Why you should not connect with a Person’s Official Email ID

An email is meant to communicate and to keep in touch with someone. But connecting with someone via his/her official mail id calls for something to be kept in mind that he/she is working for a company and provided an email id on company domain that prohibits them from using the email id for personal use. Although our action may or may not be reprehensive but they do represent a bad professional image of us. Thank HR for not reprimanding you on this.

Moreover a person’s official id may not connect you to him/her forever. As soon as he changes his company/Organization he works for, you may loose communication with him.

What’s more sometimes you forward mails to all your friends without noticing that it is his/her official id. I remember when a friend complained that how another friend of his sends him forward mails, some of them containing naughty things (you know how it happens), on his official ID and how it has put him in embracing situations on few occasions. Besides this consider for example, a day you are sitting doing your official work and a forward mail comes telling you to send it to 10 people you love. It is just so irritating that you are interrupted in the middle of the workflow with an email that has nothing to do with work.

Although you may see no harm in getting your official ID into contact list of the of the other person but unfortunately many people disclose their own email id and password to social networking sites and that site uses the APIs to get all email addresses from the contact list which they use to send invitations like be a part of the organizational campaign, to all the ids (unfortunately your official id was added in their contact list). By this way, your official id can go to the spammers.

So be professionally aware and moderately govern your actions before you communicate with someone’s Official ID.

Mixero: A promissing twitter Client that needsto mature fast

Its when my colleague Meenu (@bmeenu) suggested I tried Mixero. It is a desktop client for Twitter and I tried every feature it has. It sure looks a promising application. The application with no doubt presents itself very nicely. It has two version : The Desktop version and iPhone Version (I havent tried iPhone version though).

The mixero says reduce signal to noise ratio using the Active List, Context and Filters. It really does reduce the noise ratio, the Active List enables you to aggregates information on a number of elements (like new User, List/Group, Channel) which are of your interest. Your ActiveList shows only the elements included in the it, so no important information is missed. Context is a saved ActiveList with a name given by you. You can switch between various contexts in Mixero. Filtering in mixero is not only the positive filtering, it has negative filter too. Positive filter provides you the tweets/content that you want to see while negative filter removes the tweets/content that you do not want presence of. Filter also does the work of blocking. Another thing that I liked in it is its style, the appearance it really is cool.

I know it must be sounding interesting to you but while using Mixero I wondered how to use a lot of stuff. Yes the features are there but when it comes to using them as a naive user, you will struggle a lot. There is help but its not easily trackable. Once tracked where the help is, you will be unsatisfied with the help. Lets take an example of context. It took me 2 days to get what it is. The site provides context help, where they are just talking about what context is, there's no explanation of how to use it.

The mixero looked attractive to me coz of its multiple Twitter & Facebook (FB) account management. Which appeared as a yet to refine feature. Mixero with Twitter is good but with FB it struggles in connecting. And if you have enabled your auto login mode then just keep waiting for the application to start, it just stucks. Another point to note is after logging in FB a display issue that arises. You get a dialog box notifying you about the sharing of Home & wall updates but, its accept/deny button is not visible on the dialogue box. Actually the accept button is present below the window of dialogue box which can be discovered if you use the tab button of your keyboard.

Once I have logged in (with both FB & twitter account) I see now is the mixero cool screen. The left panel has all my tweets organized as per @ replies, my timeline, DMs etc. The right panel has my lists/groups, chats, twitter trends etc. between the two panels I can see my twitter and FB mini profile. Its quite messed up with the display of DM, @ replies, Update icon & counters. A major issue with mixero is updation of tweets. At one moment your tweet is visible on time line and at very next momemt it vanishes. Another tiny issue is closing the application. You can close it only through the Task bar's tray icon.

As I said I tried all the things mixero got, my context R&D made me realise that @mixeroteam (the mixero twitter account) is really a lazy one to reply. Over all I would say Its an application which shows some promiss but I would still stick to Hootsuite till the time its matures enough. It is still my favorite of all twitter clients I have tried till date.