Zemanta Part 2- It ain’t (exclusively) your fault- it’s emails.

By Shana | Published: July 21, 2009
Zemanta Firefox plugin
Image by Tom Raftery via Flickr

While others have already established that Zemanta is the essential blogging tool for adding yourself to the blog link cloud of awesomeness,  Zemanta for email is leaving me ehhhh and lost for the perfect use.

This is in no way exclusively a reflection of Zemanta- it is rather a reflection of the ecosystem Zemanta lives in.  I use it in Gmail. In some ways, my frustrations with Zemanta are as much reflections my frustrations with GMail:

Zemanta does not pick up my del.ic.ous tags, not does it pick up my brief stint on Google Bookmarks- nor does Gmail.  Gmail is still in specialty testing mode for quoting particular parts of text in email- and cannot fully implement across a chain of conversations.  Zemanta, in turn, cannot notice replies.  Email seems very broken, and the tools that could be making it better are fighting an uphill battle.  Gmail cannot decide where tools should be placed on the right nor left column.  As a result, Zemanta gets placed on the right column, in a frustrating place near the contacts, rather than on the left.  This has nothing to really do with Zemanta though- this has more to do with Gmail having design faults, and Zemanta having to work around those (in most cases).

Considering that my previous cold-hearted ranted mentioned that

Email has a high level of privacy and direction associated to it.

It is extraordinarily frustrating when products associated with email don’t pick up on that nuance.  When individuals write emails, they are often specific in the message or the person.  Blogs, on the other hand, are to the world.  For that reason, as a western culture, we find it immensely funny or embarrassing when emails get released into the massive public.  They were never meant to be there.

Zemanta is one of the first products to start touching that boundary, by bringing the world into it.  It is doing so in an extremely awkward way, much like most products out there for email.  Email itself is very old, dating back at least to 1961.  It was originally meant as a way of sending text and maybe a file in a mainframe, or maybe two mainframes with the same OS.  One would log in and send an email. Text was the obvious choice, files only when necessary.

Zemanta changed the name of the game radically because it is taking from any and many, and sending it through email to many and any via your words, and files, and any other content.  Meanwhile, we usually assume that very content, when trying to penetrate, is something to be blocked off and hidden unless otherwise notified, due to the influence of spammers.  Email is a world were we try to avoid the outside.

It leaves open questions about how dated email is- and what even constitutes a private message, and what we express in our solitude to each other. Zemanta on its uphill battle to fight against a medium that sorely could use an update.

If one of Zemanta’s goals is to start an attack on the way we conceive of email, it needs to answer that email is old. Right now it only answers to Yahoo Mail and Gmail.  What of other webmail services, including the last large counterpart, Microsoft‘s Hotmail?  Smaller webmail providers across the world?  Client-server operations such as Outlook, Thunderbird, and the dying Pegasus/Merurcy*? There are no guarantees that Zemanta can fully implement itself to perfection against a mess that was made long before its time.  Not everyone can display the links it gives yet, nor can embed its images.

It will be interesting to see Zemanta climb its mountain-because it is a portentous one for email, especially the non-work kind.

*Apparently Pegasus is about to close too unless it gets funding.  That, AOL briefly, and one of the very early versions of Netscape was among the very first Internet programs I used.  I feel old.

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  • Jure Cuhalev

    Very insightful post about Zemanta and how it is related to e-mail. We have discussions daily at the office while trying to figure out how to shape our product to work within the existing eco-system and work-flows that it implies and at the same time, provide added value to the user.

    Our vision for Zemanta for Email is currently as a writing assistant that can look briefly into the future and envision things that you will need. Like a link to MetroCard page, when writing to a foreign friend who comes visiting you or a Google Maps link to a specific place.

    In regards to personalization, we already recognize your Twitter/Facebook/MyBlogLog friends and recommend links to their avatars, homepages and such. This is useful if you're introducing someone or just talking about them in your email.

    We recognize the need to integrate with Social Bookmarking space and are actively looking for a way that would provide most natural interaction to access the links while creating content.

    The question of email platforms that we support is a matter of time. We decided to focus on the ones that are close to early adopters in the beginning and we have plans to expand further. There is also a limited beta program for our versions of Zemanta for Outlook and Thunderbird and I can give you access if you're interested.

    I hope this answers some of your questions, I'm interested in continuing the debate further!

    Jure Cuhalev, Zemanta
    jure@zemanta.com

  • ShanaC

    Hello Jure (all the way from Slovenia, very cool),

    I feel a bit bad for being Negative Nancy- Sometimes a quiet analysis of where things are and things are going wrong can push things into going right if phrased nicely. I recognize this is not going to make the Buzz page anytime soon. :) Not my purpose in life anyway.

    I definitely think that the vision of a personal secretary is an achievement to strive for, and that should be made more explicit in the UI. As a personal secretary for email, as opposed to a blog, means that on some level you have access to a fuller level of what it means to be that individual, as opposed to any other individual. Many people run multiple email addresses, but even then, another good chunk still end up streamlining the process from one location (such as Gmail or Outlook). Same with social networks- one could be tweeting under multiple names for a variety of reasons, on the same computer. Further, all this information could turn up some, interesting, surprises about said email writer (a theoretical individual: Sous Chef by Day, Forex Trader by Night, who collects Victorian Men's Magazines) Handling the process of managing individual identity, especially when what really matters is not the icons, but the content of those emails (which you will be helping provide) is a very delicate task when we become more than our “internet brand.” Our fake person above has to delicately balance different elements of Machismo to different people in his emails. His public social networks might relate different parts of him, but only in his entire body of his written word, which in effect you would be managing, do y0u see a complete whole, or something veering close to it. I suggest a large amount of discretion, and to think about why we save what we save when we have to present it to the public, even when that public is our closest friends and families.

    As for Social Bookmarking/Semantic Tagging issues- you already are starting on a path with color and squares/rectangles. Considering that I sometimes outgrow even in blogs your tags, expand the spaces you work in for tags underneath the blog/email screen. Then add another long scrolling cube of searchable Delicious tags and have the user pull down, towards the keyboard, to the link that they are thinking of ? Give it the opposing color, blue, a deeper but related tone to the one as a bold stripe on your website, since your tagging system in in bright orange and pale green, to clearly signal that these are in fact, your stuff, as opposed to Zemanta's outside stuff?Not the best option, but the best I could think of. I guess what I am sort of thinking of is a dynamically opening search bar of tags. with a pulldown menu inside each of them of what is inside.

    Limited Beta Testing- I'm a Gmail user who is looking for a good computer for my needs (don't ask). I can take a look around for you for people with more specialized UI needs that can provide insight, such as trying to find someone with a disability, but I am not currently able to participate (especially without a decent computer…)

  • http://shanacarp.com/essays ShanaC

    Hello Jure (all the way from Slovenia, very cool),

    I feel a bit bad for being Negative Nancy- Sometimes a quiet analysis of where things are and things are going wrong can push things into going right if phrased nicely. I recognize this is not going to make the Buzz page anytime soon. :) Not my purpose in life anyway.

    I definitely think that the vision of a personal secretary is an achievement to strive for, and that should be made more explicit in the UI. As a personal secretary for email, as opposed to a blog, means that on some level you have access to a fuller level of what it means to be that individual, as opposed to any other individual. Many people run multiple email addresses, but even then, another good chunk still end up streamlining the process from one location (such as Gmail or Outlook). Same with social networks- one could be tweeting under multiple names for a variety of reasons, on the same computer. Further, all this information could turn up some, interesting, surprises about said email writer (a theoretical individual: Sous Chef by Day, Forex Trader by Night, who collects Victorian Men's Magazines) Handling the process of managing individual identity, especially when what really matters is not the icons, but the content of those emails (which you will be helping provide) is a very delicate task when we become more than our “internet brand.” Our fake person above has to delicately balance different elements of Machismo to different people in his emails. His public social networks might relate different parts of him, but only in his entire body of his written word, which in effect you would be managing, do y0u see a complete whole, or something veering close to it. I suggest a large amount of discretion, and to think about why we save what we save when we have to present it to the public, even when that public is our closest friends and families.

    As for Social Bookmarking/Semantic Tagging issues- you already are starting on a path with color and squares/rectangles. Considering that I sometimes outgrow even in blogs your tags, expand the spaces you work in for tags underneath the blog/email screen. Then add another long scrolling cube of searchable Delicious tags and have the user pull down, towards the keyboard, to the link that they are thinking of ? Give it the opposing color, blue, a deeper but related tone to the one as a bold stripe on your website, since your tagging system in in bright orange and pale green, to clearly signal that these are in fact, your stuff, as opposed to Zemanta's outside stuff?Not the best option, but the best I could think of. I guess what I am sort of thinking of is a dynamically opening search bar of tags. with a pulldown menu inside each of them of what is inside.

    Limited Beta Testing- I'm a Gmail user who is looking for a good computer for my needs (don't ask). I can take a look around for you for people with more specialized UI needs that can provide insight, such as trying to find someone with a disability, but I am not currently able to participate (especially without a decent computer…)

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