Adam Engst, the editor of TidBITS, has written a thoughtful piece, summarising the many reasons why email still rules the roost.

Along the way, he considers what to make of the current “email is dead” meme, how to assess objectively the impact of the facebook phenomenon, why Gen Z (or whatever we are up to) still needs its email addresses, the innovative nature of Gmail’s design and also hazards a guess at what Google Wave might mean.

It’s worth reading. Check it out at TidBITS: “Why Email Remains the King of Internet Communications” email, social networking, facebook, google wave, gmail, internet

James Frye has written a small app that syncs facebook events into iCal, so that you can integrate your facebook invitations with the rest of your calendars in one view.

Packaged up as a stand-alone app, it first authenticates into your facebook account, and then retrieves a list of your events.

Its Preferences allow you to determine whether or not it lists events that you have accepted, declined, are unsure about or have not yet replied to.

You are then presented with a dialog containing the events:

Hit the sync button, and the app creates a new local calendar in iCal called “facebook events”, displaying all your “facebook dates”.

Because it is all listed in one new calendar, it’s easy to delete them again—say, hypothetically, you have a student who has (by mistake?) created a 21st birthday party that lasts for a month. It’s easy to undo the sync again.

James is working on EventSync 2.0 which will display the flyers and images associated with the facebook events as well.

EventSync is donation-ware and can be downloaded from its own web site.facebook, ical, events, syncing, social networking, not apple mail, not mail.app

Fluid has just been updated. It’s a clever new app that allows you to make your own site-specific browsers (including the power of Greasemonkey scripts in Cocoa).

Along with a raft of bugfixes, the new version (0.9.2) can now turn the browswers into menubar items for even greater flexibility.

Longtime Hawk Wings readers will remember the small flurry of site-specific web apps two years — Michael McCracken’s WebMail app for Gmail and Chip Cuccio’s GCal app for Google Calendar. With no bookmarks, other windows and other temptations, these apps allowed users to focus on their productivity without distractions.

Fluid works on the same principle. Based on Mozilla’s Prism app , it creates a site-specific app, complete with its own Dock icon, menubars and other individual settings.

Here are some that I made earlier for Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, mint and facebook:

Now, when I want to get the email done, I open the Gmail app, when I want to unwind I turn to the facebook one. I am never tempted to work when I should be relaxing, nor to relax when I should be at work. (That’s the theory; as every “Getting Things Done” fan knows deep in their heart, in the end no app can save you from yourself!).

The ability to run Greasemonkey scripts inside these Fluid apps is very cool. Previously only really available to Firefox users, Fluid now lets me load my two favourite scripts from userscripts.org so that I can use Gmail with killer keyboard macros and some of the noise taken out of the Gmail interface:

Fluid’s free-standing apps can each have their own preference settings. The overall behaviour of the window is also customizable — overlaid on the Dashboard, normal, floating or embedded in the Desktop. Here, for example, is my mint in Fluid’s simple black HUD style:

A Flickr group – Fluid Icons – offers lots of nice looking Dock icons for various web sites. I scored most of the icons in the screenshot above from there.

The possibilities seem enormous, and this article only scratches the surface of the app’s potential.

This updated version lets you turn a browser into a menubar utility, so that clicking on its menubar icon opens its window–instant, roll-your-own to-do lists in a Fluid-generated Remember the Milk or Stikkit app!

Fluid is freeware and available from the Fluid web site . productivity, GTD, Getting Things Done, webkit, fluid, gmail, google calendar, facebook, mint, google docs, web 2.0, web apps, greasemonkey

FacebookSync syncs data between your Address Book and facebook account. It used to sync a lot of data (email addresses, IM details, phone numbers, etc) until facebook pointed out that this was a breach of its terms of use.

It still does a number of useful things though. It can add facebook profile pictures to Address Book contacts who have no photo, also address information.

Fire it up and you are asked to authenticate your facebook account. Then it delivers a list, comparing information about friends in your facebook account with your Address Book contacts, noting the differences:

You can then select sift through the contacts manually to select which Address Book contacts you would like it to update, or use the buttons on the right for a batch job.

It’s very clever. If you are addicted to Mail.app’s ability to display a photo of the author in the top righthand corner of each email, which somehow (for me) turns emails into conversations with real people, you will love it. Finally, I have an Address Book photo for a photo-shy friend! (I could simply have taken it from her facebook profile page but that wouldn’t have been nearly as much fun.)

facebooksync is freeware and and you can get it from the developer’s web site .address book, mail.app, apple mail, contacts, friends, facebook, syncing, social web

Every now and then someone will poke their head and claim that email is dying or is dead. Almost two years ago Business Week predicted the death of email and the rise and rise of IM, wikis and blogs in its place. A year before that technology pundit Stowe Boyd forecasted that 2004,

will be the year when it becomes truly obvious … that email’s days are numbered. Not that it will disappear — surface mail and fax will linger on due to the long-tail of communication media — but it will clearly be a byway, and not the highway, for communication and collaboration.

Now ValleyWag has dredged up the first actual statistics that I have seen, in defence of its claim that “email is dying as a form of communication”:

I’m not a statistician, but it seems that there are least two things to say about this “evidence” from Valleywag.

1. The chart displays the amount of traffic – or “hits” – to email services and to social web sites. The number of times a person visits his or her email service provider may not be a safe indicator of the value that person places upon email, nor of the frequency with which email or other forms of online communication are used. All it shows is that people in the UK now visit social web sites more often than they visit their email service providers, which is… well…. unsurprising.
2. The general trend is not one of social web visits supplanting visits to email service providers, but of supplementing them. As the social web site traffic grows, visits to email service provider do not decline by a corresponding amount for most of the graph.

If there is eveidence for the death of email, this is not it. email, not apple mail, internet, web 2.0, social web, facebook