Why everyone needs their own email domain

Photo credit: Horia Varlan

This post is part of what will ultimately be a series that includes a complete step by step guide to setting up your email from scratch.  Before I dive into that, though, I thought it might be a good idea to spell out why I think everyone should have their own email domain, just in case it isn't self-evident.

An Address for Life
Email providers come and go, and yours will likely change multiple times during your life, but there's no good reason why your email address should have to.  I've just done a quick analysis of the email addresses of my couple of hundred Facebook contacts to see what kind of email addresses they're using.  Now my friends may be somewhat more weighted towards tech-savvy folks than most, but there are still plenty of what I'd consider everyday users amongst them.  Breaking the list down into four broad categories, the results are:

• Employer's domain: 28%
• ISP's domain: 16%
• Web mail provider's domain: 46% (Of those: 59% GMail, 19% Hotmail, 15% Yahoo, 3% webmail.co.za)
• Personal domains: 10%

Let's tackle the first two classes of addresses.  If you're in that 44% of my friends, are you expecting to work for the same employer for the rest of your life and never retire, or to use the same ISP for the rest of your life?  I hope not!  That means you're inevitably going to have to change your address at some point in the future, and not just for Facebook but for typically tens to hundreds of sites and organisations that you interact with.  There's just no getting away from it and, in fact, I'd suggest you change your address as soon as possible, but only do it once.

I was actually quite impressed to see how many people rely on free web email providers, and particularly how many of those use GMail.  That's definitely a step in the right direction, but I think they could do better.  Don't get me wrong - I don't think there's anything wrong with GMail - I use and recommend it myself, but I don't ever give out my GMail address directly because I can't guarantee I'll always want to use them.  GMail suits me right now, but let's say Google decided to start charging for GMail, or they reduced the mail storage space they give away for free.  I know it's highly unlikely, but it's possible, and if that scenario or any other that prompted me to want to change email providers arose then I'd hate to be stuck in the same situation as all those people using employers or ISP's domains.

Those final 10% of my friends have done it right - they're using personal email domains that they (or members of their family) own and control.  They, like me, might be using GMail now, but if they want to use another provider, or host their own mail, they can do just that without having to update the email addresses they've given to Facebook, or their bank, or anyone else.

So, the permanence of a personal email domain is the most obvious and important reason to have your own domain, but there are couple of others that spring to mind too:

Spam Control
Spam is here to stay and though everyone's estimates vary widely, I'm inclined to believe those that say that spam accounts for over 90% of all email flowing between mail servers that's certainly true of mine.  Having your own domain isn't going to magically render your inbox free of spam, but coupled with using unique email addresses for each organisation you deal with you can eliminate a good proportion of the worst kind of spam - that which makes it through even really good spam filters like GMail.  GMail is great at killing the typical pharmaceutical spam, and even most of the online banking phishing mails, but when someone sells your address to some small-time South African business who thinks it's OK to buy an email address list and spam them, their volume of spam is generally too low to get caught by GMail, but still high enough to annoy me.  It's also the best defence against phishing, but it's actually worthy of its own post, so I'll save that for later.

Reputation
Your mates won't care, but if you're using email for business purposes then the email address you choose to use can say a lot about you.  If I was dealing with John Smith, I'd treat mail from johnnyboy@mycrappyisp.co.za and mail from john.smith@jsconsultants.com somewhat differently.  Of course if everyone has their own domain then it becomes harder to recognise the dogs, but your choice of address still says something about you.  If you're conflicted about picking john@mysurname.somedomain or john@afancysounding.company then don't sweat it - register both and use each in the appropriate circumstances.

Web Presence
More and more we're all generating content all over the web, whether on Facebook or Flickr or Twitter or blogs or all of the above.  Even if the content remains distributed across multiple sites, using a simple web site with your personal domain to aggregate all the content you want to be associated with is a smart idea.

It's Easier (and Cheaper) than You Thought!
Most people don't even consider registering their own domains because they think it's difficult, or expensive, or just for geeks.  I hope I've made a case for why everyone needs their own domain.  If you disagree (or even agree), let me know through the comments.  In future posts I hope to show that it's a simple enough and cheap (or free) enough for anyone to set up for themselves.

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How to find your Facebook friends on Twitter

A while ago I was looking for a way to find any of my Facebook friends who are also on Twitter.  A bit of Googling for "How to find your Facebook friends on Twitter" turned up a number of articles from around mid-2010 which suggested that for a while Twitter's Facebook application allowed you to do just that.  Unfortunately, that's no longer the case.

According to an article at mashable.com, Facebook claimed at the time that they were working with Twitter to resolve the issue, but here we are almost a year later and the friend-finding functionality is still missing from the app.  Whether they'll admit it or not, I think it's fairly likely that Facebook is intentionally making life difficult for Twitter because they'd much rather have you communicating with your friends within the Facebook ecosystem.  Making it easy to connect with your Facebook friends on Twitter is therefore not in Facebook's best interests.

Another suggestion that came up in one of the pages in the results of my Google search was a third-party Facebook app called fb140 which apparently used to find any of your friends who had Twitter handles listed in their Facebook info.  That would have been useful if people bothered to update that info, but lots of my Facebook friends who I know are on Twitter haven't bothered to reflect that in their Facebook info.  Unfortunately, it appears fb140 is dead, so even its limited functionality is no more.

Fortunately, there is still a way to find your Facebook contacts on Twitter, although it's a bit of a roundabout route.  What you need to do is to use an intermediate address book provider to whom you can export your Facebook friends' details, and from whom Twitter will help you find contacts.  Here's the current list of services that Twitter will search for you:

Now the relationship between Google & Facebook is far from great so there doesn't seem to be an easy way to sync directly between Gmail & Facebook, but both Yahoo and Hotmail provide the easy Facebook contact import functionality we want.  AOL and LinkedIn may do too, but since I only need one that works I haven't explored those options.  Given a choice between sharing data with Yahoo or Hotmail, I tend to think Yahoo's the slightly more benign option, so that's what I'll use here.  

Step 1

If you already have a Yahoo account and you want all your Facebook friends in your Yahoo address book, you can obviously use your existing account, but for the sake of clarity let's assume you don't already have an account.  Your first step is to create a Yahoo mail account by visiting mail.yahoo.com and clicking "Create New Account".  Don't worry about the extra email account you're creating - there's no need to use it for anything other than syncing your contacts, so you won't have yet another spam collection point to deal with.  You can bypass some of the sign-up questions by signing in with your Facebook credentials at this stage, but that doesn't automatically import your Facebook contacts into Yahoo, so it's not an automatic win.  It will also add the email address you use for your Facebook account as a secondary address on your new Yahoo account, which you may or may not want.

Step 2

Once you have your new Yahoo account set up, you want click on the Contacts tab, and then the "Import Contacts" button.  Next, click the Facebook icon.  A new window will open prompting you to log in to Facebook if you aren't already logged in, or simply asking if you want to share your contacts with Yahoo if you're already logged in.  Log in if necessary and click OK to allow the sharing.  You'll now have all your Facebook friends listed in your Yahoo contact list along with the email addresses they use for their Facebook accounts.

Step 3

Your next step is to log in to Twitter.  Click on the "Who to Follow" link in Twitter's main navigation, and then the "Find Friends" tabs as shown in the first picture in this post.  Click on the Yahoo button and you'll get a new Yahoo window asking you to sign in (if necessary) and then to authorise sharing of your Yahoo contacts with Twitter. Once you've clicked the "Agree" button, Twitter will take the list of email addresses it got from Yahoo and check to see if they have Twitter accounts.  (Remember Twitter can only find them if they used the same email address to sign up for both Facebook and Twitter, but that's a topic for another day.)  

For most of the people that do have Twitter accounts you'll see their Twitter avatars, bios and the usual Follow button that you'd expect in most Twitter people-search results, but for some of them you'll instead see a message saying "This person is on Twitter, but isn't yet findable by email. Let them know you'd like to follow them."  These are people who've unchecked the "Let others find me by my email address" option in their Twitter account settings.  For them, clicking the Follow button just greys out the button - it's not entirely clear whether clicking it actually lets them know you'd like to follow them or if Twitter expects you to manually email them to ask them.  If you've got an email from Twitter saying I want to follow you, please let me know!

Update after some more investigation:  Anyone who's actively unchecked the "Let others find me by my email address" option in their Twitter account settings will not be found at all.  The people who "aren't yet findable by email" are those that haven't updated their Twitter account settings since the "Let others find me by my email address" option was introduced.  If they visit their settings they'll see the box ticked by default, but until they actually save their settings Twitter's keeping them in a state of limbo where you can see that they have an account, but can't actually follow them directly.  I also confirmed that clicking the Follow button for these people does absolutely nothing.

If you're not sure about your own findability then I'd suggest you visit your Twitter account settings and click Save.  Assuming you're exposing your real name in your Twitter settings, I don't see any point in unchecking the "Let others find me by my email address" option - all you're doing is making it harder for your friends, who already know your email address, to connect with you on Twitter.

Step 4

	Tweet

Now, if you've found this article useful, please help spread the word so your friends can find their friends too.  All it takes is a click on one (or preferably more) of the buttons to the right.  I'd also appreciate your feedback via the comments form below.

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Old Mutual Entrepreneurs' Guide

At today's Net Prophet conference, Old Mutual launched their Entrepreneurs' Guide as part of their "Do Great Things" campaign. I was honoured to be one of the entrepreneurs who contributed content to the guide, so it was great to see the final product finally launched to the public about six months after I was interviewed.  The project was the brainchild of Jack Kruger, head of Old Mutual Digital and the notable omission from the credits list on the site, and took a lot of work from a big team to put together.  You'll find my contribution at DoGreatThings.co.za/duncanforrest

Minor gripe: I'm generally much more comfortable behind the lens than in front of it, so it's not often I like pictures of myself.  The stills for this project were taken by the brilliant Clare Louise Thomas, who managed to pull off a miracle by creating a number of pictures I really like!  Thanks, Clare.  My small gripe with the web design is that the person in the screen grab above isn't actually me - it's my mirror image.  I undertand why designers feel the need to flip images, but it's always bugged me when it's noticeable, and now that I've been flipped it's even more so! :)

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Jeffrey Friedl’s Geoencoding Plugin for Lightroom

If you're a Lightroom user and like to geotag your images, you've probably found yourself frustrated that there's no way to manage photos' location data natively within Lightroom.  The links to Google Maps that Lightroom provides from photos that have embedded GPS co-ordinates are nice, but you can't edit the data or do much else with them.

When I first started geoencoding a few years ago, the pick of the bunch of Mac apps that I tried was PhotoGPSEditor and that served me quite well, but it added a very slow and frustrating step to my workflow that got in the way of seeing my pictures in Lightroom quickly.  Geoencoding apps like this work by matching (or interpolating) your photos' timestamps against those in a GPS track log to determine the co-ordinates at which each photo was taken. Most standalone apps like PhotoGPSEditor then create new copies of your images with the co-ordinates baked into the new image's EXIF data.  When you're working with several hundred RAW images of 20MB+ each, reading and writing complete copies of each image takes ages.  To save some time I used to have PhotoGPSEditor read the source images from the CF card or external hard drive on which I'd brought the images home and write them to the Drobo where the images in my Lightroom catalogs live.  Unfortunately PhotoGPSEditor seemed prone to crashing if you gave it more than a few hundred images at a time, so importing the couple of thousand images I routinely accumulate on a trip was extremely tedious.  Anyway, you get the picture - enough moaning about how I used to do it!

Some time last year, while looking for something entirely unrelated, I stumbled upon Jeffrey Friedl’s Blog.  If you're a serious coder and you've ever had to wrangle regular expressions, then you'll probably recognise Jeffrey as the author of "Mastering Regular Expressions" (or "The Owl Book"as O'Reilly aficionados will know it).   Imagine my surprise when I discovered that someone whose work I knew and respected in a very different field was also the author of a wide range of Lightroom Plugins and, best of all, a brilliant geoencoding plugin!

Installation is pretty simple:

• Download the zipped plugin from Jeffrey's site
• Unzip and place the plugin file somewhere sensible. (I use ~/Pictures/Lightroom/Plugins/ where ~ is my Mac user folder)
• In Lightroom, go to File > Plug-in Manager and click "Add".  Navigate to the folder where you put the plugin and click "Add Plug-in"
• Once the plugin is installed, there's one more tweak I recommend before you leave the Plug-in Manager screen, and that's to click the "Configure Plug-in Extras menu items" button.  By default the plugin adds lots of ways to interact with your photos to Lightroom's Plug-in Extras menu, but quite a few of them aren't going to be relevant unless you happen to have taken pictures in particular parts of the world.  To reduce clutter, I'd suggest unticking any that you don't need:

All Jeffrey's Lightroom plugins are distributed as donationware.  In the case of geoencoding plugin that means you can use it forever without any cost if you really want to, but after six weeks you'll find that you're limited to working on batches of 10 photos at a time.  Given how useful the plugin is, I'm sure you'll find yourself wanting to donate well within the generous evaluation period.  The quantum of the donation is entirely up to you, so I suggest you use the plugin for a while to assess how much you're using it and how much time it saves you.  If the answers to those questions are "often" and "a lot", be sure to reflect that in the size of your donation.

Once you have the plugin installed, it's time to encode some images. Most of the time my geotagging data comes from a tracklog created by my trusty old Sony GPS-CS1, but let's start with a static example. First, select one or more pictures in Lightroom whose point of capture you know.  Now launch the plugin from File > Plug-in Extras > Geoencode....

In the Static Location tab of the plugin you have a number of options for entering the location.  You could enter it manually, cut and paste it from somewhere or use the great Google Earth integration provided by the plugin.  For maximum accuracy, start by clicking the "Show Crosshair Target in Google Earth" button which will add a temporary overlay in Google Earth.  Simply position your Google Earth viewport so that the centre target is at your desired position, then return to Lightroom and click the really cool "Import Location from Google Earth" button (which works fine for me in Google Earth 5.2.x despite Jeffrey's disclaimer in the dialog).  That pulls in the location from Google Earth, and does a reverse lookup to arrive at a description of the location too:

If it's a location you're likely to re-use (like home, where it's pretty pointless to fire up a GPS logger whenever you shoot) the you can save the location as a preset to easily call it up again in future.

Before you proceed, you'll probably also want to configure the map URL that gets added to the metadata.  You can choose your preferred map provider (Google, Yahoo, Bing in various languages), the style (map, satellite, hybrid, etc) and which extra layers to include (Wikipedia, Panaramio etc).  Disappointingly, though, you can't control the default zoom level of the map you link to.   I often find myself having to zoom in when I've clicked through.

The plugin maintains the geoencoding data as "shadow data" within Lightroom and doesn't write it back to original files by default, but I generally like to have the data in Lightroom's native GPS data fields too.  Unfortunately the plugin architecture means you have to take a slightly roundabout route to achieve that. As explained in the "Write Back" tab of the plugin dialog, you have to start by writing the geodata to the original files and then read it back into Lightroom.  I'd imagine that if you're using DNG files then that's a slow and painful process akin to the standalone encoding I used to endure, but since I keep my images in their original RAW format, we're only talking about writing & reading tiny XMP sidecar files, which is more than quick enough for me.  Note that if you have existing XMP sidecar files, but they're out of sync with changes you've made in Lightroom, you should manually sync them before you get the plugin to add geodata to them.  I always set my catalog preferences so that metadata changes are automatically written to the XMP files, so I don't risk losing them.  If you're confident that your sidecars are up to date and know that you want your geodata written to them, you'll probably want to tick the box on the "Write Back" tab to enable automatic writeback during the encoding process:

Right!  With all of that done, you're ready to return to the "Static Location" tab and click "Geoencode Images and Write Image Files".  If you want the geodata back in its native Lightroom fields, now's the time to invoke Lightroom's "Read Metdata from File" command as described in the picture of the dialog above.

If you're getting your GPS data from a tracklog, then it's just a case of pointing the plugin to the file, setting your timezone & camera clock offset if necessary, and deciding on the fuzziness to allow.  As long as your interval between tracklog points is smaller than the fuzziness value, pictures taken between two tracklog points at different locations will have their positions interpolated from the neighbouring tracklog points. If, however, your logger lost signal at some point and so there aren't any usable points within the fuzziness interval from the timestamp of a photo, the plugin will skip those photos and tell you  about them in its simple error log.

One of the features I really appreciate is that Jeffrey's plugin isn't limited to using GPX tracklog files.  If your logger produces output in any of the myriad formats understood by GPSBabel then you can have the plugin convert files on the fly for you so you never have to do any conversions.  My Sony logger produces NMEA-formatted files stored with a .log exenstion.  To tell the plugin how to deal with that, start by clicking on the "Config..." button on the "Tracklog" tab.  First, tell the plugin where to find the gpsbabel binary.  (If you're using a recent edition of GPSBabelFE on the Mac you'll need to drill down below the main package in your Applications folder to Contents/MacOS/gpsbabel.)  Once the plugin has tested your GPSBabel binary you can then tell it, for example, that .log files should be interpreted as NMEA files by passing GPSBabel the argument -i "nmea".

OK - that's it for now.  This has turned into a longer and more time-consuming post than I imagined.  I actually started out thinking I'd add a post about the seascape shoot I did with David & Shem on Monday, but then I realised I hadn't geoencoded those pictures yet and one thing led to another.  The seascape post will hopefully follow soon!  In the meantime, I hope this one proves useful for someone.  If it does, please leave feedback!

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