Email

Yesterday, Gist released their new Gist for Gmail Firefox plugin (the Chrome plugin will be out in two weeks). As a long time Gist user and investor, I’ve been anxiously awaiting this as it makes Gist available to anyone using Gmail (vs. previously just Google Apps users.) Since I just finally completed my move over to Google Apps, I decided to start over with Gist (by resetting my account) and document the experience of getting it set up. Over the past year I’ve found Gist to be increasing indispensable to me and with the Gist for Gmail implementation, I think it’s in a position to become a critical use application for many people. If you haven’t tried it in a while, or have never tried it, give it a shout. Here’s how. ...

While at the amazing Tahoe Tech Talk, I heard Dave Morin mention a new service called Letter.ly . It’s a great example of brilliance through its simplicity. In my never ending quest to use all the things I find interesting, I’ve started an email newsletter called Feld On Work-Life Balance. While I periodically post on Work-Life Balance, Amy and I are working on a book called The Startup Marriage. There is also a chapter on Work-Life Balance in the book David Cohen and I just wrote called Do More Faster . This is a topic that’s long been important and interesting to me, especially as I travel around explaining to my completely unbalanced friends how they are actually balanced and they just don’t realize it yet. ...

My week-long experiment with Gmail continues with my first big bump happening last night at around 9pm. After sending a lot of emails (apparently 500) I received an error message “You have reached a limit for sending mail “. I tried again. This perplexed me. So I clicked on the link. I read through it and couldn’t figure out what I’d done wrong. I tweeted about it and immediately heard back that Gmail had throttled me for up to the next 24 hours because I’d been sending too many emails. I poked around a little to try to figure out if there was a way around this and finally concluded that the solution was to go to sleep and try again in the morning. ...

Ah – the joy of a meme. Today’s meme is “The Web Is Dead.” Whatever. My favorite article about this in the past 24 hours is The Tragic Death of Practically Everything – this is basically what I would have written if I’d had time today. This latest round apparently started with the new Wired cover story “The Web is Dead.” Yeah, I read it. My reaction to it was “whatever.” Are books dead ? Is email dead ? Are memes dead? ...

In the mid 1990’s I used an email client that did a pretty good job of “threading conversations.” The UI was kind of crummy, but it did some interesting things. It was called Lotus Notes. I also invested in a company called NetGenesis that made the first threaded web discussion software based on a construct that had been deeply implemented in BBS’s and Notes; in fact, we referred to it as “bringing Lotus Notes like threaded discussion functionality to the web.” That product, net.Thread, was acquired by another company I was an investor in (eShare) which went on to be have a very successful acquisition by a public company called Melita. I have no idea where net.Thread ended up but as a master-emailer I’ve always wondered why the very simple concept of a threaded conversation never became a standard part of the email UI. ...

Over the past year the amount of emails I receive on a daily basis from entrepreneurs has reached a point where I can’t deal with it any more. My partners at Foundry Group feel the same and as a result we’ve moved to twitter to deal evaluation . If you are interested in talking to me about a potential investment, please just tweet it. Limit yourself to 140 characters – that’s more than enough to describe what you are doing. Optimally, you’d DM me, although I realize that I have to follow you for this, so just use @bfeld in your tweet and I’ll see it. And please – don’t sent me multiple tweets – that kind of defeats the purpose.

After downloading Skype 4.2, I realized that I could now invite all of my Facebook friends who had Skype accounts to my Skype contact list. So I did. Unfortunately the Skype UI for this sucks so I had to go through about 1,000 entries a screen of five at a time unchecking the Facebook friends I didn’t want on Skype. I ended up inviting about 280 – fortunately I was on a conference call for the thirty minutes it took me to grind through this. ...

I was thinking about how to drive CTR’s up via different mechanisms this morning when this email arrived in my inbox. I remembered talking about high CTR email response rates with Dave McClure and Shervin Pishevar when we were in DC on our Startup Visa trip at the beginning of March. I’d forgotten about this conversation until this email showed up while I was thinking about this. Of course, I clicked to see where Dave had tagged me (it was on a Huffington Post article about innovation .) ...

I’ve been obsessed with the notion of email as the ultimate social network for a while. I wrote a post in 2007 titled Social Networks In Obvious Places that catalyzed me to thing harder about this as an investor. I eventually decided that the email address is the ultimate reference id for one’s current online identity and that it was ludicrous to ignore this notion. This ultimately led to my investment in Gist in 2009. ...