Merlin Mann (of 43 Folders), who I’ve had the pleasure of meeting at Microsoft’s HQ in January of last year, and someone I deeply admire for being a productivity aficionado (in a very good way), spoke Monday at Google about his concept for Inbox Zero.

I usually don’t post about videos unless they’re really good, so as you may guess I really recommend this one to all of you - especially those who can’t stand having all this email to deal with all the time, nagging you in the back of your mind. Merlin goes through his system for processing email through actions (Delete, Delegate, Respond, Defer, Do) and gives a few examples of how to deal with the typical email mess.

I am a GTD guy, but like quite a few people I relapse into FFA mode every once in a while - which is crazy. Client projects get in the way of everything else, email flow stops, inbox gets filled up - it’s like a huge stone in a processing line machine. Hey, only human, here.

So, these little systems are great to at least guide us into how to deal with something that really plays a huge role in an organization like our company - email. I’ll likely post about how I organize my daily work very soon, but for now, you really should see Merlin’s video.

Note: Oh, and if you care about this sort of stuff, you should definitely check this post by Mike Davidson about replying with 5 sentences or less to all email. Smart, systematic and effective.

Oh facebook. I think nothing really beats it when it comes to hype in the blogosphere, except for (you guessed it) the iPhone. Everybody keeps talking about how Facebook is the next Microsoft, the next Google or the next IBM - and while I have been absorbed by the beast, I can’t help but question those claims, and be a little worried.

Debunking the Facebook glories

Let’s get it out of the way now - it’s a spruced up contact list / social network. The API and applications do give it a lot of flare, but being totally honest, it’s not going to give me much more than a list of friends a a series of metachunks (did I just coin this?) about them.

Interesting, yes. But where’s the real marketable value? Sure, it’s aggregating all sorts of information about people, what they do, and what their friends do - there’s tremendous potential when it comes to advertising. But it’s closed data - it’s a silo. A walled garden - albeit a small wall, considering the apps.

Linked-in killer, MySpace-killer, what?

Facebook is good for what it is - an aggregator of people data. As such, it’s not going to kill Linked-In as a place for people to use their network to tap into the job market. Or ever stop kids from signing up for MySpace to check-up on their favorite artists. Facebook doesn’t kill much except for its own users’ time - which isn’t bad at all.

Now, Facebook could easily evolve into a competitor against Linked-in, particularly because it already does have the same audience - but should it? My personal opinion is that it wont, but I guess we’ll see.

It does have its merits

Facebook does strike me as genius for one thing, though - being the first social network with no one specific social object (something I initially talked about back in 2005), but being completely flexible about it.

Social object is the main thing the social network is about. Flickr has photos, Last.fm has music, 43Things has activities, Twitter has social statuses.

Through the facebook API, they’ve managed to allow external developers to inject any social object into Facebook. A few examples would be the applications to track movie tastes, music tastes, photos, etc. Now that is smart - I’ll go as far as saying Facebook wouldn’t be 1% as interesting if it wasn’t for that.

In conclusion: Facebook is great for what it is, but fails by being a semi-closed system - you can’t get your data out. It locks you in. I don’t think any social network is tackling the lock-in problem properly, and I suspect there may be considerable gains to the one that does first. If networks make it easy for me to leave and take my data with me, I’ll stay - heck, that’s why I’m using Flickr and Last.fm.

It’s almost that time of the year again. Last year on September 2nd and 3rd we organized the first Barcamp on Portuguese soil - and this year we’re doing it again (only a day sooner - the 1st and 2nd of September).

If you remember last year’s announcement, the goal of bringing Barcamp to Portugal is to stir things up a bit and to give back to the place the team here at Webreakstuff calls home. Bringing people together seems to ignite change, so we’re bringing people together again.

Don’t know what to expect of a Barcamp event? Here’s a quick summary: exciting discussions, ad-hoc presentations, workshops, interesting people, great dinners, hilarity. Take my word for it, you’ll be addicted.

Roll up those sleeves and participate!

If you want to participate in this year’s event, drop by the Barcamp Portugal 2007 wiki page at Barcamp.org and add your name (password to edit is c4mp). Also, make sure you join the BarcampPortugal mailing list so you can stay on top of details and help organize the event itself.

If you’ve never been to a Barcamp - even if you have, it’s always a good thing to mention - keep in mind that it lives and breathes participation. This means that if you have been working on exciting stuff, or have some technology or idea you want to rave about, setup a presentation slot and get cranking on those slides and demos.

Sponsorship opportunities

Interested in sponsoring Barcamp Portugal? We love you already! We don’t have any major needs (this is a labour of love), but it would be great to have group meals sponsored by companies. Please get in touch with us at barcamp@webreakstuff.com - thank you!

Photo credit: Scott Beale @ Laughing Squid

It’s been a while since I’ve mentioned a specific web-application on this blog, but I wrote a few notes on Pownce to send in as feedback and figured it might be interesting to post them as well.

If you don’t know what Pownce is, lets call it a spruced up Twitter (I know Kevin, Daniel, Shawn and Leah must be getting tired of the comparison, but it does sort of fit) that allows you to send messages, files, events and links. And it looks pretty good design-wise (no surprises there, Daniel keeps doing great work).

What it should do better

Grouping: I want (and I assume many others do too) to be able to send these content bits (the notes, events, links and files) to certain groups of people - in short, I want to be able to categorize, tag or group my friends so I can address them as a group. Twitter doesn’t solve this problem, even though many people asked for it, and Pownce doesn’t either, unfortunately. [Duane in the comments tells me this does exist (apparently it’s called sets), which doesn’t say a lot for me for not finding it, or Pownce for not being obvious about it’s killer feature. I’m extremely glad this does exist!]

It doesn’t make sense for my friends in the US to get the same messages I send my friends in Portugal. This is particularly true for events, because those carry local context.

Findability: I had a really bad time with the friend-finding experience. Searching for friends one by one is not going to work if they number in the hundreds, and browsing friends of friends - which is usually the best solution - doesn’t feel right on Pownce either because they show names as “Firstname L.” instead of the full name or the nickname.

That name display issue and the fact that they show a limited number of people per page (unlike Twitter, that bombs you with icons for each person) makes you want to give up adding new people (I know I did). Fixing that means growth, people - come on!

All things considered,

Pownce is a very neat application. I’m still not sure how many people will be coming in from other services (like Jaiku or Twitter), but if they did the grouping I suggest above thing I’d be moving in a snap - and I’m sure others would as well.

Well, that being said, if you do try out Pownce, feel free to add me up - it’ll be interesting to converse with this blog’s audience (which is now way over the 12.000 people mark). See you there and if you have any comments or questions, feel free to leave a comment here.