E L S U A ~ A KM Blog Thinking Outside The Inbox by Luis Suarez

My Top 5 iPad Apps of the Week – Week #4

Continuing further with that on-going series of blog posts on My Top 5 iPad Apps of the Week, here I am, once again, sharing with you folks another round of interesting and worth while checking out iPad Apps I have bumped into over the last few weeks and which I have been enjoying quite a bit. This time around we are going for Week #4 where I have got something for news junkies, road warriors, weather addicts and, of course, the game of the week! So, let’s do it!

Oh, hang on, before we get things going with them, and like I have mentioned on a previous blog post over here as well, I thought I would share a couple of interesting links related to the iPad and how it is changing the way not only we participate on the Web as end-users, i.e. as Web 2.0 enthusiasts, amongst several other activities, but also from a business perspective. Specially, today, where I have got a couple of superb links to share with you folks that clearly establish the path to follow on improving the overall user experience into new heights for mobile business workers.

The first link comes from my good friend Thomas Otter, who, not long ago put together this blog entry under the heading “The iPad and the Enterprise” and where he shared this rather thought-provoking reflection:

“[...] But what I’ve not yet seen is the must have enterprise application on the iPad. Yes, I’ve seen some neat repurposed reports and simple entry screens but I’ve not yet seen an application that makes me sit up and say wow, that is a new and fundamentally better process enabled by the device. So far the innovation is all about Apple.“

Well, that may no longer be the case. Read further on for his conclusion, which I think is very much worth while reading. I think the race has just gotten started. I think that more and more businesses are beginning to turn into devices such as the iPad to help improve overall the performance from their knowledge workers, specially those who are mobile. SAP has already started with that race, but I think that’s just the beginning. Have a look though into what Hyatt Hotels & Resorts are doing though. Specially, check out the nearly three minute long video clip that explains thoroughly what that innovation within the Enterprise could look like! And be ready to be WOWed big time!

The whole article is very much worth while a read, for sure, on what’s to come not just for knowledge workers, but also for consumers enjoying some of those really nice and powerful services, but here is one of my favourite quotes:

“Mobilizing hotel staff with iPad lets them get out from behind the desk and in front of the guests“

Or this other one:

“We use Lotus Traveler as the core platform to integrate with our messaging collaboration system, Lotus Notes — and users have full access to our VPN infrastructure“

Indeed, I can relate, very much, to what John Prusnick mentions on that article, since I have been using Lotus Traveler myself for work and it’s just beautiful! Not that I care too much about email, since I hardly use it anymore, but having quick access to my work calendar & agenda, as well as contacts, while I’m on the road, in a secured manner, is a killer! And, if, on top of that, you have got VPN access to your company’s Intranet network, like I do, then it all becomes a treat, to say the least! Boy, I just can’t wait for my next business trip and see whether I can make it and survive it without having to carry anything else than the iPad. Can you believe that? 2 months ago I didn’t think it would be possible to travel without my Mac. Very soon, on my next business trip, it’ll be a reality!

Yes, the iPad for the Enterprise is here! And, sooner or latter, it will catch up with everyone! So you better start looking forward to travel light, to much less pain on your shoulders and back, to the complete mess with cabling and gadgets to carry with you, and so on and so forth. Never mind where things will be going as we all become more and more mobile by the day! Indeed, I can’t wait!

Ok, enough with that drooling! Let’s go and move on focusing on the My Top 5 iPad Apps of the Week for Week #4, where this time around I have got some recommendations for news junkies, folks up in the air, weather addicts and, of course, the iPad Game of the Week. So let’s go!:

• Pulse News Reader: For those news junkies out there (Yes, I know! You can never get enough of them, can you? Welcome to my club! hehe), here is the first news related app I installed on the iPad on the same week when I bought it and I still use it on a daily basis. It allows you to customise the resources you would want to tap into and both the horizontal and vertical scrolling experiences are amazing. Incredibly engaging! Worth a look, for sure!
• NewsRack: Ok, in the past I have mentioned how Reeder for iPad was my preferred RSS feed reader client for the iPad. Well, since we all know how RSS Feeds are not dead just yet, right?, I have got a second one: NewsRack. It was actually my first iPhone app for feed reading and I was surely really glad when it came over to the iPad as well. I access my second Google Reader account through it on a regular basis and the reading experience is quite something! Even for large amounts of feeds! Loving it!
• Kayak Explore + Flight Search: This one is for those road warriors or those folks up in the air living their lives more on a plane than on the ground itself. Kayak would allow you to just find plenty of really good options for your upcoming trips and find that weird combination you can get anywhere else! I have tried it out a few times and it’s gotten me out of trouble far too many times! And browsing it through the iPad vs. the iPhone *does* make a difference!
• Accu Weather Free for iPad: From all of the various iPad apps related to the weather and weather forecasting, I must confess there are a couple of them that I really enjoy. Accu Weather is one of them. It’s free, rather accurate and the hourly forecast is quite an amazing experience, specially if you slide your fingers through the clock! Never thought I’d be interested in the weather just as much, but this iPad app is helping change that perception rather quick! Not much more to add … hehe

• AirAttack HD: And, finally, like usual, to close off the Top Picks of the week, here is the iPad Game of the Week: AirAttack HD. When I was a lot younger I used to be hooked into these kind of video games where I could play them for hours without getting tired of them. Remember the original Battlefield 1942? Well, this one is just as good, if not better! The graphics are amazing and the overall gaming experience is amazingly engaging and all of that for 0.99$; so who can’t ignore that? It’s just unbeatable, don’t you think?

And that’s it for now, folks! Hope you have enjoyed the Top Picks for this time around and, stay tuned, because, if I have some more free time later on in the week, I may be capable of sharing another round of Top 5 iPad Apps, since I am running a little big behind still from what I have been sharing over at Twitter under #elsuapps. That just to keep you busy for a little while longer… For now, I will let you all go and explore some of those, while I will go back to my meetings galore

Keep having fun!

Technorati Tags: #elsuapps, Apple, Collaboration, Games, iPad, iPad Apps, Mac, Thomas Otter, SAP, Enterprise iPad, Hyatt Hotels & Resorts, Lotus Traveler, IBM, Mobility, Mobile, IBM Mobile, Lotus, Pulse News Reader, NewsRack, Reeder for iPad, Kayak, Travelling, Road Warriors, News Junkies, Weather Addicts, Accu Weather, AirAttack HD, Battlefield 1942, Productivity, Productivity Tools, iPhone, iPhone Apps, Recommentations, iPads for Business, iPads for Biz

The Death of the RSS Reader: Another Debate That Needs to End!

It’s rather interesting to see how, over the course of the years, every so often, we seem to come back, time and time again, to some good old debates that perhaps we should have left behind for good, since we don’t seem to have made lots of progress over time. Just recently we have seen the one about the generations at work and the generational divide. Last week we saw it come back again with the Death of the RSS Reader debate, where a bunch of people stated, very adamantly, how the days of RSS feed reading are numbered and how we ought to be moving to something else. In this case, social networking sites, which is where we seem to be living nowadays by the looks of it. But, are RSS feeds really dead? Are we no longer using RSS feed readers on a daily basis as we used to? Have we abandoned them all to their own fortune and don’t look back? No. We haven’t. We have just changed, slightly, our consumption habits. To me, RSS feeds are move alive today than ever! And all of that, thanks to … email!! Yes, who would have thought about that, right?

It all started with the recent announcement of BlogLines going offline on October 1st and which last week made the tech news highlights for quite a bit. From there onwards, the conversation moved into stating that now that RSS feed readers are dying out a slow, but painful death, RSS feed reading will vanish as well altogether! Really? Do you think so? Really? I don’t think so! Otherwise, how are we going to consume Web content from multiple resources at the same time? I mean, are we going back towards just having 5 to 10 Web site Homepages open here and there and hit refresh constantly? Of course, not! Who would still do that nowadays? There are smarter ways of getting the information you need.

Who would just spend such a huge amount of time trying to catch up with things as they happen by having multiple Web sites open? Probably not many people, specially when those favourite links make up for total numbers in the several dozens or hundreds! It’d be almost impossible to catch up with! Stowe Boyd put together a rather interesting and thought provoking read where he stated the problem we seem to have been having with RSS feed reading all along. It surely is quite a good read, as it certainly highlights some of the various issues at play. Mainly, the fact that RSS feed readers are not integrated fully enough into people’s daily workflows, as far as how they consume their news items. And also how RSS feed readers and RSS feed reading, in general, haven’t evolved enough to provide new ways of digesting all of that content outside of the traditional concept of the Inbox.

Like I said, a great read that would help you understand what some of the potential issues are. I agree with him that RSS feeds have never been popular amongst our 2.0 habits, as we have always found it difficult to, yet again, check out another Inbox that doesn’t touch base, really, with what we do on a daily basis. However, he mentions how it looks like we have now turned into our various social networking sites to grab and digest that content as it comes across to us, pre-filtered collaboratively already by those very same networks, as part of the information flow. So it looks like we are ditching RSS feeds for social networking sites.

That’s quite an interesting thought. And I would agree with it to a certain degree, after all, Twitter has become for me what I have been calling my dynamic RSS feed reader of choice, but with that same rule, what we would then need to realise is that we are no longer having a debate about our RSS feed reading habits, but more about how some of the applications we used for that activity didn’t really meet our needs in the first place. And still don’t. Instead, we try to make the most out of our social networks. So, it looks like they are going to be our next RSS feeds eventually. If not already. Well, nothing further than the truth, to be honest. And here is why…

RSS feed readers still are rather cumbersome to make use of; as a starting point, most people don’t even get what RSS is all about. They find its explanation and definition far too complex to digest, and hugely prohibiting to make use of it fully. So eventually most people are turning back to what they are more comfortable with in the first place. Still today. Of course, I’m talking about … email! Let’s not forget: what’s the number #1 tool that we still use today to keep up with what’s happening inside our networks? It’s not the various desktop clients that I use to other social tools. It’s not the various networks that we all hang out at on a regular basis. It’s actually still our email clients where we keep receiving, more and more by the day, the various different notifications of activities that are going on inside our networks. That’s where our RSS feed reading is happening today! Right inside our Inboxes!

And, I am sure that at this point in time you are thinking how ironic for someone like myself, who is living “A World Without Email“, to eventually state something like that so categorically! Well, it’s not ironic, folks; it’s just all about taking email back to what it was designed for over 4 decades ago: a messaging and notification system of content that is stored elsewhere! And that, not sure what you would think about it, is what RSS feeds are all about: i.e. providing you with an opportunity to grab the content you need from the resources and networks you curate and nurture to help you stay informed and get the job done at the same time, but always following your knowledge flow!

And where does that knowledge flow happen? … Exactly! Right inside your Inbox! Welcome to the fabulous world of BACN!

RSS feed readers will come and go; just like with any other Internet (social) tool available out there. We have seen that happening for years, and plenty more to come!, specially if those tools are not capable of evolving accordingly to meet our current needs. However, that’s not where our focus should be. Our focus should be on the behaviours; on the task at hand; on building the good habit of ensuring people understand and comprehend fully, so they can adopt it successfully, key concepts like aggregation of relevant content or subscribing to the content that matters to them. Regardless of where it may well be: rather on Web sites, or social networks or even their mailboxes!

That’s where the key challenge and the debate should be happening, in my opinion. Yes, we all get to use Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. etc. to grab our feeds nowadays, but have you ever thought what would happen if one of these days any of those social networking sites disappears altogether without leaving a trace and without allowing you to make a backup copy? Gone! Zipped! Nada! Nothing! What would you do to keep up with your aggregation and subscription needs? How are you going to supply them? Well, with the easiest RSS Feed Reader ever designed for us all: email!

That’s right! To me, that’s the lowest common denominator that still tells me that RSS feed reading, as a social networking activity, is today healthier than ever. That habit of subscribing to updates happening in our networks is slowly, but steadily, turning our Inboxes into the next generation of RSS feed reading. And it surely is quite interesting to think along those lines, when email has been with us for over 40 years. Looks like we are reinventing ourselves, once again, and, at the same pace, we are reinventing our very own habits of how we would want to consume relevant Web resources that would matter to each and everyone of us without going crazy with the attempt.

Do I still use RSS Feeds personally? Have I given up altogether on RSS feed reading? Well, no. Not at all! Right at the moment that I am putting together this blog entry I’m currently using about 6 different feed readers: two of them mobile and the other four on my Mac. A good combination of both online and offline feed reading I have learned to grow over time load balancing what are essential key resources for me, and those others I know I will eventually come around them at some point. And, if I don’t, that wouldn’t worry me much either, because if it is something that I really needed, it would eventually come around to me. Are you still obssesed with keeping your Unread Marks down to zero?

That’s, essentially, the shift that we are going to see with our very own RSS feeds consumption habits: how we are no longer going out there to hunt down for the content stored in our feed readers, but more that very same content is going to be presented to us, pre-filtered collaboratively by whatever the filtering mechanisms (Human or not!), through those tools we feel the most comfortable with at the moment: for some folks it would be Facebook, for others it would be LinkedIn, for me (And plenty others, I am sure!) it would be Twitter, and for the vast majority the place where they all still live: their mailbox!

Finally, another interesting part of this so-called debate is, if we are all rather keen on relying on our social networks to provide us with those feeds and whatever other interesting Web reads, because that’s where we are going to spend more and more time, how we are going to possibly manage it all in such a way that we can draw some sense into it without going crazy? I mean, how are people going to have access to those critical resources when your networks may not be there ready for you? Because, whether we like it or not, that’s going to happen at some point in time? … Sooner or later, it’s going to hit us, whether we like it or not. And that’s, on its own, the whole use case for having your favourite RSS feed reader (Whatever that may well be!) at hand, so you can add it to your existing Personal Knowledge Management tools suite (and strategy!) you just can’t live without, even when you are offline, in a plane, for the next 9 hours! Where will your networks be when you are offline for an extended period of time? Think about it… You may as well need to have a good solid backup plan, or Plan B: your RSS feed reader of choice!

Technorati Tags: Debates, The Death Of…, RSS, RSS Feeds, Newsfeeds, RSS Feed Readers, Feed Readers, BlogLines, Stowe Boyd, Habits, 2.0 Habits, Adoption, Email, E-mail, Messaging System, Notificiation System, BACN, Personal Knowledge Management, PKM, Personal Knowledge Sharing, PKS, Sensemaking, Behaviours, Mailboxes, Enterprise 2.0, Social Software, Social Networking, Social Computing, Social Media, Collaboration, Communities, Learning, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Knowledge Management, Innovation, Networking, Social Networks, Productivity, Re-purposing Email, No-Email, Challenge Your Inbox, Thinking Outside the Inbox, Information Overload, A World Without Email

A World Without E-mail: The Mashable Effect!

Last week was one of those weeks that would surely mark a before and an after on my mission of living “A World Without Email“. Two years back, in June 2008, to be more precise, I published an article on this very same subject in The New York Times. For a good few hours it was the most emailed story of the day, or so I was told. The amount of buzz generated around the subject of giving up on corporate email and, instead, make heavier use of social software tools, was just outstanding! One difficult to forget! Till last week. Welcome to the Mashable effect!

If you would remember, on Friday September 3rd, Amy-Mae Elliot published a lovely article over at Mashable’s Homepage under the heading “A World Without E-mail: One Man’s Vision of a Social Workplace“, where she talked about a recent interview I did with her talking about what it is like being a remote knowledge worker working for an email driven corporation like IBM (Most businesses would probably feel the same way as well, I guess…) using, mostly, social software tools to collaborate and share your knowledge across, giving up altogether on work email. I had a terrific time talking to Amy-Mae about this topic, but I never expected what would be coming along after that! Basically, when the article was finally published!

Welcome to the Mashable effect, indeed! What happened from there onwards was the emergence of a huge number of superb conversations and overall buzz generated that it kept me busy for the entire week last week! Several dozens of blog posts, thousands of tweets, retweets and Mentions; hundreds of buzzes; hundreds of Likes; several dozens of comments on the original article (Which I have now finally caught up with!); traffic on my blog tripling from previous weeks, and, most interesting, a massive decrease of incoming emails, during the course of those few days… Something that, with the NYTimes article, didn’t last that much longer. But it looks like the Web has matured in this respect quite a bit! What before was perhaps the most emailed story of the day, now it’s been a huge buzz on various social networking tools for over a week!

Yes, I’m posting today this blog entry over here to reflect on the overall experience of what has happened in the last week and a day, since that article in Mashable was first published. I didn’t have much time to reflect on it till now and it surely is one of those wonderful experiences difficult to forget. For certain! Alas, new week, new stories coming along at Mashable and traffic over here has gone down back to normal; well, perhaps a bit more than double of what I used to have. But, certainly, things seem to have settled down quite a bit!

The remarkable thing from this whole experience has actually been getting contacted by people who I know very well for a long while now, and who I trust dearly as well, and, also, most interestingly, getting contacted by a whole bunch of total strangers, both fellow IBM colleagues, as well as non IBM social networking evangelists and enthusiasts, who have started themselves their own conversations on reducing some of the email clutter they are exposed to on a daily basis. That has been tremendous and what I would consider mission accomplished!

Social Networks’ traffic is a nice thing to have, it makes you feel good, it helps you get a good sense of being “noticed”, but, like I am witnessing over the last few hours, it’s something that will pass. People will move on. Just like yourself and myself. And that traffic will slow to slightly higher levels than before, but sticking around there. Yet the effect of that buzz will disappear eventually, over time! However, I cannot say the same thing about the conversations that’s triggering; about how it is helping people question the way they do and process email, and, most importantly, how they collaborate and share their knowledge with others. And, that, to me, is exactly what I wanted. To challenge email. To help people wake up and think before they send out that next email! And it looks like that objective has been met quite extensively, because the email traffic I got over the last week, including today, has been averaging 2 emails per day!! And the amount of social networking traffic has gone sky high!

Yes, indeed, mission accomplished! Everyone is out and about sharing their knowledge and information more openly and publicly, thinking outside their inboxes! And I cannot be happier than that, to be honest! Well, actually, I can be! Because also last week, a total “stranger”, Amber MacArthur (Amber Mac, for short), kindly invited me to participate on TWiT’s net@night live podcasting show with her and the one and only: Leo Laporte. Yes, I mentioned “stranger” a few seconds ago, because, to them, I was a total stranger, even though I have known, and followed!, them for years! (Some of my favourite podcasting shows I still listen to on a regular basis come out of TWiT).

Yet, there I was, about to be invited to participate in episode #167 on the topic of “A World Without Email“. Can you imagine how hard my worlds collided?!?! Still, I had a blast! I couldn’t say “No!”, of course!, to such kind offer by Amber, so despite the unearthly hour I stuck around and spent a good few minutes talking to them about the experiences of giving up on corporate email. What the main reasons were, why I still keep doing it, what social networking tools I use on a regular basis, what have been the main implications of such blunt move, and a bunch of other stuff, including some helpful tips on how to get things going for other folks!

Lots of good fun with some really interesting discussions going on as well! And all of that recorded for posterity! Yes, that’s right, there is a recording both at the TWiT site, as well as in YouTube. Thus I thought I would finish off this blog entry sharing the embedded code over here, so just in case you may have missed it last week, you would still have a chance to go through it and get a glimpse of what it is like starting a week at work getting hit by the Mashable effect and finishing it off with being the host of one of your all time favourite and unforgettable TWiT net@night shows with Amber and Leo!

Whooaahh! Will it get better than that?!?! I don’t know. I doubt it. But I tell you what… I would be incredibly excited if you would stop using email to collaborate and share your knowledge across with your fellow co-workers and other knowledge workers altogether and, instead, make a heavier use of social networking tools for business. Yes, that would make me really happy! Not just for you, nor for me, but for all of us! And if the urge to send that email is just still far too strong for you, breathe, count to 10, and think before whether you would really want to send that email or not. Hopefully, not! That would make me happy, too!

From here, I just want to take another opportunity to send a special thanks to all of those folks (Yes, you know who are!) who have made a reality such an incredibly exciting week for yours truly and his mission to live “A World Without Email”. I’d be eternally grateful, to say the least … Thanks ever so much, folks!

Technorati Tags: Amy-Mae Elliot, Social Workplace, Workplace, Knowledge Workers, Mashable, Enterprise 2.0, Social Software, Social Networking, Social Computing, Social Media, Collaboration, Communities, Learning, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Knowledge Management, Remote Collaboration, Innovation, IBM, Networking, Social Networks, Conversations, Dialogue, Communication, Connections, Relationships, email, Productivity, Re-purposing Email, No-Email, Challenge Your Inbox, Progress Reports, Thinking Outside the Inbox, Information Overload, A World Without Email, NYTimes, Articles, Published Articles, Mashable Effect, Buzzing, Buzz, Likes, Mission Accomplished, Amber MacArthur, Amber Mac, TWiT, net@night, Podcasting, Podcasts, Leo Laporte, YouTube, Recordings, Videos, Thanks!