Facebook for BlackBerry, my view

I think it's really well done.

It seems to use the standard email notification system but intercepts the messages before they get into the main BlackBerry inbox. You then get a little facebook icon in the alert are on the BlackBerry home screen.

It doesn't have applications it's really about seeing the status of your friends, poking them, writing on walls and exchanging messages with them.

There's been a lot of talk at CTIA Wireless about mobile device applications just focusing on what the mobile user needs. This follows those principles.

When I'm out and about, the most important functionality to me is communication. Zombies, film quizzes and all the other stuff that you do when you're a bit bored is a lot less important.

Actually what this does for me is change facebook into a powerful, realtime, communication service, rather than something I do when I'm looking for a diversion from whatever I'm working on.

Take this thought forward and email is no longer a communication application but it becomes just a transport layer for a richer, contextual communication paradigm. If I want to communicate with my friends I use facebook, for work I use Outlook.

Crazy valuations or not they are shaking things up. I was a little sceptical about facebook before but the more I get familiar with what they're doing and how they're doing it, I'm becoming more and more impressed.

It's also made me want a BlackBerry Curve, the photo tagging feature looked very cool and my trusty old 8707 just 'aint gonna cut it in the new era.

BTW, BlackBerry screenshot created using BBScreenShooter. You have to also download the BlackBerry JDE (90MB+ which you have to register for) but the application worked a treat, very simple.

IP07 - Please call someone

Popped into IP07 this week, the annual exhibition covering the convergence of voice data and video over IP networks. This produced a pretty eclectic mix of exhibitors. To give you a flavour:

• BT and Thus with their managed network services,
• Dialogic with their telephony cards,
• Microsoft of course (what it must be like to have a marketing budget for attending every show almost irrespective of relevance).
• Symantec and IPSwitch offering network monitoring management tools (we use WhatsUp)
• Nokia with all sorts of device management offerings as well their obligatory sexy handsets in glass case
• eFax with the internet faxing service
• Coms, a hosted VoIP provider
• Nortel, Mitel and Avaya offering their particular take on the next generation PBX.

It is to this last group I turn for an interesting insight.

I attended presentations by both Mitel (about Presence) and Avaya (about connecting mobile devices with the corporate PBX) and both had a recurring theme:

Please make voice calls.

People are increasingly using email and text messaging to communicate rather than picking up the phone. If you sell voice systems, this is bad news.

There was talk of the scourge of email trails and how organisations are becoming paralysed as people covered their backsides and cc’d the world. People are using email to hide but are being increasingly overwhelmed by more and more messages. If everyone just picked up the phone, they claimed, life would be better and things would get done.

Picking up the point about hiding, the man from Avaya did have the decency to mention voice mail, the original communication avoidance tool.

There will always be people who want to avoid direct communication but this can be for a number of reasons, not necessarily just because their work-shy.

I use a mix voice calls, email and text to better manage my communications. The choice is a function of the information to be exchanged, my availability and location as well as that of the other party.

Voice calls are if I want to discuss something now or just want to make the communication more personal

Emails are if it’s something that I don’t need an answer to straight away or I’m expecting the other person to consider or research a response

Text is when I’m mobile or I know the other person is, or I don’t know where they are. If it get’s complex or drawn out I’ll generally move over to a voice call or email from my BlackBerry

Receiving and answering a voice call is incredibly interrupting. It stops you dead in your tracks, preventing you from completing what you are doing. Interrupting someone while they’re mind is elsewhere forces them to readjust their thinking and as the caller, you have to negotiate the preamble while this happens before you can have an efficient conversation with the other party.

Email and text on the other hand allow the recipient to complete the task they are currently undertaking. This is far more efficient for both parties.

Send them an email or text and you give them a chance to respond coherently. I’m not saying they will, I’ve fired off far too many reactive emails and texts in my time, but they can.

Whether they do or not is a function of them not the communication method. Impromptu voice calls promote this kind of behaviour.

BlackBerry non-corporate email account setup

Took me a while to find this so I thought it was worth a post.

We use the BlackBerry Enterprise Server to redirect emails to our BlackBerries. I wanted to be able to access my personal email accounts on the same device.

Conceptual leap for me, apologies if it was obvious, was that I needed to setup the BlackBerry Internet Service with my carrier.

If you're on Vodafone UK then you go to mobileemail.vodafone.net enter your PIN and IMEI and you're away.

Message Response Time : UPDATE

I posted recently about the 160 Characters survey on Message Response Times. Well results are in and their report can be found at Stats & Research: Five Minutes To Respond

Key points for me were:

• 84% of people expect a response to an SMS in 5 minutes
• a similar number said they would respond to a personal SMS within 30 mins
• yet only 56% said they would respond to a work SMS in that time
• 31% people would respond to emails the following day, I bet they weren't BlackBerry owners!

The conclusion seems to be that SMS remains the king of short communication requiring a quick response. There did seem to be an implication that people at work were becoming less responsive to SMS.

I'd be really interested to find out the industry sectors the respondents came from. Did the survery reach outside of the mobile industry and if not, are we the best people to represent usage of mobile messaging.

Message Response Time

160 Characters are running a survey on message response times for different types, Email, SMS and IM. I blogged about my views on the different communication methods recently: http://adam-bird.blogspot.com/2007/03/blackberry-threat.html, so I'm keen to see the results.

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=615303585592

The BlackBerry Threat

Recently took delivery of a Blackberry 8707v and it truly is a marvellous mobile email device. I do use it as a phone, for which it seems less well suited, dropping calls, sound quality can be poor, etc. It is also a great device for SMS and has given us some great ideas for the upcoming new release of our Web SMS application. The BlackBerry success story has always been raised by investors and colleagues as one of the key threats to our business at Esendex. "If everyone has a BlackBerry", they would say "then who needs SMS?". While on the face of it, BlackBerry, and mobile email in general, is a threat to SMS there are a number of reasons why mobile email will never replace SMS, in my opinion. Firstly, the raw numbers, there are 6.2 million BlackBerry accounts worldwide¹. Compare that to over 40 million mobile phones in the UK alone. Mobile penetration is now over 100% 13 of the 17 countries in Europe. In the GSM world, just about every phone can send SMS as well as receive. If you want to send or receive a text message from your customers, employees or colleagues chances are they haven't all got mobile email devices, but they almost certainly have a mobile phone. People buy mobile phones and devices for a vast set of reasons. Just peruse the replica phones at your local mobile phone retailer to see the plethora of features and styles and you'll see not everyone wants a Blackberry. Secondly, email isn't necessarily always the best method for a given communication exchange. Each of the three forms of text based communication commonly used by businesses today have different styles and presence requirements, described in the table below.

	Communication Style	Presence
Email	Verbose often with attachments	No presence required or necessarily expected
SMS	Short, to the point, often informative	Expectation that the recipient will be available within a short time period
Instant Messaging	Conversational, 2 way, question and answer	Recipient must be available to start communication, expectation that they will respond almost immediately

When someone initiates a communication exchange they choose the medium based on these critiera. Do they want a response, how quickly, how much information are they sharing. For example:

• A monthly sales report may work best as an email. The reader is likely to need time to digest the content and consider a response.
• The monthly sales figures update is probably best as an SMS sent to all interested parties. Doing this from a virtual mobile number allows the recipients to reply with congratulatory messages, or otherwise
• For the sales manager wanting to clarify the terms of a deal being reported in the sales report with one of his team, IM could be a great route.

So it's all about messaging that's fit for purpose. I believe, all will continue, all will coexist. SMS is a key requirement of any mobile device. Take a look at the Apple iPhone. Revolutionary user interface, ultra-cool styling and the SMS function is in the most prominent position of it's menu system. BlackBerries are great mobile email and SMS devices and my life is better for having one. Or are these the ramblings or a delusional crackberry addict ;)

1. Research In Motion interim results, September 2006