This doesn’t happen every day.

Rene Obermann, the Deutsche Telekom CEO himself, just pinged me, inviting me to connect to his LinkedIn profile. 

Now, two things came to mind instantly: Who else at DT got pinged? And why so late at night?

As to the former, it seems fair to assume the same invite went out to 200,000 or so of my other Deutsche Telekom colleagues around the globe.  (Because, although a Deutsche Telekom employee, I am certainly not close enough to Mr. Obermann to qualify for a personal one-on-one invite to his social network. More about this later).

As to why so late at night, myself in New York right now, my Blackberry took notice of the invite to connect to Mr. Obermann at a surprisingly late 10:43 PM EST.

Which means someone in Germany - where DT’s HQ resides - got up rather bright and early (4:43 AM to be exact), to get this out to me.

So what does this all mean?

A)  No doubt, when the top executive of a multi-national company pings you via LinkedIn, you know Web-based social networking has hit mainstream.

That’s a good thing I suppose. (Even when you know, it is his PR team that drives the initiative).

B) Driving traffic worth 200,000 individuals (at least potentially) towards a single social network doesn’t happen every day. Not even at such a popular site as LinkedIn has become.

On balance though, I don’t think they’ll mind.

C) My guess is more messages will be forthcoming from my CEO; presumably all via internal PR, all DT-related I suppose, and designed to induce informal dialog, outside corporate walls and a T-branded environment.

Whether this is going to work, let’s see. But I am certainly smitten by this new openness permeating not just inside DT’s CEO office, but in many other places these days.

Then I got really curious.

What if all the CEO’s of other leading European telecom giants have long been on LinkedIn, and I just didn’t know.

Could Rene be late in this, merely following and not leading his peers into the nebula of Web 2.0 ?

Well, turns out, France Telecom CEO Didier Lombard himself is currently not on LinkedIn. But the company maintains a corporate profile, so far with 556 FT employees auto-grouped by LinkedIn under the corporate umbrella.

Telecom Italia Franco Bernabe is indeed on LinkedIn, but so far with zero connections. What went wrong there?

Then there is BT CEO Ben Verwaayen. Yes, Ben does maintain his personal LinkedIn profile. Even better (little did I know), we are only two degrees removed. 

Tuns out, his profile page only shows a single connection so far. And the one connection separating Ben and I is someone with 500+ connections. Hardly a quality contact, I suppose.

And how about closer to (my) home, the US? Are the leading US telco CEOs populating LinkedIn?

As of my writing these lines, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson is curently not present with a profile.

Neither is Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg. 

Either they (and their PR team) haven’t gotten to it, I am thinking, or they (and their PR team) found it simply not worth their while. Who knows?

Backt to Rene Obermann, unlike his LinkedIn telco CEO peers, he publicly distributes a Gmail address, and has set his profile to allow insight into who else is connecting to him at any time.

This seems to signal a level of engagement interests way above and beyond his telco CEO peers.

But upon my last check (12:03 AM EST), his public LinkedIn profile shows a mere eight connections.

While not overly impressive, heed the time difference, folks. I suppose most of my colleagues haven’t had a chance to accept the invite as they have literally yet to wake up to their CEO’s surprisingly early morning ping.

Picking up spyware or a virus/worm/trojan used to require some conscious action on the part of the user:  opening an email attachment, installing supposedly ‘necessary’ system software (video codecs were a common ploy), or downloading media and/or applications of questionable origin.

These days, Bad Things can occur much more transparently: the most rapidly growing method of spreading malware today is via compromised websites – so now, rather than having to (one way or another) make the explicit decision to ‘invite the bytes’ onto your machine, merely visiting a malicious (or unknowingly compromised) site can launch an exploit.  And since this new type of ‘drive-by’ attack is often implemented through 3rd-party browser plug-ins (such as Flash and Acrobat Reader) or via good old fashioned Javascript, it’s not just a Windows or Internet Explorer issue anymore (for the first time, Apple recently issued a KnowledgeBase article advising users to start installing antivirus protection (although after the resulting flurry of unwanted publicity, the warning was removed from the Apple site 24 hours later).

Although the increase in web malware activity is dramatic, it’s been going on for some time now: a recent study found that during 2007 alone, the number of such attacks increased more than 500 percent.  And while this is bad enough news for the home user, it’s even more troublesome for the enterprise, as HTTP (port 80) is the often the only traffic left largely unrestricted on corporate firewalls.

One simple precaution?  Update, update, update.  To address Javascript engine vulnerabilities, update your browser religiously, regardless of which particular browser or operating system you’re using.   As for Acrobat Reader, resist the temptation to ignore those frequent messages about available updates: you might wonder just how much better a PDF can possibly be displayed, but these days, chances are good that the update has something to do with security – and the same goes for Flash.

You can check for any available updates for Acrobat Reader from the Help menu of the application itself, and to check your version of Flash, go here - the Adobe site will inspect your installation and let you know.

The New York Times has discovered (or rediscovered) thin computing: a small simple device (or ‘terminal’) with just enough under the hood to send mouse & keyboard clicks to a server doing absolutely everything else.  Initially hyped as a challenge to Microsoft’s domination of the workplace desktop, the concept had its 15 minutes as The Next Big Thing a few years back, only to fall from favor due to network performance issues (while it’s acceptable if an application’s a teensy bit slower over the network, sluggish mouse and key response is a non-starter for most users).

But look at the advantages, though: rather than a $1000 workstation with Windows and Office installed, we’re talking about a simple paperback-sized box and monitor for $400, all in.  Granted, MS Terminal Server (and especially Citrix) licenses do cost, but on the other hand consider that there’s no fan noise, no hard drive failures, no long boot-up time, no virus susceptibility, no user-installed malware, space savings, power consumption savings – the list goes on and on.

And I speak from experience – several years ago, as the network administrator for a small business with half a dozen retail and office locations spread across  the country, I moved a good portion of my remote users to these devices.  This not only solved my problem of how to install and maintain remote these workstations, my client (who was growing quickly at the time) loved the immediate savings compared to the workstations they had been buying (even taking the cost of terminal server licenses into account).  I was a hero; life was good (in a keep-the-trains-running job like network administration, you tend to savor those win-win moments). 

While I chose devices from Wyse, as the NY Times article points out, thin client computing is becoming The Next Big Thing all over again - so there are more and more manufacturers out there.  So many, in fact, that it begs the question:

What about the home market?

What I’m getting at is the return of the web appliance.  Like thin clients, this is another concept from a few years back that never quite took off – the only difference being the addition of an onboard web browser of some sort (maybe the well-received Opera browser, since Sony is already embedding that into its new Internet Video Link hardware).  Because in a world of Hulu, Flickr, and Google Docs (services which, unlike Windows Terminal Server or Citrix, are generally free), a simple little box with a browser and a handful of drivers for peripherals would about do it for a lot of folks, wouldn’t it?

Clearly, cloud computing is The Next Big Thing now – at least Google thinks so, and Microsoft thinks so too.   The potential reliability and privacy issues of cloud computing might be a little easier to take if one also imagines potential upside of being able to radically simplify things for the home user.

So thin computing is back. Who knows, maybe the time is finally becoming right again for the web appliance too; maybe the browser is the new operating system.

Who knew? A Twitter feed, large on a flashy screen, during a live conference workshop Q&A.

While attending the recent Web 2.0 Expo software love fest in New York, what struck me, those Twitter posts came from audience members right in the same room, only steps away from a microphone and free to pose the same questions to everyone “organically”.

Rather than raising their “analog” hands and voices, they opted to type questions into a digital device.

Afforded seeing everyone’s “twittered” questions come in live, this seemed info overkill, distracting from the verbal live discussion unfolding at the same time.

Later, walking past the Web2Open area (set up for free-wheeling “anti-conference” discussions among peers), more participants seemed tied to their handhelds and laptops then actually talking to each other face-to-face.

All in, to get real people to engage in real meetings was never easy.  With the advent of Web 2.0, could we have added yet another layer of complication?

No doubt, despite its relatively short existence, Web 2.0 (the trend, not its name-sake conference) has had fundamental, positive impact on consumer digital life.

But during this industry conference, the community of evangelist and software architects seemed surprisingly stuck between “old world” idiosyncrasies and “new world” paradigm. (In all fairness though, some Web2Open discussion certainly did take place).

In his most recent testimonial ad,  Sprint CEO D. Hesse makes a valid point. ”Technology is only great when you know how to use it”.

Web 2.0 Expo attendees certainly know how to “use technology”.

But even to the best of us, it seems still somewhat awkward to navigate both analog and digital worlds simultaneously - especially if both are “anywhere, anytime” and “always on” to reckon with.

So, what is the right mix of “synthetic” communications and “organic” conversation at the dawn of the 21st century?

For anyone with interest in the bigger picture behind all of this, during the conference, Intel social scientist, Genevieve Bell, gave an impressive to-the-point presentation.

Wanna’ discuss this further?

Please no analog “old world” calls.

Instead, post a digital “new world” message right here.

Oh wait, why don’t we talk AND twitter ;-)

I’m no web designer.  But I’m pretty picky about efficient design - and moreover, I just couldn’t accept our little blog here looking like dozens of others that used the same out-of-the-box Wordpress template.

Well, that was a slippery slope -  I chose a template as a starting point, and I ended up (spending way too much time) effectively rewriting most of it.

The Wordpress platform is very well-thought out (so much so, it’s also sometimes used for content management on non-blog sites).  the PHP scripting effectively shields one from having to deal directly with the back-end mySQL database, and there are a wealth of useful and well-written 3rd party plug-ins available -  but to get things looking like I wanted them to, I was going to be in for a bit of a learning curve, there was no way around it - not only with the PHP, but also with the CSS (the ancillary document that defines the layout and style of the web pages themselves).

While I think the PHP’s pretty transparent to anyone who’s had any experience at all with programming and/or scripting languages, making changes to the CSS was a particularly painful hit-or-miss process I had frankly little patience for – until, that is, I came across Firebug, a Firefox add-on for web developers.  The Firebug icon sits down in your Firefox tray and when needed, will (among other things) allow you to locate the relevant CSS code for any element on the web page, to make changes to the CSS, and to see the resulting change in real time.  Using Firebug is simple and intuitive, and I would recommend it to anyone with a need or interest in modifying website design and/or javascript – it’s an excellent tool (at least for identifying CSS elements and auditioning changes, which is all I used it for), and fun to use.

That’s it. Just like that. One morning you wake up to find most of your emails emptied, gone, vanished - never to be retrieved again.

Well, that just happened to me. But what happened really?

A happy Yahoo! Mail Plus customer since February 2003 - a full five years of my personal emails dissolved into thin air this past week.

A moment of panic ensued. Then I started thinking.

The good news: I discovered that Yahoo! has a toll-free number to call (still relatively untypical for a .com), their customer service rep was exceedingly helpful and to-the-point, without schmoozie upselling attempts and just a minimum number of subservient “we-love-you-Mr.-Customer”.

And yes, I did get my follow-up call the same evening, just as promised.

The bad news: In a heartbeat Yahoo! (accidentally?) removed a full five years of my personal email communications with friends, family and many other folks I care about - only to confirm Yahoo! had forever deleted thousands of my digital messages off their server farms.

To me, that real question behind this unexpected personal data kill: In our hyper-social, interconnected world, what role does our email communication really represent within our personal sphere?

Certainly not as direct and personable as a one-on-one phone call, email is faster to-and-fro sender and recipient than, let’s say, a letter or a fax.

Conversely, email lags the speed of instant messaging and typically is slower than a briefly “spit-out” Twitter-style micro-blog post.

Of course email is searchable. In fact, Yahoo!’s recent free browser update improved my ability to turn scant bits of memory (… didn’t what’s-her-name’s email mention “engagement ads”?) into a series of (mostly relevant) hits.

Try that with past voice mails , letters or faxes received. It will not work.

But did I hold on to years of emails because I really needed to, or simply because I could? 

And what meaning do personal emails occupy in my daily life in terms of actual productivity gains?

Pushed by Google’s competitive Gmail launch, in May of last year, Yahoo! responded by offering “unlimited email storage” capabilities.

At one fell swoop, I was confronted with the pleasures of an all-you-can-eat email depository.

But just because competition got tough on Yahoo!, and storage cost had fallen dramatically, doesn’t really mean myself (or most anyone) actually needed the extra space and ensuing clutter.

Leaves my postmortem analysis with the legal aspect of my involuntary email vanishing act.

In short, a look inside Yahoo!’s service agreement failed to provide detail into the liability aspect of emails lost. (Do I actually have recourse here?).

But then again, it’s too late anyway.

What’s gone is gone, forever in the heavens of the Internet ether.

Beta-testing of the Windows version of Google’s new open-source browser Chrome starts at 2:00 EST this afternoon (Sept. 2nd).  They even wrote a comic book about it.  While I had been planning to go get that and play with it as soon as possible, on reflection maybe It Ain’t Broken…  I mean, I just upgraded to Firefox 3 last week – how compelling can a new browser be?

Supposedly Chrome is optimized for video, web apps, and security - and the java script engine is faster.  However, the Firefox 3 upgrade is already mostly about security - and since Google Chrome uses several unnamed Mozilla components (Firefox being open source too), how much new can there be in terms of security?  And in terms of performance, client-side browser processes such as AJAX and java script, etc. are *not* the bottleneck – it’s the internet connection.

So whether or not to be on the bleeding edge…  maybe not.  I expect a flood of internet reviews of Chrome starting in just a few hours, I’ll read those - what I’ll be looking for is whether Chrome features gmail/Google search/Google Apps optimizations – because I think Chrome is at least as much as improving the Google apps/cloud computing experience as it it is about faster/safer web browsing.

If Chrome turns out to be not only a browser but also a fatter client for a richer Google Apps experieince, now that could be very interesting.

Use Firefox?

Ever close a tab by mistake?

Ever wish you could go back to the site on the tab you closed 15 minutes ago?

Then this is for you: command-shift-T (Apple OS) or control-shift-T (Windows). Not only will this reopen the last closed tab, there appear to be an unlimited levels of undo within a given cached session (at least up to a dozen or so tabs, which is as far as I’ve cared to test). This is something I use every day, and I’m always surprised how many people don’t know about it.

Convenient? Youbetcha. I know there’s a lot of people out there tricking out Firefox with <a href=”https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/ “>add-ons</a>, but I’m one of the vast majority for whom Firefox is fine pretty much right out the box (although I do use the OPML plug-in for getting certain RSS feeds into Google Reader).

But then again, maybe this handy little shortcut is too convenient: the other day I noticed that (unless or until a server-side inactivity timeout occurs) cmd-shift-T takes you right back into your authenticated SSL sessions, too… (!) And since it will also take you to pages you’ve deleted from the browsing history, deleting just that isn’t enough (actually, the browsing history is less dangerous than the cache, because since it’s just a URL string, any SSL sessions would have to be reauthenticated).

So let this be just another warning to delete that cache on public or semi-public machines! (I can just picture someone up to no good hitting repeatedly using this shortcut on any running instance of Firefox they come across …)

And backup your local data.

And eat your vegetables.

It’s a world of translucent shiny semi-transparent user interfaces (“What’s the difference between Web 2.0 and 1.0? – rounded corners!” …ha…)

Still, there’s one tool from the developer-world that’s so effective, so useful – and so ugly – that not enough users know about it. Total Commander is a shareware file management utility – in other words, a Windows Explorer replacement. Back in the day (and we’re talking a long time ago here), there were several such tools out there to improve on DOS file management. Then Windows Explorer came in with Windows 95, and for the average user, the need for these tools faded. But developers and other old-school type folks (such as myself) kept using Total Commander, so it’s kept going, adding features and supporting all subsequent Windows Operating Systems.

The first thing you’ll notice about Total Commander (and the other older ‘Commander’-style apps such as Norton Commander) is that there are two windows side-by-side - a ‘source’ pane and a ‘destination’ pane. These windows can have multiple tabs (which turns out to be every bit as nice a feature managing files as it is browsing websites). Working back and forth between the two panes, all the obvious file tasks can be done - but Total Commander can do so much more:

• A solid, fast FTP client (the best I’ve used), available directly from within the same Total Commander window you’re managing local files in.
• Transparent access to all networked resources (including non-mapped drives) – conceptually, Total Commander integrates the user’s Network Places into the local window structure (which is as cool as it sounds).
• Packing and unpacking in all popular (and a few not-so-popular) archiving formats, again right within the Total Commander window.
• Folder Synchronization – (really nice for ad hoc backup folders on other drives).
• Multiple File renaming (via rules or in a text editor).
• File comparison (not by name, by the actual contents - the actual 0’s and 1’s).
• File View (in Hex/Binary/Text).
• Search for duplicate files (again, by the actual bits).

I am by no means a power user – for me, what I love about Total Commander are the window tabs, the excellent onboard FTP client directly available from within the 2 Total Commander windows, and the archive functionality. For software or web developers (or anyone who does repetitive file management tasks), the deeply flexible configuration and hot key implementation might be the main sell – but if that’s not enough, there’s also a built-in command line interpreter, and there are plug-ins for almost anything you could imagine: creating ISO images, burning discs, creating AVI files from graphics files, using HTTP and POP, and much more – all within the window (it’s the polar opposite of interface-crazy software such as Nero).

In fact, my only frustration with Total Commander is that I know that there’s some much more functionality and productivity there than I’ve had the time to explore…

So feel free to submit your tips!

Total Commander - it’s not pretty. But it’s powerful, good, solid, non-bloated software.

And isn’t that refreshing?