Open up your mind and say, ahh...

Many of us live in our inboxes; for all intents and purposes, our Gmail is our homepage. And yet for all the email junkies out there, there are at the same time people and businesses who are saying that email is dead or dying, a relic of an era before social networks. The future of communication may lie somewhere in the middle. Fiesta.cc, a service that helps you manage group mailing lists, launches a major update this week that in some ways envisions a melding of email and social networking.

“Those lines are becoming blurred, by the day,” Fiesta’s CEO, Michael Dirolf (inset), tells Fast Company. “And to me there’s no reason why they should be distinct.” Fiesta hopes to occupy that sweet spot in the middle by revolutionizing that least sexy of communications tools: the email listserv.

Before getting into the details of Fiesta’s update, let’s discuss what it’s been for the past 10 months or so that it’s been operational. Fiesta basically streamlines and simplifies the creation of email groups. Think about how you currently communicate with groups you’re a member of. If you want to email the group, you probably search your inbox for one of the members, find an old email chain with the whole group attached, hit reply-all, and change the subject heading. You could, of course, start a Google Group, but many people don’t feel like taking that extra step.

Fiesta’s insight is that you should be able to instantly create and name an email group from within your new message itself. Fiesta treats the cc field of email as a command line: write an email to your whole soccer team, and then cc something like “soccer@fiesta.cc.” Fiesta remembers this group, and from here on out you can just send to “soccer@fiesta.cc” (Fiesta is smart enough to know that your soccer@fiesta.cc is different from any number of others). All it cost you to set up that group was adding a cc line, and now you’re good to go.

In a nod toward a future in which email and social networks converge, Fiesta this week launched a service wherein all group emails are also backed up on the web, cleaned up and parsed into threads for easy perusal. An example of the layout is here. Each of those messages originated from an email. Dirolf calls these “private social networks powered directly from the inbox.”

Once email and social networking become hybridized in this way, says Dirolf, new forms of innovation become possible. Fiesta (currently a two-person team incubated by Dogpatch Labs in New York) is experimenting, for instance, with labeling messages in such a way that essential ones would get pushed to your inbox, while trash talk and chatter would stay online for you to skim (or not) at your leisure.

Fiesta is focused on scaling right now, not making money, says Dirolf. In the long term, he sees “charging for our
white-labeled service” and “premium subscriptions with additional
features” as possible business models.

As Mark Twain would have said of email, had he had it: Its death has been greatly exaggerated. “To me, what’s much more likely than email disappearing,” says Dirolf, “is email evolving.”

Image: Flickr user Steve Johnson

It’s been a busy week for Boeing 787 pilots, who kicked off a world tour in one Dreamliner and circumnavigated the globe in record time flying another.

To bolster the Dreamliner’s reputation, Boeing is sending the refurbished ZA003 flight test airplane on a six-month global tour that started in China and stops next in the Middle East and Africa. Cooler still, a second test airplane, ZA006, went around the world this week in less than 43 hours.

ZA006 departed Boeing Field in Seattle at 11:02 a.m. Tuesday and landed in Dhaka, Bangladesh, setting a distance record for its weight class. The 10,337-mile flight was the first leg of ZA006′s journey.

The plane stayed in Dhaka for two hours to refuel before the 13 people aboard took off for home. After another 9,734 miles, the flight landed at Boeing Field 42 hours and 27 minutes after leaving Seattle.

The trip netted two records. The first was absolute distance for an airplane in the 440,000- to 550,000-pound weight class. Boeing broke a record the Airbus A330 set nine years ago. The second record was for the shortest time around the world in the same weight class. Granted, ZA006 was the first plane in its weight class to attempt the record, so it literally was no contest.

Boeing recently sent the first 787 Dreamliner, airframe ZA001, into retirement. It is expected to eventually land in a museum.

Boeing has delivered two 787s to All Nippon Airways and the airplanes are currently flying passengers on domestic routes within Japan. International 787 flights are expected to begin early in the new year.

Photo: Boeing

If you sell at the top of the market (luxury travel, services to Fortune 500 companies, financial services for the wealthy…) you might be tempted to figure out ways to cut costs and become more efficient.

After all, if you save a dollar, you make a dollar, without even getting a new customer.

Resist.

The goal shouldn’t be to reduce costs. It should be to increase them.

That voice mail service that saves you $30,000 a year in receptionist costs–it also makes you much more similar to a competitor that is more efficiently serving the middle of the market.

Go through all the ways you serve your customers and make them more expensive to execute, not less. Your loyalty and your market share will both grow. People who can afford to pay for service often choose to pay for service.

Cartoonists have a crazy streak. They can’t help themselves; it’s how they are made. As a cartoonist-inventor, I sometimes cannot resist the temptation to illustrate a concept even while knowing it is crazy, stupid or at least poorly conceived.  For instance, I have invented silly toilets solely to keep myself amused. I have also spent time pondering whether there might be non-traditional locations within the home where a toilet might be placed. Is it merely for reasons of tradition that toilets are consigned to bathrooms? Could toilets be placed in hallways, in dining rooms, or in the middle of the living room? Why not outhouse-like facilities (of modern design) on the porch, deck, or in the garden?

There are likely many good reasons for not locating a toilet in the middle of a kitchen. I understand that. But why not locate a toilet inside a shower stall? In fact, I can imagine extreme situations where water and space are so scarce, as on a submarine, where toilets might be incorporated into showers. But admittedly that is not the case in a home or apartment. But to see what it might look like, I drew a toilet inside a shower and I succeeded in amusing myself. I admit the concept is somewhat disgusting and disturbing given that dampness is the perfect medium for the spread of disease, contamination, smells, and so forth. I will give my idea an F for practicality but an A for whimsy.

Where else in a home might a toilet be placed? In 1983, I proposed The Living Bathroom, a space-saving concept for small apartments and cabins. I like my cute and clever execution of the idea, though I worry that the issue of odors was not addressed.

In 2007 I revisited my Living Bathroom concept, making it more stylish and adding a chimney. The chimney contains a built-in fan that sucks vapors from the toilet toward a roof vent.  Both the chimney and the toilet come in polished stainless steel and look very modern. Note how the Toilet Concealment Chair slips over the toilet. It rolls forward on wheels when there is urgent need to use the toilet.

I have also pondered the practicality of freestanding toilet cabinets or closets. A Toilet Cabinet might be placed anywhere, assuming plumbing connections could be attached from below. In this design floor drains are shown.  Optional toilet seat heights are offered, allowing the user to select between the thin (standard) and thick (elder) seat lid. The weakness in this design is the lack of a fresh air vent. I do not, by the way, consider the claustrophobia-inducing design objectionable though some users might.

This month I revisited my earlier designs for the Living Bathroom and created a modified concept that offers a vent pipe and a mini-sink. The entire unit fits stylishly in the middle of a living room. I can’t see many flaws in this design, though an objection might be that there are noises attendant with toilet use. The noises I refer to are not just those made while flushing or washing one’s hands. Music or white noise could be broadcast out to the living area while the bathroom is in use. The masking sound would commence at the moment the “occupied” latch is set in place.

If there are good arguments for why the toilet should remain where it belongs – in the bathroom – are there ways of integrating it into the design of the other typical bathroom furnishings? The studies above show some possibilities. Notice how these designs, though seamlessly integrated, seem to conflict with a person’s need for privacy and modesty!

Yet modesty is such an outmoded concept. Is anyone modest anymore?  Do TV programs, movies, magazines or newspapers show concern for adhering to old standards of modesty? No! Perhaps the time has arrived for promoting my Duplex Toilet for home use. Think of the advantages of a Duplex Toilet. Consider the high cost of adding an extra bathroom to the home and how much space is saved within the home by these designs!

Of course, there might be some issues initially with use of the Duplex Toilet because of ingrained habits of personal modesty. There might be problems between a brother and a sister who just aren’t comfortable being in the bathroom at the same time.  But looking far into the future, I can imagine the Duplex Toilet becoming popular. It could even contribute to a melting of a present-day taboo against communal toilet use. Admittedly, just as swimmers frolicked modestly at public beaches in the 1890s while nearly fully clothed, there might be a step in the acceptance of the Duplex Toilet when users will feel the need to don a concealing, tarp-like covering over their knees, allowing them to modestly hide their bare legs, dropped underpants and trousers.  Eventually, however, no one will feel the need to use the draping accessory! There will be Duplex Toilets in your future, and you read this prediction first in Neatorama!

Visit Steven M. Johnson at his website.