I spend plenty of time making connections between people.  Email has certainly made this a lot easier.  One of my best friends – Warren Katz (the founder / CEO of Mak Technologies) recently send me some prehistoric emails that he had saved from me demonstrating that even when I was in my mid 20′s, I was using email to connect people.  Note the Compuserve email address – can you remember your Compuserve (or Source) address?  And yes – the Compuserve address bounces now.

Subject: Scott Instruments
Date: 10 Sep 92 17:38:38 EDT
From: Bradley Feld <75170.1206@CompuServe.COM>
To: Warren Katz

Warren,

I sent a letter to a company in Denton, TX called Scott Instruments and suggested they give you a call. This is a company that was co-founded by my first "business mentor" — a guy named Gene Scott. They are a voice recognition company that is based on technology developed by Gene’s son Brian (Brian is VP of R&D). They are a small company (20 or so people) that are primarily in the technology development and licensing business. They have deals with a number of companies, including Silicon Graphics.

I met with them last week when I was in Dallas. Their current CEO is a guy named Marvin Preston who also has his own business working with developing technology companies (Scott Instruments is his current client). He’s a super neat guy, and lives in Princeton, NJ (and has a daughter at MIT). I thought you might benefit by being hooked up with these guys in some way. When I mentioned virtual reality, everyone’s eyes lit up. I’ll send over a copy of their marketing stuff for you.

… Bradley

Eh – shitty metaphor.  But Bill nails it in his Dear Microsoft: Please Buy Plaxo post.  I don’t have a nickel in Plaxo, but this has been an obvious fit for a lot of years.  Hopefully someone at Microsoft is listening.  While they are at it, maybe they can build a file format autoconverter into Office 2003 SP4.

I’ve periodically engaged in the debate about who actually owns your email.  The assertion that email sent from your corporate email address is owned by the company is a difficult one for me to deal with, especially since email has become a ubiquitous means for communication.  As a result I find the entire thing tiresome – but important. 

I’m a big believer in private property rights.  I also know the risk of the government granting a property right inappropriately (for example, the evils of software patents.)  Today, the New York Times reported that The National Labor Relations Board Restricts Union Use of E-Mail.

The National Labor Relations Board has ruled that employers have the right to prohibit workers from using the company’s e-mail system to send out union-related messages, a decision that could hamper communications between labor unions and their membership.

In a 3-to-2 ruling released on Friday, the board held that it was legal for employers to prohibit union-related e-mail so long as employers had a policy barring employees from sending e-mail for “non-job-related solicitations” for outside organizations.

The ruling is a significant setback to the nation’s labor unions, which argued that e-mail systems have become a modern-day gathering place where employees should be able to communicate freely with co-workers to discuss work-related matters of mutual concern.

I’m not a fan of unions, but this is stupid.  Solution #1: Union members all get a Google Apps account (member@unionname.com) and use that for union communications.  Since it’s a union email account, shouldn’t that be ok even thought it’s being sent via a web browser on a work computer?  I don’t know union rules well enough, but do they prohibit interaction with other union members on work facilities during work hours?  If not, then this should work.

Stupid Company Trick #1: If the company believes it owns the email, doesn’t it actually want the email on the company’s e-mail system?  If the company has made every employee sign a little thing saying "we own your email", this would give the company the right to read all the union-related email which seems to give the company a big advantage here!

Stupid Government Trick #1: Why is our government wasting tax payer dollars on this? (Hint – this is a rhetorical question.)

Upon my return from a week off the grid, I was slaughtered by Facebook invites, LinkedIn invites, and an endless stream of unread blog posts.  It only took me 75 minutes of my morning routine to get through all of them.  The most entertaining ones had parallel structure to them:

• "you are my friend on Facebook – I thought we should be friends on LinkedIn"
• "you are my friend on LinkedIn – I thought we should be friends on Facebook."

Of course, if I hadn’t turned off email reminders for both services I would have also had email messages alerting me to my new almost friends.

Pete Warden – who I met through some special friends that I’ll be talking about shortly after the new year – showed me a really cool visualization of his Outlook Graph when he was in Denver for the Defrag conference.  He’s now made the alpha available for anyone to play around with (against your Outlook data store.)  Social network as a function of email.

Fred Wilson is now living in twitter, tumblr, and disqus.  I’ve been pestering Fred for a few months about the hidden social network across blogs, especially embedded in comments (Fred uses Disqus – I use Intense Debate.)  Social network as a function of blogs + comments.

There is another layer of structure here that some smart people are working on, but so far I haven’t found "the company" that is doing this.  The metaphor that popped into my head was portal vs. Google.  Before Google, we had Yahoo, Excite, Infoseek, Lycos, and a bunch of others.  They all did search and discovery, but were completely eclipsed by Google.

Today we have Facebook, LinkedIn, Bebo, Hi5, Meebo, Orkut, …  We also have email, blog comments, …  Seems like a parallel universe.  Be a good friend and help me find the answer.

Pete Warden has a good post up titled Google, Yahoo and MSN Mail APIs.  In it, he points at the various “sort of APIs” that are “sort of public.”  Later that day, in response to Pete’s post (not really) Google released the Google Apps Email Migration API.  Progress.  Deva Hazarika – who runs ClearContext – followed with a post titled The three I’s of “Inbox 2.0” where he suggests the issue isn’t the inbox, but the address book. Finally Matt Blumberg, who attended the top secret email meeting that was at Fred Wilson’s office last week, finished us off with In Search of Automated Relevance where he talks about “the channel of communication.”

While a universal set of APIs isn’t the solution, I find the need for an API in the context of the ubiquitousness of SMTP to be entertaining.  Most of the “sort of APIs” are limited in some way (one directional, not secure, not all inclusive, limited to a finite amount of traffic, available only to premium accounts, broken.)  As far as I can tell, none of these APIs really address the core issues in Deva or Matt’s posts.

I shudder to think that we need another abstraction (integration?) layer.  But maybe we do, especially when you broaden “email” to “messaging.” 

I’m sitting at the W Hotel in Union Square as Amy packs up.  We are finally heading home to Boulder after being on the road for 10 days.  We had an awesome time this week in Manhattan – one of our favorite cities away from home.  But – we are both fried from full days and awesome dinners / late nights.  Plus, our pants are tight.

Earlier this week I had a fascinating couple of hours with some smart friends talking about email.  Two hours later, we had a lot more questions and things to think about.  Some of the thoughts are up on the blogs of Fred Wilson, Tom Evslin, and Jeff Pulver.  Fred’s insight that we are really taking about "messaging", not "email" is an important one.

I just heard them say the word "delicious" on TV and my brain parsed it as del.icio.us.  I just went out in the hallway of the fifth floor and told the three kids running around yelling at each other to chill out a little.  Time to go home.

If you are following along at home, a gang of us are getting together in NY today to discuss email.  Tom Evslin – one of the gang – has a blog post on his pre-meeting thoughts titled Thinking Aloud.  I just read a pile of stuff about email in Slate including The Death of E-Mail.  Don Dodge (who I should have invited to this meeting) and I have had a fascinating exchange (pun intended) about this over the past few days.  This will undoubtedly be a interesting meeting.

Is it possible that I’m thinking about the same stuff this morning as Fred Wilson and Jeff Pulver?  Fred just put up a post titled The Biggest Social Graphs and Jeff just posted Social Media is changing the Face of Communications. 

Well – ok – yeah.  We’re getting together tomorrow, along with a couple of other friends including Matt Blumberg and Tom Evslin to talk about this stuff.

Paraphrasing a recent email from Fred – "Email is Dead, Long Live Email."

I’m completely baffled.  Yesterday, Saul Hansell of the New York Times had an article titled Inbox 2.0: Yahoo and Google to Turn E-Mail Into a Social Network.  Saul’s article is short and punchy, but excruciatingly obvious to anyone that has been playing with email for a while.

The amount of "social network" information contained in a typical email user’s data store is enormous.  Google and Yahoo are sitting on huge amounts of very interesting email data that to date they’ve done nothing with.  According to Saul’s article, this is about to change (with the subtle insinuation that "Facebook should watch out.") 

So what.  Seriously.  The real data lives in the gazillions of Microsoft Exchange servers that are distributed around the world and connected to this magical thing called the Internet.  Don’t think about your inbox (or your Outlook PST file) – think about "the server."  Yeah, I know – many large organizations run multiple Exchange servers – just envision an abstraction layer on top of them and think about each company.com address as a single element.

The amount of "social information" – especially in a business context – is staggering.  In the past there have been a few startups like VisiblePath and Plaxo that looked like they might go after some part of this.  Recently, a new wave has emerged like Xobni and ClearContext.  As far as I can tell, everyone is focused on the client side (Outlook) rather than the server side (Exchange).  This confuses me since the information, distribution, and the leverage (especially with regard to selling stuff) is on the server side.

But the bigger and more mysterious question is "where is Microsoft?"  This is their world and their domain.  Over 15 years they demolished IBM/Lotus (and everyone else) in "email" only to be ready to fumble the next wave of this.  I don’t get it.

We learned from our investment in Postini that large enterprises will let parts of this problem live in the cloud.  Google is quickly expanding on this vision.  I’m haven’t concluded whether this should live in the cloud, or be attached to a server, but I don’t think it matters (e.g. either – or rather – both work). It’s about the data, how you surface it, and what you do with it.

Yes, there are privacy issues, but they should be straightforward to address as long as one is being thoughtful about them.  Plus, that’s part of the fun of it.

I’m looking for entrepreneurs that are working on this problem, especially if they love Exchange servers (my ideal entrepreneur is someone who cuddles up to one in the winter to keep himself warm.)  If you don’t know how to integrate with AD (or think AD is a abbreviated version of ADD), don’t bother emailing me.

Maybe I’m missing it (I often do), but it seems like there is magic in the Exchange data.