tatsuya's posterous

This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business.

Just when you thought you had social media figured out, Google (

) has shaken things up with a new entrant into the market: Google Buzz (

). It%u2019s integrated into Gmail (

), which means right out of the gate it potentially has an audience of tens of millions of people. As such, it could eventually prove as important to your business as the other services we%u2019ve seen prosper in the past few years.

If you%u2019ve spent much time on social media sites, many of the features will look familiar, as Buzz combines elements of Twitter (

), Facebook (

), and the quickly rising Foursquare (

). But there are some subtleties that make Buzz unique, and in turn create opportunities that you should familiarize yourself with %u2013- if not start to take advantage of %u2013- as soon as possible.

1. Gathering Customer Feedback

Like Twitter, Buzz lets you post a message to a group of %u201Cfollowers%u201D that subscribe to your updates. However, there are a few differences, namely that messages can be longer than 140 characters (and include supporting images and links) and that replies are all grouped under the original message. This makes conversations easier to track and follow up on. There are also built-in features to reply in a one-on-one way, via either e-mail or Google Talk.

2. Engaging With Others

If you use Gmail, there%u2019s a good chance you already have a built-in network on Google Buzz. The service helps you get started by letting you connect with those you e-mail or chat with frequently. Once you%u2019re following some people, clicking the %u201CBuzz%u201D link from Gmail%u2019s main navigation will let you see their most recent updates. You can comment on them, %u201Clike%u201D them, or follow up personally with an e-mail or chat message.

3. Collaboration

Buzz can be used both for broadcasting a message to all of your followers and to select groups of them. If you%u2019ve already set up Groups in Gmail, they%u2019re already available in Buzz. If not, you can create new ones on-the-fly. Posting a private message on Buzz works exactly the same as posting a public one %u2013 you just select the Group you want to be able to see it, and then only those people will be able to view and comment on it. It%u2019s instant, private collaboration.

4. Marketing

It%u2019s too soon to tell whether Buzz will have the type of impact for brick-and-mortar businesses that services like Yelp (

) and increasingly Foursquare have had, but it has a very similar feature set. Users can %u201Ccheck in%u201D at business locations, in turn notifying their followers of their whereabouts. Thus, encouraging your customers to check in on Buzz (and other location-based services) can be a way to drive free word-of-mouth marketing for your business.

5. Sharing Content

Just like Twitter and Facebook, Buzz has the potential to be a powerful medium for sharing content. You can use it to share blog posts, special deals, or interesting links related to your niche. Just like other social media services, you shouldn%u2019t overdo it though %u2013 you want to mix promotional messages with a balance of other useful information and conversation for your followers.

So is it time to jump head first into Buzz? At this point, the right answer is probably %u201Cnot so fast.%u201D While Buzz clearly has some promising use cases, it%u2019s also not yet ideally designed for businesses. There are no business accounts, no multi-user support, and a host of privacy issues that nearly derailed the service in its first couple weeks (though Google has been quick to address them).

Buzz will likely become more viable for businesses when a Google Apps version is offered, as well as a standalone service that can be accessed by anyone outside of Gmail %u2013 both of which are reportedly in the works. Nonetheless, familiarizing yourself with Buzz%u2019s features and opportunities now could be immensely valuable in the future, while at the present, it can provide some useful additional functionality for Gmail users and their contacts.

More business resources from Mashable:

- 5 Ways to Avoid Sabotaging Your Personal Brand Online
- 4 Elements of a Successful Business Web Presence
- HOW TO: Implement a Social Media Business Strategy
- HOW TO: Choose a News Reader for Keeping Tabs on Your Industry
- HOW TO: Measure Social Media ROI
- HOW TO: Use Social Media to Connect with Other Entrepreneurs

Image courtesy of iStockphoto (

), endopack

reMail Acquired by Google

Posted by Gabor on February 17th 2010 21:37

I'm thrilled to announce that Google has acquired reMail! I will be joining Google in Mountain View as a Product Manager on the Gmail team.

Gmail is where my obsession with email started as an engineering intern back in 2004, and I'm thrilled to be coming back to a place with so many familiar faces. reMail's goal was reimagine mobile email, and I'm proud we have built a product that so many users find useful. Still, I feel like we've only seen the beginning of what's possible. Google is the best place in the world to improve the status quo on how people communicate and share information. If you have what it takes to make these changes happen, I encourage you to reach out and come join me.

You might be wondering what will happen with reMail's product. Google and reMail have decided to discontinue reMail's iPhone application, and we have removed it from the App Store. reMail is an application on your phone. If you already have reMail, it will continue to work. We'll even provide support for you until the end of March, and we've enabled all paid reMail features for you: You can activate these by clicking "Restore Purchases" inside the app. reMail downloads email directly from your email provider to your phone, and your personal information, passwords, and email are never sent to or stored on our servers.

I want to take this opportunity to thank the people that helped make reMail a success. Fabian Siegel, Einar Vollset, Sridhar Srinivasan, Paul Bohm, Marissa Coughlin, Erol Koc, Matt Ronge, and Stefano Barbato have all contributed to building a great product. Our investors saw the potential in improving mobile email and took a bet on reMail in the darkest days of the recession. I couldn't be more grateful to YCombinator: Paul Graham, Jessica Livingston, Kate Courteau, and Trevor Blackwell all have provided invaluable guidance. Paul Buchheit and Sanjeev Singh endured my slide deck on our multi-step plan for global email domination, and pointed out that instead I should build something small, simple, and useful. It worked.

15 Comments

reMail 2.11 is Out!

Posted by Gabor on February 3rd 2010 19:50

Please update via the "App Store" app on your iPhone. reMail 2.11 has a couple of bugfixes, and one cool new feature: The view of folder contents is now updated instantly as reMail downloads mails. A lot of users have requested this, and it's finally in the product.

We're also updating all users of reMail for Gmail to a new version that supports multiple accounts and all the good stuff since 2.4 - we found out that a lot of users are still on reMail for Gmail and we thought they'd probably enjoy a long-due update.

0 Comments

How Friends Use reMail

Posted by Gabor on January 21st 2010 23:15

I'm always happy to get feedback from my friends on reMail and get a sense of how they use the product. While they're likely not representative of the whole userbase, their input is still valuable, and I can actually watch them use the product and find bottlenecks. Here are two examples:

• I have an Indian-American friend who flies back to India once a year for a multi-week trip. Since he's worried about AT&T overcharging him, he switches the phone to airplane mode for the entire trip. He uses reMail to find all the addresses and travel plans he needs, and occasionally downloads the newest emails over Wifi. He's been asking for HTML support in reMail, which is definitely on my list of things to do next.
• My friend Axel lives in Germany and uses an old Nokia as his cell phone, because it's small and the battery lasts forever. He also has an iPod Touch which he's primarily used for gaming and listening to music. Since he doesn't have email access on his Nokia, and his iPod Touch doesn't have GSM, he uses reMail to have access to his email archives when he's not at home or at school.

Have a reMail story to share? Use the "Support/Feedback" button in reMail to send it straight to me!

0 Comments

reMail 2.11 Submitted for App Store Review

Posted by Gabor on January 19th 2010 22:34

I just submitted reMail V2.11 for App Store review.

It has one pretty cool feature: The view of folder contents is now updated instantly as reMail downloads mails. A lot of users have requested this, and it's finally in the product.

reMail 2.11 should be on the App Store soon.

0 Comments

FCC Chairman (Jokingly) Endorses reMail

Posted by Gabor on January 7th 2010 18:44

GigaOm kindly invited me to a GigaOm session yesterday with FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski yesterday. In the discussion, Genachowski discussed issues around net neutrality and the looming constraint on wireless spectrum.

At the start of the event, the Chairman joked about how he had mentioned his fascination with an iPhone App at a conference, only to find that company come back to him and ask for an official endorsement, which as an impartial government agency the FCC can't give.

When the time arrived for the Q&A session, I stood up to ask a question about FCC's involvement in regulating the mobile app stores. Here's what happened. You can see this exchange at time index 44:45 (displayed in the player as -18:10):

Gabor: Hi this is Gabor from reMail, we develop iPhone applications. So ...
Genachowski: [jokingly] I endorse your company.
[laughter]
Audience member: Sit down, you're done!
Gabor: Um - I'm going to keep standing and ask the following question ...
Genachowski: Am I in trouble now?
Gabor: I'll put that on our website this afternoon.

And here's the post, as promised. If this post gets taken down, you'll know why it happened.

If you can't see the player, click here.

Watch live streaming video from gigaomtv at livestream.com

0 Comments

reMail 2.8 on the App Store

Posted by Gabor on December 31st 2009 10:17

reMail 2.8 was approved by Apple right after Christmas, while I was out snowboarding in the Swiss Alps. It's a minor bugfix release, so it's not imperative that you upgrade.

We added a workaround for GMX users who were experiencing Protocol Errors caused by GMX's IMAP implementation. We also improved the speed of the "Status" screen which used to take several seconds to appear for people with tens of thousands of emails. It should now appear instantly.

0 Comments

reMail 2.8 Submitted to App Store

Posted by Gabor on December 21st 2009 23:24

We just submitted reMail 2.8 to the App Store. It will be a small update with some UI speedups and a bugfix for users with GMX accounts. (It turns out GMX doesn't completely follow the IMAP protocol specifications. There's now a workaround in reMail to deal with their server.)

Until then: Happy Holidays from the reMail team!

0 Comments

"Search All Your Rackspace Email on Your iPhone with reMail"

Posted by Gabor on December 17th 2009 02:25

Here's what Rackspace writes about reMail:

You know this situation: You%u2019re traveling and you need to look up your flight confirmation, meeting time, or hotel reservation. All this information is in your email. We partnered up with the team at reMail to offer Rackspace Email customers a solution to this problem %u2014 and get a great deal at the same time!

We're offering Rackspace Email customers a reduced price on reMail functionality. Read all about it here.

0 Comments

reMail hearts Rackspace

Posted by Gabor on December 16th 2009 21:48

We've partnered up with Rackspace to bring their 1.5 million email hosting customers a more integrated, cheaper version of reMail: You can connect any number of Rackspace email accounts to your reMail for $0.99, instead of the $4.99 we charge for any IMAP account.

This feature is available in reMail 276, which is now available in the App Store. This new version brings a bunch of new stuff: Person searches are now faster, the UI is smoother, and you can set up Push notifications to remind you to download your latest email.

We've also changed reMail to be a free download. You can then buy support for other types of accounts via In-App purchase. We believe that this is a better model than charging the entire amount upfront. This way you can test drive reMail and see how useful it is!

Existing customers get reMail 2.7 for free. All the In-App purchase options will be marked as purchased (if this doesn't happen, please drop us a line in Settings > Feedback). We're phasing out reMail for Gmail in favor of a single edition of reMail: If you've used reMail for Gmail in the past, please download reMail.

Read more about this on the Rackspace Apps Blog!

1 Comment

reMail's New Business Model

Posted by Gabor on December 14th 2009 01:17

reMail is now available on the App Store for free:

Support for Gmail and Google Mail accounts is included for free. You can purchase IMAP support inside the application,by clicking on "Buy reMail Features". IMAP support costs $3.99:

I think that this is the model that we'll see most apps trending towards: A true Freemium model. Apps will be free. Users can buy additional features that will make the app more useful and valuable. Rather than paying $4.99 upfront, reMail users can now buy the same features once they've been able to try out the app with a Gmail account.

0 Comments

Older Entries �

Google Calendar may not be the sexiest product Google offers, but, as with Gmail, there are plenty of people who use it to manage their business and personal lives (and wind up staring at it for hours each week as a result). Today, we’ve gotten our hands on a screenshot showing what appears to be an internal build of Google Calendar, giving us an idea of what a forthcoming UI refresh might look like. We’ve included photos of both the internal version and the current version below for comparison’s sake (be sure to click on the photo for a larger version).

As far as we can tell, the changes are all aesthetic and fairly minor but they add up to make a difference — the new version looks more modern, and it also looks more like Google’s other Apps. The new version replaces many of the text-based navigation links with the sleeker silver buttons, which are also found throughout Gmail and Google Docs. The calendar has been spruced up a bit, and the entire interface is now surrounded by a colored border (in the current version, some text and links and hover above the calendar, which looks a little less polished).
[...]

What are Google Chart Tools?

The Google Chart Tools enable adding live charts to any web page.

The advantages of the Google Chart Tools are:

* A rich gallery of visualizations provided as:
o Image charts - using a simple URL request to a Google chart server
o Interactive charts - using a Google developed JavaScript library
* Can read live data from a variety of data sources
* Simple to use and free

This post is part of our ReadWriteCloud channel, which is dedicated to covering virtualization and cloud computing. The channel is sponsored by Intel and VMware. As you're planning your Cloud Architecture, check out this helpful resource from our sponsors: Virtualized Datacenter = Real-World IT Optimization.

Privacy is a touchy subject. In almost all cases, the more fame and fortune a person or company acquires, the more scrutiny they receive. And, out comes the trolls, worms and paparazzi.

Twitter and Facebook are the beacon examples of this issue. People like being famous, and we want followers! And the evidence shows, the more personal information we put out there, the more people consume it. Today, on International Data Privacy Day, we explore the social and technical norms and issues of privacy in the network and the cloud.

International Data Privacy Day is an event that asks, "In this networked world, in which we are thoroughly digitized, with our identities, locations, actions, purchases, associations, movements, and histories stored as so many bits and bytes, we have to ask - who is collecting all of this - what are they doing with it - with whom are they sharing it? "

One of the official sponsors of Data Privacy Day is the recently launched, The Privacy Projects. Interestingly, the other official sponsors include Google, Microsoft and AT&T. Each of these organizations themselves have been under intense scrutiny for privacy policies in the recent past.

Google and Microsoft have industry-leading cloud-computing initiatives. Google Apps, and Microsoft Azure both want to use the cloud for productivity applications. Also, both companies have significant investments in the future of healthcare and becoming middleware for health information online. It is clear that both of these organizations have a stake in data privacy as the physical infrastructure moves into the cloud.

Is it a Technology Problem?

We've compiled a few considerations to keep in mind about the underpinning technologies that power our online lives. Hard questions keep coming to mind: Is the system that we use to communicate secure at all? Is it even possible to build a privacy-enabled application on top of the 2010 Internet?

• Internet Protocol (IP) itself has been proven to be hackable in many ways, shapes and forms. Will it ever be possible to build a truly private experience on this protocol?
• Can the communication networks win the encryption arms race? This month, the 64-bit 3G encryption used by a majority of mobile providers was cracked. Researchers quickly demonstrated that they could optimize around this weakness and penetrate the 3G encryption. Our voice traffic and data traffic can now be seen by others - anytime.
• Anonymous data is not really anonymous. Paul Ohm's recent paper illustrates how easy it is to take current best-practices in data management and prove they're not worthy of our trust. "Scientists have demonstrated they can often 'reidentify' or 'deanonymize' individuals hidden in anonymized data with astonishing ease."
• Social networks are actually taking the opposite approach to privacy. Facebook is an astonishing example of where the rules of engagement have changed. Mark Zuckerburg's recent statements that "privacy is no longer a social norm" show with remarkable clarity that it will be especially difficult to achieve privacy if we're not actively trying.
• Search history has been a constant issue with privacy. Google is in perhaps the most difficult position by both having the history of what we look for on the Web and a reason to sell it. Recently it was reported (again), with relatively little fanfare, that Google has a backdoor that allows the federal government to view the search history for a user. Yikes!
• Virtualization and cloud computing come to the rescue (or not). The biggest trends in computing this year actually advocate taking data outside of private data centers and putting it into co-located computing centers, or running multiple instances of software on one physical host. The benefits are tremendous, but there are also significant unsolved privacy issues that are going to continue to lag the adoption of cloud solutions.

Or is it a Motivation Problem?

This all begs a question of motivation. Many companies monetize sharing data, or promote the existing state of affairs in the technology stack. Others have questioned whether it is desirable to have a tamper-proof private network solution, even if such a technology exists. Would that top technologies companies promote a private network to their customers.

• Google may have a motivation problem. By monetizing heavily on "knowing" what we do, it is hard to see how Google will be the best guardian of our online data. Google clearly wants to do the right thing, but will the approach to data management ever catch up? That being said, major progress is going on at the company that tries to not do evil, including the recent launch of the Google Privacy Center and the establishment of the five privacy principles.


• Cisco provides a good portion of the technology infrastructure for computing. Cisco was built on the IP and has wielded IP to its advantage in gaining traction in the enterprise and in voice networks. Would Cisco be willing to take an aggressive approach in guarding citizen privacy if it risked the networking architecture franchise?


• Microsoft has been criticized and brought into court for its efforts that breach anti-trust and user privacy. Microsoft may be the most experienced company in the world when it comes to seeing the challenges inherent in having the keys to peek into a user's data but choosing not to use it.


• ATT is a network company that wants to avoid be relegated to a just a "dumb pipe". The company has been brought to task in the past by the EFF and others for its use of private data and billing information. It seems that all the networks will be challenged in producing a truly private network. It is also a question of whether they have the ability - whether they're blocked on in a technical or regulatory way - to monetize personal data enough to truly be a risk for citizens.



What Should a Mere Mortal Do?

The leading thought leaders have not been silent on the balance of privacy and trust. These leaders leave us with a bit of hope that smart people, rather than smart companies may offer solutions to online privacy.

• @jtrentadams - Technologist, Futurist, and Innovator - "Tip to minimize browser fingerprinting: use the most common browser & settings with no plugins (& turn off JavaScript). #privacy #identity"
• @identitywoman - Saving the World with user-centric identity - "People are not free to leave with their info these systems if they lose trust. #ftcprivacy sorry LinkedIN"
• @adrielhampton - Govie. PI. Gov 2.0 Radio. Ran for Congress. - "RT @EFF Help EFF Research Web Browser Tracking http://eff.org/r.f82 Check out our new research site, Panopticlick! #privacy"

These people - and many more - are working to make sure our backs are covered in this new world of trade-offs between our privacy and the free Internet.