Voices » email

EarthLink Customers Suffer Email Outages

Marisa Taylor — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 08:30:38 +0000

By Marisa Taylor, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal

EarthLink (ELNK) email customers experienced outages over much of the weekend, according to numerous online complaints.

Starting Friday, Twitter users began to post updates about service outages. Alex Mendez tweeted “33:40 minutes on the cellphone dealing with TW / earthlink. UGH,” and Diane Fischler wrote, “Not getting email messages again. Woke up to about 60 left over from yesterday’s Earthlink outage, now seems to be down again. Who else?”

On Saturday and Sunday, EarthLink users continued to complain about their lack of service. Jim Rattray wrote: “#Earthlink email has been down for 24+ hours. ‘We’re aware and working on it.’ Not good enough,” while romeneskoblogs said, “I haven’t received Earthlink email since Friday night. Customer service rep (in India) said could be 72 hours b4 restored.”

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Some Courts Raise Bar on Reading Employee Email

Dionne Searcey — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 13:00:24 +0000

By Dionne Searcey, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal

Big Brother is watching. That is the message corporations routinely send their employees about using email.

But recent cases have shown that employees sometimes have more privacy rights than they might expect when it comes to the corporate email server. Legal experts say that courts in some instances are showing more consideration for employees who feel their employer has violated their privacy electronically.

Driving the change in how these cases are treated is a growing national concern about privacy issues in the age of the Internet, where acquiring someone else’s personal and financial information is easier than ever.

“Courts are more inclined to rule based on arguments presented to them that privacy issues need to be carefully considered,” said Katharine Parker, a lawyer at Proskauer Rose who specializes in employment issues.

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It's a Free Country…

Nick Wingfield — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 15:50:50 +0000

By Nick Wingfield, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal

Does this sound familiar?

At the office, you’ve got a sluggish computer running aging software, and the email system routinely badgers you to delete messages after you blow through the storage limits set by your IT department. Searching your company’s internal Web site feels like being teleported back to the pre-Google (GOOG) era of irrelevant search results.

At home, though, you zip into the 21st century. You’ve got a slick, late-model computer and an email account with seemingly inexhaustible storage space. And while Web search engines don’t always figure out exactly what you’re looking for, they’re practically clairvoyant compared with your company intranet.

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The Internet Is Killing Storytelling

Ben Macintyre — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 08:23:19 +0000

By Ben Macintyre, Associate Editor, London Times

Click, tweet, e-mail, twitter, skim, browse, scan, blog, text: the jargon of the digital age describes how we now read, reflecting the way that the very act of reading, and the nature of literacy itself, is changing.

The information we consume online comes ever faster, punchier and more fleetingly. Our attention rests only briefly on the internet page before moving incontinently on to the next electronic canapé.

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Almost Famous: Brizzly's Chris Wetherell

Drake Martinet — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 08:05:01 +0000

By Drake Martinet, Intern, All Things Digital

A new feature wherein All Things Digital looks at up-and-coming and innovative start-ups you should know about.

This week: A video visit with, some questions for and a few pertinent stats about Chris Wetherell and his creation, Brizzly, a Web-based social media reader, one of many in the hot status update arena.

Who: Chris Wetherell

What: VP of Technology, Thing Labs, creator of Brizzly.

Why: Brizzly is a Web-based social media software client, for microblogging sites like Twitter or Facebook, expands attachments automatically and allows users to describe and define the trending topics for all its users to see. It’s in invite-only beta.

Where: @cw (Twitter); massless.org (Wetherell’s personal blog); San Francisco (HQ for Thing Labs and Brizzly)

Who else: TweetDeck, Seesmic, TwitIQ

Five Stats You Won’t Find in his Facebook Profile

Worst Job: Assembly line at Fujitsu, making rack servers

Has a Geek Crush on: Mihai Parparita, Google developer in Boston

Gadget of the Moment: Roku’s digital video box. “It’s got Netflix, You Tube and TV. Damn.”

Wishes There Was an App for: The legal arena. “They need to, like, use a computer.”

Fails at: Anything related to email

Bio in 140 Characters

From Beaverton, Ore. Dropped out of Berkeley. Got hungry as an indie rock drummer. @Google Reader. Left Google, invented Brizzly.

The Five Questions

Why should I care about Brizzly?

It depends on what you’re looking for. If one of the things that interests you is how a large community is experiencing life–I mean really interested in the community and not just the idea of your friends–then Brizzly does that a little more easily than other things. [Brizzly's assets are] no small difference for those who are interested in it.

Why are all Twitter-related logos, including yours, so darn cute?

Yeah, we’re a little cheeky, right? I think it’s probably just because of a pendulum swing. I mean, the last thing [Thing Labs' CEO Jason Shellen] and I worked on was the exact opposite. Google Reader is not cuddly. It’s friendly, but cuddly it isn’t. The other thing is, we were hoping to try what strong branding is like–in terms of anthropomorphic animals. The bear design [was drawn by] both Jason and [Twitter Co-founder] Biz Stone.

What can we expect from Thing Labs and Brizzly three months out?

We will have at least three richer sets of experiences, some of which include entirely different products all connected through our letsbetrends.com API.

Every geek has a memory where they saw something new and had to say to themselves, “Dang, I love living in the future.” What’s yours?

One big one for me was at Google–it was my first day and someone says, “Hey, have they taken you to see the robots yet?” I was like, “Hahaha… No.” They took me to this building where there was a room filled with these Rube Goldbergesque mechanical devices. Large cages with metal bars and wires, culminating in this ball in the center. This girl climbed into the thing. She put her feet in these stirrups and sat in this weird chair, and then this book slides out. The girl started tapping her feet on this base drum pedal and doing this thing with her hands, and then the book slides away [they were scanning the books]. I was like, “What is this?” and they said, “Well, this is Ocean [the internal name for Google Books].” What struck me was the scale. It was clear to me that they were going to scan ridiculous amounts of information very, very quickly, and I realized: Whoa, THIS is very different.”

Are you really competitive with rivals?

I just don’t have that kind of fight in me. I mean, I want to kick my own ass. I know there are lots of guys out there who can totally drop the names of someone they want to just crush. I just don’t have it. I get more frustrated with me, more than anyone else. I’m like Jim Carrey in “Liar Liar”: “I’m kicking my ass.”

The In Living Color Interview

[ See post to watch video ]

Email, Exposed

Jessica E. Vascellaro — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 14:42:12 +0000

By Jessica E. Vascellaro, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal

Want to know how your email usage stacks up?

The results of our informal email survey provide some food for thought (though clearly not much science). Inspired by a Journal article earlier this week entitled “Why Email No Longer Rules,” we asked readers to tell us how many emails they sent on Monday, and a little bit about themselves. They could respond by email, commenting on Digits, or Twittering. Here’s what we learned from our 48 respondents.

Averaging the responses together, readers sent an average of 32 emails on Monday.

Here’s how the results broke down by response method. Readers who emailed in their responses sent slightly more than the average (38 emails). Those who responded to our survey by commenting sent slightly fewer emails on Monday (26 emails).

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How Many Emails Did You Send Yesterday?

Jessica E. Vascellaro — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 21:17:15 +0000

By Jessica E. Vascellaro, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal

A Journal article yesterday on the end of email’s reign has generated more than 170 comments from readers agreeing and disagreeing with its points.

The argument of the article was that, while email is still growing, new forms of messaging and interaction are changing how we communicate.

Readers repeatedly stressed that email was not “fading into the sunset,” in the words of Joe from Texas. “If this were a ‘tweet’ I would only have room to say: “You are full of it”!”

A few were keen on the other extreme. “I haven’t had a personal email address since I joined Facebook in 2005,” remarked one reader in an email response.

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Why Email No Longer Rules…

Jessica E. Vascellaro — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 14:50:07 +0000

By Jessica E. Vascellaro, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal

Email has had a good run as king of communications. But its reign is over.

In its place, a new generation of services is starting to take hold–services like Twitter and Facebook and countless others vying for a piece of the new world. And just as email did more than a decade ago, this shift promises to profoundly rewrite the way we communicate–in ways we can only begin to imagine.

We all still use email, of course. But email was better suited to the way we used to use the Internet–logging off and on, checking our messages in bursts. Now, we are always connected, whether we are sitting at a desk or on a mobile phone. The always-on connection, in turn, has created a host of new ways to communicate that are much faster than email, and more fun.

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Web Privacy for the Dead

Jonnelle Marte — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 15:47:16 +0000

By Jonnelle Marte, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal

Who takes down your email and Flickr accounts after you’re dead?

As we increasingly live life on the Web, services are popping up to help people manage their online lives after they die. At the same time, regulators are cracking down on privacy violations for the deceased.

VitalLock.com offers an application that lets people encrypt personal messages on their computers and send secure messages to people now or after they die. The goal is to give people a safe way to share account passwords, wills and other important information, said founder Bob Stewart.

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IBM Markets Wares to Africa

William Bulkeley — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 16:53:23 +0000

By William Bulkeley, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal

International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) will try to sell a new package of low-priced computer desktop applications to companies and governments in Africa, challenging Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) and other rivals in the region.

IBM, which has been pushing into developing markets like Africa and Asia as mature markets slow, said the package–which includes basic programs like word processing and email–would be made available to customers via remote “cloud computing” facilities, meaning users could access the programs from the Web. It would cost $10 per month per user, and can run on so-called netbook computers, or low-cost PCs priced around $300.

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Pondering "Email Conservation" After Hitting Gmail's Storage Limit

Danny Sullivan — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 07:05:33 +0000

By Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-chief, Search Engine Land

Back in April, I became one of the rare people to run out of Gmail space. Due to a glitch with Google, I was also unable to purchase more space for several weeks. As a result, I became hyperaware of how much email space gets eaten up each day routinely. Newsletters, product offers, Facebook and Twitter notifications, that person you don’t know who emails you a 7MB file. It adds up. And Gmail’s supposedly “endless” space might not be keeping pace.

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How Facebook Ruins Friendships

Elizabeth Bernstein — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 18:45:10 +0000

By Elizabeth Bernstein, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal

Notice to my friends: I love you all dearly.

But I don’t give a hoot that you are “having a busy Monday,” your child “took 30 minutes to brush his teeth,” your dog “just ate an ant trap” or you want to “save the piglets.” And I really, really don’t care which Addams Family member you most resemble. (I could have told you the answer before you took the quiz on Facebook.)

Here’s where you and I went wrong: We took our friendship online. First we began communicating more by email than by phone. Then we switched to “instant messaging” or “texting.” We “friended” each other on Facebook, and began communicating by “tweeting” our thoughts–in 140 characters or less–via Twitter.

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Email Still the Biggest Threat for Insider Leaks, but Blogs, Video on the Rise

Marisa Taylor — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 18:48:54 +0000

By Marisa Taylor, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal

A report from security firm Proofpoint shows that email isn’t the only inside threat companies face–confidential information is leaking out via blogs, mobile devices and social-media sites.

In a survey of some 220 companies, Proofpoint found that email is still the No. 1 offender when it comes to data leaks. About 43% of respondents had investigated an email-based security breach during the past year. Nearly one-third of the companies surveyed had fired an employee for violating email confidentiality policies, a 26 percent increase from 2008.

Blogs and videos are increasingly channels for leaks as well, with 18 percent of respondents saying that they looked at those media when investigating an information leak.

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Breakfast Can Wait. The Day's First Stop Is Online.

Brad Stone — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 07:05:01 +0000

By Brad Stone, Reporter, New York Times

Karl and Dorsey Gude of East Lansing, Mich., can remember simpler mornings, not too long ago. They sat together and chatted as they ate breakfast. They read the newspaper and competed only with the television for the attention of their two teenage sons.

That was so last century. Today, Mr. Gude wakes at around 6 a.m. to check his work e-mail and his Facebook and Twitter accounts. The two boys, Cole and Erik, start each morning with text messages, video games and Facebook.

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A Voicemail Transcription Scandal in Britain

Marisa Taylor — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 14:33:05 +0000

By Marisa Taylor, Tech Reporter, The Wall Street Journal

SpinVox, a British company that converts voicemails into text with speech recognition technology, has been accused by the BBC of using humans at call centers to manually conduct the majority of the translations.

The U.K.-based company, which boasts 30 million users across five continents, says that voicemails are translated into text via conversion technology known as “D2,” or “the Brain.” Customers can read the messages and post them on blogs, social networking sites, or send them to their email inboxes.

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