dangerouslyawesome

I’m a heavy Gmail user, with 6 (soon to be 7) separate Gmail and Google Apps accounts. On my Macbook, I actually IMAP in to all of the business accounts using Mail.app for one reason: cross-account search. For my personal account, though, I’m extremely reliant on Gmail’s web interface. I’ve used Mailplane in the past, and really loved it…with the exception of the inability to do cross-domain search. I use that daily.

On the mobile, there’s no option for cross-account searching. Mobile Mail.app gives me some native functionality and speed, but without cross-account searching, I’d much prefer to use Gmail’s mobile web app. HTML5 support in recent releases has made it faster, easier to use, and hands down one of the best mobile apps on the internet. I used Mobile Mail to connect to my Gmail accounts over IMAP because having multiple bookmarks was clunky no matter how I configured it, but I was always looking for something better.

In all cases I use IMAP because it keeps accounts in sync; changes made on the computer, the web, and the iPhone are all synchronized via IMAP.

I never used Push for my email because, well, I get a lot of it. I rely on Push for contact and calendar updates, but for email…if I haven’t checked my mail in 10 minutes, I can be sure that there’s something new in there.

Worse are unread counts. I’m compulsive about unread accounts. Mail, RSS feeds, Campfire, whatever it is…I hate having things unread. It’s a bad behavior, because I treat unread counts like to-dos, and in all of the scenarios where unread counts keep me on my toes, they are essentially to-do lists that OTHER people can put things on to. I’m already busy, I don’t need someone else to put more things on my to-do list.

The biggest loss in using Mobile Mail.app is tags, something that I do use pretty extensively. I’ve learned to get around it in Mail.app, which has better drag and drop support for moving things into folders that represent tags over IMAP. Mobile Mail.app was just clunky, and I resolved to not do that interaction on the go unless I had to.

I know I’m not describing everyone, but I am describing a lot of people. And as more corporations move their mail infrastructures away from Exchange and into Hosted Google Apps accounts, the group with this set of needs grows more and more.

A few weeks back, Dave Martorana (of MultiFirefox, Multiplex, and Two Guys on Beer fame) slung me a prototype of an app he’d been working on at IndyHall. It was called “MultiG”, and was basically an app that did fast account switching between Gmail and Google Apps Gmail accounts. It was rudimentary, but instantly useful for me. He quickly added an “unread” count to the accounts dashboard, but then did something I had never seen in an email client. He added a secondary badge that showed how many messages were actually new. I mean, how many of your unread messages weren’t there the last time you looked.

Think about that for a second. The anxiety of unread counts has finally found its Prozac.  All I care about is how many messages are new! In casual conversation, I dubbed this feature “TrueNew”, something that I hope other developers build into their app notifications.

At this point, I was hooked. But Dave wasn’t done.

He’d also whipped up integration with the iPhone’s native address book. I haven’t gone through the process of moving my address book into Google, and again, I have multiple accounts so where would I sync my address book to? Not all of them.

Dave added a button to the chrome of the Gmail browser window in his app that let me pull up my iPhone address book and insert email addresses right into the “To:” field. Sneakily, if I turned on CC or BCC, the exact same feature gave me the choice of which field to put the address in to. Simple, sleek, lovely.

Since emails tend to include attachments and links, Dave also put in a handler that made sure that they opened without leaving the app, much like our favorite iPhone Twitter client, Tweetie.

This feature set changed the way I interacted with mail on my iPhone. It made my life better. It made one of the most painful parts of my day, dealing with email, less painful.

We realized that “MultiG” was a lousy name, and Johnny Bilotta (the other Guy on Beer) proposed “Mailroom”.

Sold.

He whipped up a sexy icon, and we were off to the races.

Dave got the app in the hands of a few other testers, worked out some kinks, processed some feedback, and with the hand of myself and co-conspirator Amy Hoy pushing him to “ship as early as possible”, got it into the App Store.

Initial feedback was mixed. People who were like me in terms of email use loved it. People who had different email workflows weren’t as convinced, and many people saw it simply as a “wrapper for Gmail”.

Technically they were right, but they were missing the progressive enhancements because they didn’t augment their workflow. The app wasn’t for everybody, and we knew that. We’d still struck a chord with a good number of our initial users, and got some great feature requests.

2 weeks later, Dave pushed out a significant release to Mailroom. We’d prioritized feedback against our desired feature set, and introduced some new ideas of our own. At the root of the new release was a settings screen.

Badge Icons were a huge part of our 1.0 release feedback. We’d been hesitant to include them by default because, without Push (which I’ll get to in a minute), the counts were largely inaccurate most of the time.

Since we wanted to encourage people to start using TrueNew, we made that the default badge icon if enabled, but gave the user the ability to turn on unread counts instead.

Another major improvement was both workflow and performance related. If you only had one account and used Mailroom, launching the app to the dashboard was wasteful. If you left Mailroom on a given account screen to go to another app, launching put you back at the dashboard again, which was undesirable. We gave users the opportunity to remember the last account used, meaning that as soon as they launched the app they were where they left off last. This immediately made my email experience more efficient.

And as a bonus, Dave gave the user the option to lock screen orientation. Not something I was particularly needy for, but a nice touch nonetheless.

And then there’s that last setting. Cache management. What’s that, you ask?

Well that brings us to the biggest quiet improvement to Mailroom 1.1. The app is now taking advantage of Gmail’s HTML5 offline storage. What does this mean?

It means that every time you visit an account, the entire interface is cached locally and a HTML5 database is created/updated with the email on your screen. Kill your connection (because ATT sucks, because you’re on an airplane, or because you’re in a meeting) and Mailroom is still useful. In fact, you can not only read messages, but you can reply to messages and even COMPOSE NEW MESSAGES without a data connection. As soon as you reconnect, your cached messages are sent while retrieving new mail.

He even made the multi-account dashboard smart, only allowing you to enter accounts that had offline caches from a previous visit.

Yesterday, all of these 1.1 features hit the iPhone App store, and already a large percentage of our users have upgraded. One of them left us a review in the app store that commended us not only on the app and how great its icon is, but on Dave’s responsiveness to feature requests. Big win for us, that’s exactly what we wanted.

We’ve already talked about feature roadmap for 1.2 and 1.3 releases, and it’s very much in the works. The plan is to continue with iterative releases, process feedback, and continue to grow the user base all at once.

Two “issues” continue to arise: the lack of Push badge updates, and the $2.99 price point of the app.

First, push isn’t as “simple” as some of our reviewers seem to think it is. Among the scaling concerns we have about people who move a lot of email. I ran some averages and my smallest inbox gets well over 24,000 emails a year. Those numbers aren’t staggering, but across the customer base we’re targeting, that becomes a LOT of notifications to deliver.

The real technical challenge is more complicated though. In order to accurately update badge icons over push, we’d need to store email addresses and passwords on a server somewhere, and that’s a HUGE security risk that we can’t figure out how to justify. I know I wouldn’t want that info out there, and I have to imagine that our users wouldn’t like it either.

So until we come up with a more elegant way to support push, Dave has built in an app-specific URL handler. Calling mailroom://username@domain.com from another iPhone app or even from a mobile web page launches Mailroom, and even jumps straight to the account if there’s one in mailroom that matches the email address in the URL. We’re hoping that other push services like Boxcar and  Prowl can build in support for our app. We know it’s not the best solution, but given the infrastructure for Push provided by Apple, we’re pretty limited in what we can do. We don’t want to deliver a half-assed experience, so until we figure this out, Mailroom will not support push. If anyone has suggestions for how to overcome this hurdle, our ears are WIDE open, so please, sound off in the comments or via email.

And about that price point. Some customers seem to think that $2.99 is too much for an app that’s “just a webkit wrapper”. I won’t do more than touch on the fact that it’s not just a webkit wrapper for the right users and workflows since I’ve already explained here. But why $2.99? First, we’re targeting business users and we know it. They’re more comfortable spending more money on apps because in most cases, businesses equate cost with quality. But more importantly than that is the fact that this is, in most cases, a high-touch app.

99 cents for an app that you’re most likely going to touch at LEAST once an hour, if not several more times in a given day, feels undervalued. Like Tweetie, which I launch several times a day, I feel like I get an immense value for the $2.99 I spent on it.

Fact is, our first release might not have been worth $2.99 for everyone and you could say they got pegged with an “early adopter” tax. But since we’re not charging for the updates, and plan to roll them out often, we don’t think its really a tax at all. It just means that you will continually get more value from the app you already paid for.

We’re confident that future releases in our roadmap will continue to win people over the price point and even the “it’s just a webkit wrapper” theme. Mostly because, we’re listening. We hear what people like, don’t like, and how they are using the app. The more people feed back, the more they help to shape the future of Mailroom.

If you haven’t already, please consider heading to the App store and picking up a copy of Mailroom for your iPhone or iPod Touch. We’d love your feedback, and absolutely appreciate you supporting independent software development. You can also follow us on Twitter for app updates, or send us ideas and feedback there as well.

Did you spend your time writing about things worth doing, or doing things worth writing about?

I was just tipped off to Cobot (thanks to Allen at Centernetworks). In the last 2 years, I’ve evaluated a LOT of options for improving the management of IndyHall. None of them have fit the bill.

All of the issues stemmed back to the same thing that is wrong with most coworking spaces: the focus of the software is on the desks instead of the people.

Cobot has found a way to strike the balance between functionality that helps a coworking space run (like analytics and billing support), but also paid careful attention to the needs of the people in the space, helping them get signed up, oriented, and solve their own problems so we don’t have to do it for them. They even have a support ticket system for our members when something goes wrong. Even the pricing model is based on the members instead of the desks.

This is smart. Very smart.

Being people oriented is what’s gotten IndyHall as far as it has, and seeing software that supports that is extremely exciting for me.

Even more exciting, is software that is designed to help people get into the mindset of being people-oriented…if they aren’t already. I think that software that helps train people into good habits instead of reinforcing bad ones is great software.

Feature-wise, it’s not quite there for what we need, but I’m going to be paying very close attention to this venture because it’s got the right direction. Our feature needs are what they are, and while I hope they can support them, I’m much more interested in how they continue in the direction they are going where everything else I’ve evaluated in the last 2 years has totally missed the mark.

“It’s not hard to make decisions when you know what your values are.” – Roy Disney

Hat tip to Theresa Stigale, one of the partners that owns the building that IndyHall resides in.

Gatekeepers are the leading cause of confusion, dissent, and ultimately their own demise.

Don’t be a gatekeeper.

Instead, find every way possible to help people say “yes” and allow them to execute.

The outcome is world changing.

Permission is a highly underutilized leadership skill. Let’s see if we can’t change that.

Mission #1: Try saying “yes” to something trivial that you would normally say no to, and watch what happens.

Less than one week ago, an unlikely e-mail found it’s way into my inbox. Actually, it found it’s way into 2300+ inboxes connected to the Coworking Google Group, which arguably the most active singular location to find out about coworking, share ideas about coworking, and meet people interested in coworking.

Gerrit Visser, and his partner Bernie DeKoven, had owned coworking.com for over a decade. On it, they shared articles and ideas about collaborative work and play. They periodically interacted with members of the coworking community, including some interviews with Brad Neuberg who kicked off the movement we know coworking as today.

An Opportunity

Gerrit and Bernie had been approached by two commercial entities interested in coworking.com, and decided between them that the community that had gotten behind the term “coworking” should have a shot at buying the domain first, if they were going to sell at all.

A few hours after their post the Google group with the offer, there hadn’t been any public activity so I decided to take some action and e-mail Gerrit for details.

Once I had the sale price and a target to hit, I realized that there wasn’t only no way for me to buy this domain on my own without seriously stressing my bank account, but it would have been the wrong thing to do. Indy Hall benefits from a strong sense of belonging and ownership even from people who do not technically own IndyHall. It’s peoples’ contributions to the making of Indy Hall in every step of our history that binds them to us, and to each other.

Photo by @missrogue

People support what they help create

I e-mailed a list of trusted advisors, peers, and a couple of coworking’s “patron saints” to first see if I was off my rocker, but also to propose a model for raising the funds. That model established a clear cut financial goal, defined methods of contribution, and outlined some simple rewards.

Three basic tiers of contribution, and actionable goals.

Before I could even get the model out of the hands of this short list, almost half of the target had been reached.  The concept had been de-risked.

The floodgates open

At 12:26 pm EST on Monday February 15th (my dad’s birthday), I posted a proposition to the google group based on the one that had happened in the smaller dialogue. 5 hours later, I had to put a hold on contributions because we’d actually OVERSHOT our target by a few thousand dollars. Money poured in from around the world.

Quickly, discussion on the Google group changed from excitement to excitement…with a bit of anxiety.

Woah. That went fast. Too fast?

In the hurry, I’d created a sponsorship model that was exclusionary, unless we were to raise funds without any limits. If we went that route, we’d need someone to be responsible for that extra money, and what its spent on. Talk of business entities resulted, co-ops, LLCs, and the like. The pendulum swung between highly inclusionary and highly exclusionary.

Nearly 100 emails were slung over the next 2 days, debating a number of ideas and issues. Among them, three primary ideas/questions began to crystalize.

1. How to pay for/who owns the domain, long term
2. What kind of entity could exist
3. The definition of coworking

The idea of a coworking “entity” or “organization” seems like the right medicine, but I remained unconvinced that we weren’t curing a symptom instead of a disease.

Back to core values

We’ve approached the “what is coworking” conversation before, and at this scale, it’s EXTREMELY difficult to pin down an answer of what is and what isn’t. Instead, we have core values established by Citizen Space in 2006 and adopted and iterated by many other spaces and communities. Those core values are clear and understood, and most importantly, something we can expect people to respect.

I might argue that defining coworking doesn’t help anyone long term, because if the definition isn’t allowed to change, we’re stomping out the fire we intentionally created. That’d be counter to the movement. That’d be counter to the purpose. That’d be outright stupid.

But without arguing the “what” and the “who”, we can come back to the domain coworking.com, and what it represents.

Power of Words

The beautiful thing about the internet is it’s made up of words. Domain names are technically pointers to ideas, and instead of having to remember IP addresses, DNS has allowed us to connect words with ideas.

Coworking.com connected the word “coworking” with the ideas…and the ideals…of the community, without introducing commercial and organizational overhead.

Meanwhile, the discussion (and periodic disagreement) on the Google group continued in a healthy, smart, and fun manner. It was helping people bond, and figure each other out. The armchair psychologist and sociologist in me was grinning as I watched the whole thing unfold. The word coworking truly bring people together in fantastic ways at every turn. How could someone not get excited about this?

Launch

While the community continued to converse, sharing ideas, and inching towards something truly emergent, I continued working with Bernie and Gerrit on the domain transaction. It’s worth noting that THEY were every ounce of awesome to do a deal with. Their commitment to the idea of coworking was genuine, and their continued excitement about the domain being put to this use was clear in every e-mail. Almost 80 messages between the three of us over the course of a couple of days, keeping each other updated at every turn. Not the most efficient deal by any means, but they were responsive, fun, and most importantly: I think they handled things very fairly.

Today, I worked with their technical guy Jasper to transfer the domain and complete the transactions. While waiting for DNS to resolve, I drafted the home page that I described in the initial proposition to the group. I built a single page that introduced the coworking core values, and linked to the leading community properties: the google group where this entire legacy will live forever, the wiki which is full of an extensive knowledge base (despite being incredibly disorganized), and the blog (which could stand some refreshing of its own).

I launched that website at 7pm, February 18th, with the text:

Did you know that there is a global community of people dedicated to the values of Collaboration, Openness,Community, Accessibility, and Sustainability in their workplaces? It’s called Coworking. And people seem to think it’s swell.

Again, connecting the word to the values. The most important thing we can do right now as the movement grows and more people discover the word and the actions associated with it.

Now what?

Now that the site has been relauched, we can return to the questions raised by the admittedly half-baked funding model. I’ve returned the puck into the court of the community, suggesting we focus on brainstorming a way to redistribute the funding opportunity over a wider base, and creating a more sustainable and inclusive model. I have some ideas of my own, and some suggestions from others, but I don’t have an answer yet. My hope is that the ~20 initial funders are willing to re-draw lines so we can all move forward together gracefully. I’m not naive enough to think that money won’t complicate things. But I’m confident that we will find a lightweight and sustainable model to move forward, providing as many people in the community the benefits of the domain as possible.

My hope is that we can re-orient a bit, and as Chris Messina suggested in an offline e-mail, put the focus on the humans instead of the companies that make up this community. I think that will better represent the purpose of the website, and the voices behind it.

There are infinite possibilities with this domain, and that’s very exciting. We’re starting small, and even the small achievement is huge.

Furthermore, we’ve proven that this community can move mountains together. That may be the most exciting demonstration yet.

Thank you.

For this opportunity to lead, learn, inspire, be inspired, and make some history happen.

This post is actually a slightly adjusted version of a comment to this thought-provoking commentary. I thought it was a compartmentalized thought enough that I wanted to post it here for my own record.

The prompt, from Ashley’s essay, is:

“We’re taught what to think, not how to think”.

Therein lies a problem. The education model being experienced today (K-12 & much of higher ed) has been built on top an old process designed to produce two things: workers, and more academics.

If we’re willing to put aside the “more academics” part and focus on the “workers” part of the product of education, we need to consider what’s changed. Through at least one lens, changes exist in workplace and the expectations it has.

Rather than go down the road of “I paid six figures for a college education and now I can’t get a job, EFF YOU America” that many young professionals are doing right now, there’s a huge, huge, HUGE missed opportunity to improve the educational system using mentorship, and refocusing on learning skills instead of just the learning of skills.

When the industries with the highest demand were focused primarily on manufacturing, someone who came out of school not only had basic skills, but had the proficiency to learn some more basic skills in order to accomplish a task. Manufacturing and the industrial workplace provided a very specific, guided ladder to continue learning skills, leading to promotions, opportunities, better pay, hours, so on and so forth.

Times be-a changing.

Now, with another industrial shift fully swinging away from manufacturing (sorry Detroit) and towards knowledge work, the ability to just learn new tasks isn’t enough.

You’re expected to synthesize new, unmarked tasks.

You’re expected to create, not just produce.

If you can’t create, you’re going to have to try a LOT harder to get a great job. And that thesis ignores the increased likelihood that you’ll work for yourself, start a company, be a great leader of your industry or workforce. Maybe more.

And speaking of great leadership, mentorship seems to have been lost almost everywhere with the exception of artisans, and craftsmen (craftspeople, for the gender sensitive). And even there, art schools are stacking students high with skills, and until the last minute, very little REAL WORLD practicum.

Take a look at this video from IgnitePhilly I, where University of the Arts’ President Sean Buffington eloquently explains how as a university administrator he KNOWS that things are fucked up, and even how, but doesn’t know to go about making steps in any new direction.

From IgnitePhilly2 (4 months later), Chris Lehmann of the Science Leadership Acadamy talks about how schools need to stop being run like businesses, find new metrics for success, and a general lack of responsibility and accountability in the system despite the quality of the educators. Science Leadership Acadamy is an empowerment-based educational system, experimentally created in partnership with The Franklin Institute. One of my favorite points he makes is: you can’t learn when you feel the subject is more important than you are.

“What happens when school is real life, and not just preparation for real life”.

I’m always “preaching” about finding and having higher purpose in everything you do, especially work. It’s something I learned back in 2006 from Chris Messina and Tara Hunt when they started Citizen Agency…it was a core tenant of what they helped their clients do.

One of my side ventures is as the business manager for Two Guys on Beer. Johnny, Dave, Joe, and I have been producing this show together for almost 2 years now…Joe and I officially on the team for a bit over a year now. We’ve had some really incredible successes under our belt, not the least of which is a syndication on Philly.com’s beer page, participating in Philly Beer Week last year that resulted in interviews with beer legends Sam Calagione and Jim Koch, BeerCamp – a homebrewers summit attended by 200+ homebrew fans, fantastic relationships with a number of breweries & restaurants, and of course over 130 episodes in the bag.

The team works hard for a project that we’ve been slowly…slowly….turning into what we believe can be a profitable venture. We joke that we’re at the point where people send us beer, and that’s awesome…but the real goal is to make money drinking beer. The truth is, we have a higher purpose based on 4 core values that we think will help us make that a reality:

• Advocate Beer
• Grow the Craft Beer Community
• Make Knowledge Available
• Build Beer Relationships

Even with these core values, things get tough…especially with a project that is a passion project for the whole team right now. It’s hard to remember, sometimes, “why are we doing this again!?!”.

Then, you get e-mails like this:

TGOB:

You guys are AWESOME! I love experimenting with different beers, but I can’t find good beer while the US Army has me stationed here in Korea. I download your podcasts onto my Zune and watch them as I drink some malty Philipino beers (the only thing decent you can find here), and your show makes me feel like I’m home. Keep the shows coming; you keep me from feeling homesick. You guys rock.

2LT Vandergraff

6-52 AMD, 35th ADA BDE, South Korea

Wow. That’s the kind of thing that really puts things into perspective, and how important having core values can be.

Without our core values, the product that Two Guys on Beer produces wouldn’t be what it is today, and the team probably wouldn’t keep pouring our time and hearts into the show. But most importantly, 2Lt Todd Vandergraff wouldn’t be able to enjoy beer as a way to stay connected to home.