First off, some background. I’m a ‘power user’ who often exercises the features of software services to their limit, and so Google and Facebook often add me as an early adopter to many of their features (Google is nice enough to ask permission; Facebook just adds me to their beta group without asking me — really bad etiquette).

So for a few weeks now I’ve been using the ‘New’ Facebook before most people saw it. It was buggy, and worked slightly differently than what is live now.

They have a new feature called ‘Subscriptions’. It’s basically a way to allow public posting of your status updates — sort of like blog posts or Tweets, these are people who aren’t your friends will automatically see.

When I first was presented the ‘new’ Facebook interface a few weeks back, it asked me if I wanted to turn on ‘Subscriptions’ (it didn’t explain how it worked or anything). I turned it on not knowing what it was. Back then I tried to turn it off afterwards but could find no way to do so.

Then, without really telling you about it (at least, not that I recall) Facebook changed the way your status updates work — by default (at least for me), the status updates are ‘public’, meaning anyone who subscribes to your ‘public’ feed can see your status updates. Essentially, at this point, if you don’t take extra steps to limit the scope of who can see your status updates to ‘friends’, you are friends with the entire world.

If you’ve turned on ‘Subscriptions’ without really realizing the impact of this move, this screenshot shows how you turn it off (click the two images on this post to enlarge them).

I’m not sure if this is technically a privacy violation (I’m sure they’re updated fine print in their legal text says essentially “we don’t guarantee anything is private”) but it is sure something to give parents pause.

The issue is that Facebook is so confusing and poorly managed that users can easily opt into settings which are contrary to what they want. On a related note, I am becoming increasingly concerned that Facebook has no interest in allowing any parental controls of any kind — parents cannot control these features if their child has an account — there is no ‘parent admin’ role. Facebook clearly does not have the safety of children in mind.

Facebook is totally bungling their customer experience. There are some many examples of this. One glaring example is that some things can only be changed via ‘Edit Options’ at the bottom of the page, which is hard to get to because, if you scroll down, the pages dynamically retrieves more status posts, meaning it’s a race against time to scroll to the bottom of the page. If you’re too slow, you’ll NEVER be able to get to this feature. A very bad experience which is effectively reducing your control over your privacy.

My personal theory is that Facebook is so afraid of the explosive growth of Google+ (a Facebook competitor) that they are rushing features out without sufficient testing — a very bad idea.

I’m not sure what the answer is to this issue — Google+ isn’t perfect (they’ve had privacy issues too — remember Google Buzz?) but in general Google is better managed and is a company I trust more in such matters. So I recommend considering adopting Google+ and giving it a go. It will take a while before enough folks are on it to make it viable, but Google has the smarts to make things easy and intuitive.

Here’s how to sign up for it: https://plus.google.com/up/start

You shouldn’t need an invite at this point, but if for some reason you do, drop me an email at stanshinn@gmail.com and I’ll send you one.

Over the years I’ve adopted some best practices to process and write email — I hope you find some of them useful.

4 Rules of Processing Email

When you get an email, do one of four things immediately:

Do it (If it takes < 2 minutes)

Delete it (If you are done with it)

Delegate it (If you can forward to another for completion)

Defer it (But have some way to remind you the email needs actions — maybe file it to a ‘Tomorrow’ folder, flag it, etc. If you’re defering it, email them to tell them that you’ll get to it later.)

Using this system avoids the ’1,000 emails in my inbox’ situation, and prevents you from scanning the same email a dozen times before acting on it, which wastes time.

3 Rules of Addressing Email

Never “Reply All”. Well, not unless you absolutely must.

BCC Groups When Needed. If you’re sending email to a group where a “reply all” will be troublesome, send the email to yourself, and BCC the group, thus disabling the “reply all” capability. You can mention in the body who you sent it to if necessary.

Don’t Enter Recipients Till You’re Done. Don’t enter the recipients email address in the ‘To’ box until you’re done composing it — this prevents the premature sending of email by mistake. If you need to, list the recipients at the top of the email body as a placeholder, then remove that and fill in the ‘To’ box at the end.

8 Rules of Composing Email

When composing email, do the following:

Be Concise (also known as the ‘Don’t make me scroll!’ rule). If the email is so long the reader will have to scroll to read it, it is too long. Here’s how you make it ‘shorter’ — create an executive summary (maybe labelled ‘Summary’) at the top, then put the larger section beneath labelled ‘details’. This frees up your reader to scan the summary and only read the details if/when they need to.

Use Multiple Emails For Multiple Topics. If there is more than one topic, break it into multiple emails. Otherwise the read may respond to one topic and ignore the other.

Communicate “Action Steps.” List the action steps first, not last, in the body of the email, so the reader can know within seconds what is expected of them.

Number Your Questions. This makes it easier to respond to and clears up confusion about what point the author is referring to.

Include Deadlines. List deadlines even if they are artitrary (otherwise, they may not get done this year!).

Tag Subject Lines With Priority and Deadlines. Listing “JUST FYI:”, “URGENT:” or “ACTION REQUIRED:” or “NEEDED BY 12/6:” at the beginning of a subject line saves time and increases the odds it will get the attention it deserves in the timeline desires. In particular, use “FYI” for emails that have no actionable information. Maybe add “Just FYI” in the body as a second tag.

Make Subject Lines Informative. An email which says “ACTION NEEDED BY COB 3/12: Please review ARCW contract” in the subject line is much better than one that reads simply “Contract” or “Re: ARCW”.

Never Send an Angry or Contentious Email. Pick up the phone or schedule an in-person meeting if that’s the tone of topic.

A cool tip I’ve overlooked until recently. While you’re in GCal, press the q key to summon a single field to enter an event. Best of all, GCal understands natural language like “tomorrow at 2PM.” Not using Google Calendar? Get it at Google Calendar

Inconsolata is a monospace font, designed for code listings and the like, in print. There are a great many “programmer fonts,” designed primarily for use on the screen, but in most cases do not have the attention to detail for high resolution rendering.

Download Inconsolata

You can set up a free account, call and leave a voice mail note, and it will transcribe it and send you an email with your message. Great for hands-free note taking on the road!

• Inbox – All incoming items (downloaded files, temp documents that you’ll throw away immediately, files for email attachments, etc.). Items you save to the ‘Inbox’ must be things that don’t need to be saved to the long term archive. The ‘Inbox’ is for things you don’t have a chance to intercept and save into your archive or which will be deleted after use. You’ll want to configure you Office software and Web Browser to automatically download files here, instead of the root of ‘My Documents’ or some other folder.
• Archive – Directory in your ‘Home’ directory or ‘My Documents’ folder with all your long term reference materials. It’s your permanent file cabinet.
• Projects — Files you access regularly during short term project work, organized into project folders. Mini-projects that take only hours or even minutes such as ‘Quarterly Presentation’ or ‘Performance Review’ also merit a project folder if they involve organizing multiple files.
• To File — This is a special folder in your ‘Archive’ where you can quickly drag files that are ready for Archiving but you haven’t had a chance to organize yet. If you have Google Search or other indexing software for your hard drive, you can dispense with organizing files, and simply search for them when needed. If you go this search route, make sure you give your files meaningful names!

And don’t forget the Trash Can / Recycle Bin! Use it as a ‘To Toss?’ folder — if you think you don’t need it, trash it, and when you empty the trash, empty only files > 30 days old.

App Switching
Alt+Esc works like Atl+Tab on Windows. Hold the Alt key and press the Escape button. Continue to hold the Alt key and select a program. Release the Alt key to switch to that program.

Capitalize a letter
Hold the letter key until the capitalized letter appears.

Move the cursor in a different direction
The Alt key and roll the trackwheel.

Select a check box
Press the Space key. To clear the check box, press the Space key again.

Move down a screen
Press the Space key

Move up a screen
Press the Shift key + the Space key.

Turn on the backlighting
Press Power button

Turn off the display (saves power)
Press Power button twice

Insert the at sign (@) and periods in an Email field
Press the Space key.

Google Search
Visit google.com on your mobile web browser, or go straight to http://www.google.com/m

Google Talk (Chat with co-workers)

http://www.blackberry.com/GoogleTalk

Gmail (Check your personal email)

http://m.google.com/a

Google Maps (Get directions on the fly)

http://www.google.com/gmm

BlackBerry Push Weather
http://mobile.blackberry.com/mss/category_push

Berry 411
Wireless Link: www.thebogles.com/berry411.jad
Desktop Link: www.thebogles.com/Berry411.htm
The best White Pages and Yellow Pages search software for the BlackBerry, this also has a built-in bonus of movie showtimes lookup and weather lookup!
And here are some others you may find interesting: 

Spider Solitaire
Free Solitaire game that can be found on the free game download area of the mobile.blackberry.com

The Bible – American Standard Version for BlackBerry

http://www.handango.com/blackberry/PlatformProductDetail.jsp?siteId=1181&osId=950&jid=812D7CF7X7F219ECA4981359737B72FC&platformId=5&productType=2&productId=161699&sectionId=6530&catalog=40&topSectionId=-1

Great List of Apps
http://home.comcast.net/~tamsterra/OP/MustHave.htm

http://www.howardforums.com/archive/topic/839591-1.html

[ ] Email Susan

[ ] File this

[ ] Call John re: this

I created these in Excel for maximum flexibility. The Letter (8.5×11″ version) layout is a single Cornell page; the Classic (5.5×8.5″ version) is in 2-Up format, meaning you print on letter, and use a paper cutter to trim to size. For the Classic version, the page on the left is Cornell format, and the page on the right is a Blank page format.

Download the Excel templates:

• Cornell Letter Template
• Cornell Classic Template

Here is another great resource on this topic from LifeHacker.