MindComet

Environmentally-Conscious SPAM Infographic

Spam isn’t just an annoyance and inconvenience for our inboxes; it actually produces a negative global impact on the environment. The team at webpagefx.com recently released the infographic below explaining just how this is possible. They claim that each spam email on average causes as much CO2 emissions as driving 3 feet. Compound that with the worldwide volume and you have quite the impact on the global environment.

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Posted by Bryan Quilty on Oct. 17, 2011

Facebook Announces A Unique Vision Of Email

After taking an hour to digest Facebook’s announcement of their new email platform I’ve come to my own prediction on one simple point: For now, this will be very helpful for users who are on Facebook all day, but not your average, casual user so much. This also reminds me a heck of a lot of Google Wave. Since Wave was deemed too confusing by the mainstream and ultimately dropped from Google’s radar, you’d think Facebook would take note and not repeat history. For now, we’ll have to wait to see how things shake out.

Here’s a rundown of the new Facebook feature presented earlier this afternoon by Mark Zuckerberg and Andrew Bosworth:

• It’s been in development for over a year and has had 13-15 developers working on it

• 350 million users on Facebook actively use messages, which totals to an average of 4 billion messages per day (consisting of private messages and instant messages)

• Intended to present messaging in a simpler way, delivered in shorter bursts than “conventional” email

• Facebook claims that threading is “archaic” and that “whitelists” are not practical. (I agree with one of those points)

• It will consolidate private messages, IM chats, SMS messages and email into one thread per Facebook user

• The inbox will consist of three levels: “high-signal” important conversations, not so important messages and junk

• Your Facebook username will be your email address. Example: facebook.com/yourname =

• Will be able to with integrate Jabber, Facebook’s API and eventually IMAP

• As they put it, this is “not an email killer”, just a form of more real-time / simpler communication

• Over time, they intend to sync their email system with other email systems, as well as include video and voice capabilities

So that’s the long and short of it.

By the way, what do you think of this? Do you think Facebook Email has the potential to take over “conventional” email as we know it? Will it be a flash in the pan and go the way of Google Wave? Will it not make any difference at all? I’m very curious to hear your opinion!

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Posted by Bryan Quilty on Nov. 15, 2010