number of ‘old’ (postal mail, radio) and ‘new’ (blogs, Youtube and -of course- Twitter) technologies and ranked them on a 2D graph according to ‘quality’ (density or bandwidth) and ’sync’ (speed of reaction).
Although it is an interesting way of visualizing things, and I consider Seth a very bright and creative guy, I am bothered by the fact that the graph is neither clear, correct nor complete.
Continue reading ‘Seth’s bandwidth vs synchronicity graph: it’s a start’
I know, there are so many ‘funny’ videos you just have to share with your friends. So you send them an email. But for god’s sake, not with a 5MB movie in attachment! For all you know, he/she might not even be able to play that MOV/WMV/XVid movie anyway. Don’t send a movie, send a link!
WHY EMAILING VIDEOS IS BAD
- Email makes big files bigger
Binary files (like videos) are encoded, or rather exploded, by your email program (Outlook/Hotmail/Gmail/…) as text-only Base64 MIME attachments. Your 5MB file is transformed into a 6.85MB text file before is sent. Email is a very inefficient way to share videos with several other people.
- You hurt the recipients
Your email will have to be downloaded before the recipient can see it. If he is on a slow connection, this might mean 15 minutes of obnoxious delay before he can continue working, start receiving the emails that arrived after your ‘cute puppy’ movie. The movie, if it is not deleted, will add 5 MB of storage to the Inbox. If his Outlook/Exchange quota is 100MB (not uncommon on corporate email systems), you just ate 5% of all the place he has to store contracts, meeting reports and office gossip.
- You hurt yourself
By sending a 5MB video, you force your email program to upload a 6.85 MB file to your mail server. If you’re on a basic DSL line, this will easily take up to 10 minutes, during which all your other Internet activity will go very slow. You also add a big chunk to your “Sent Items” folder, bringing you closer to your quota limit.
- You hurt the Internet
All those forwarded videos make for a huge amount of unnecessary traffic that eats up bandwidth at ISPs and inspire them to keep prices high. Not that they needed the extra inspiration.
- It’s force-feeding-video, not video on demand
You are forcing people to download the whole file before they can decide whether they want to see it now, or ever at all. Youtube and the other sites have a very easy-to-use ‘Send video link’ form that will give the receipient the link, with a screenshot and the description text. Then he/she can decide when, where, how and *IF* to watch the video.
(Yes, this is less a problem with web-based mail like Gmail or Hotmail)
HOW TO FORWARD A VIDEO LINK
- public, popular movie
Don’t think you’re the first one to have seen this movie. Chances are it’s featured on Youtube, Google Video, DailyMotion, Vimeo, in multiple versions (FR subtitles if that’s what you like), in a format everyone can view, available to send as just a link “http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RgL2MKfWTo“. Less that 50 characters for a full 1:14 of hilarious time loss.
- private, ’secret’ movie
Even if you have a movie you recorded/made yourself and want to show only to a limited number of people (“OMG, Britney, you were, like, *so* drunk!!“), then upload it yourself to Youtube, Flickr or Vimeo, put a password on it and send link+ password to those recipients. It will be so much easier for everyone to forward that secret video that no one was supposed to see (“788 views just yesterday? How’s that possible?“).
We thank you.
On my left side: Matt Mullenweg:
- Matt was born in 1984 in Houston, Texas.
- Amongst other things (see below) Matt is a passionate photographer.
- In Jan 2003, unhappy with the capabilities of B2/Cafelog, he starts with the development of what will grow to be the hottest blog platform software around: Wordpress.
- In October 2004 he moves from Houston to San Francisco to work for CNET on, amongst other things, Wordpress.
- In October 2005, he leaves CNET too concentrate on Wordpress and also launches Akismet, a (comment/trackback) spam detection platform (with plugins for e.g. Wordpress).
- In November 2005 Matt launches Wordpress.com, the (free) hosted Wordpress provider.
- In Dec 2005 Matt annouces the creation of AutoMattic, the company behind Wordpress.com, Akismet.
- Matt is cited as #16 on PCWorld’s list of “50 Most Important People on the Web”
At my right hand: Dries Buytaert:
I especially like the ’spam detection’ detail. If this is the main concern of two of the leading CMS platforms, you can imagine spam is a real problem.
If we extrapolate on the previous similarities, we could expect:
- something like Drupal.com – a freemium hosted Drupal provider. The free version gives you an instant xyz.drupal.com site with some standard themes (layouts) and plugins. If you want your own domain, or a custom layout, you will have to pay.
- a Mollom plugin for Wordpress – because there is already an Akismet plugin for Drupal
- Wordpress starts releasing ‘distributions’: a special version for e.g. NGO’s, for schools, for music groups. This distribution will contain the latest core of Wordpress with some plugins, themes, widgets, pages … pre-installed.
In any case, I admire both guys and hope they continue to successfully lead some of the most promising web software platforms around.
I am currently using my experience with
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