Day: May 8, 2006

E-Mail As Key to Collaboration

The Central Desktop Blog has a companion piece to its previous piece on the advantages of using e-mail as a collaboration tool. This time around, the developer is concerned without pointing out e-mail’s alleged failings.

The first problem with e-mail is key and one that any collaboration tool should overcome — “Email is silo’ed”. When you have multiple people working on a project, each of them have pieces of the puzzle in their inboxes, but none of them has access to each other’s pieces. This is the major flaw in e-mail.

The way around this is to use collaboration software that makes it easy for individual users to share their piece of the puzzle on a project/task by project/task basis. I use a couple of collaboration tools on a daily basis that are designed to do just that and do a remarkable job of using e-mail to collaborate.

At the extreme, Central Desktop is right — there are still materials that end up staying in the inbox rather than ending up in the collaboration system, but sometimes that is also a good thing. The key is to trust the users to know what needs to go in and what needs to be left out, and, frankly, if you can’t trust people to make those sorts of decisions it’s not likely you’re going to have a successful collaborative experience regardless of the tool you’re using.

Central Desktop’s second argument is that e-mail is inherently insecure. Yawn. Every application is inherently insecure in the way that Central Desktop means it,

I argue that email is the single most vulnerable point in any organization’s security policy. It takes two seconds to send a confidential document to anyone or any group in the world.

Right, and it takes five seconds for me to download that confidential document and mail it to anyone in the world. It takes me 10 seconds to take a screenshot of that document and mail the screenshot to anyone in the world. It might take me 15 seconds to copy the document or screenshot to a flash drive and send it to anyone in the world once I’m outside the corporate network.

If I can see it, it ain’t secure — end of story.

The rest of Central Desktop’s complaints simply indicate what happens when you’re not running a collaboration tool that uses e-mail as a central collaboration method. So, we learn that “Group email is really complicated [to install and configure]”, “Email is not a document manager,” and “Email communications do not correspond priority.”

Applications that use e-mail as a central organizing tool for collaboration solve all of these problems.

Personally, I’m a big fan of Steve Krug’s maxim for web design — “don’t make me think!” The best design/user interface is one in which the user almost forgets that they’re interacting with a user interface. The e-mail collaboration tools I use come close to achieving that, whereas the sort that Central Desktop sells always require me to devote significant brain cycles to figuring out how I’m going to do this or that function.

New York Times Don’t Know Jack about Monopoly

Rogers Cadenhead catches the New York Times in an obvious error about the origins of the Monopoly board game — and one they still haven’t corrected.

An April 28, 2006 article about a planned revamp of the game by Hasbro repeats the nonsensical Hasbro (originally Parker Brothers) PR claim that,

When Monopoly was devised in the 1930’s, Atlantic City was chose because it epitomized the kind of glittering tourist destination that many Depression-era Americans could only fantasize about visiting.

Charles B. Darrow, an unemployed salesman, sketched the prototype game on a tablecloth in the Germantown of Philadelphia, using 21 street names from Atlantic City. . .

In fact Monopoly is clearly derived from a game called The Landlord’s Game patented in 1910 by Elizabeth Maggie Phillips. The Landlord’s Game and variations of the game were played by Quakers, with rules changing as the game spread, under the name “Auction Monopoly” or “Monopoly.”

Darrow learned a version of Monopoly from Quakers in Atlantic City who took to printing and selling copies of the game, and the rest is history. Darrow claimed he had invented the game, and Parker Brothers helped perpetuate that lie in its marketing materials. The company also bought up the rights to the The Landlord’s Game and similar games.

In the 1970s, this history came back to haunt them when Parker Brothers sued Ralph Anspach to stop distribution of Anspach’s Anti-Monopoly game. Parker Brothers ultimately lost that lawsuit and the floodgates opened for literally hundreds of impersonators and Monopoly variants.

Anspach went on to write a book about his lawsuit and Parker Brothers fraud, The Billion Dollar Monopoly Swindle.

Sex After Death?

Knight Ridder’s Faye Flam has an interesting survey of different religion’s views of whether people in heaven/paradise/whatever have sex.

Of course we’re all now aware Islam’s promise of many perpetual virgin-like Houri to devout adherents.

Not surprisingly, Christianity, especially in pre-Protestant forms, was not especially kind to the idea of getting it on in heaven,

Early Christians believed that after the end of the world they’d all get their bodies back in heaven, and this led to inevitably to questions about sex and marriage. On pondering resurrection of the flesh, St. Augustine decided we’d keep our sex organs for aesthetic reasons, but we wouldn’t use them.

Wow — Augustine in the anti-sex camp. That’s a real shock.

Zoroastrianism has a different but still odd view,

Zoroastrians, he said, believed there was sex in heaven, but people would wean themselves from both food and sex as they got used to being dead.

Personally, being in heaven wouldn’t be the time to start denying myself sex and food, but your mileage may vary.

Of course we atheists just sort of stop existing and wait for our atoms to scatter around the universe, so you can forget about any hot and heavy post-mortem atheist action. Damn.