Anyone who has emailed a group of people has probably committed this error. Once you click send, you always say a four letter word to yourself. You know what you did, but it’s too late to go back.

Sending an email and including everyone in the to or the cc (copy) field provides all the receipients of the email with a list of who you send the email to. Companies sending out press releases or marketing messages sometimes manually mass mail to a list of people. You copy a list of emails and include it in the cc field. Easy and quick way to let everyone know about the news you want to share.

The problem is that when you send this email out to important members of companies, investors or media outlets, this list can become very valuable. If you happen to be on a list, your “private” email address is now fair game for similar types of messages from other companies. Say hello to spam.

On a smaller scale of personal emails, your email address can become public thru chain emails. A joke forwarded from one friend to another may include who the email originally came from.  If you forward an email, consider whether the previous senders really want their email address shared and edit the message accordingly.

When I send emails out, I always think about the fact this email could be forwarded and shared with anyone, people I do or do not know. Hopefully the people who receive it will take my email address out of the email before they send it along.

There are numerous ways to prevent the mass public emailing. When you send out an email to a group, include the emails in the BCC (blind copy). This field is never shown. Until email programs realize this is a problem and can warn users that cc’ing ten or more people may be unusual behavior, and prompt you, it’s best to look again before clicking the send button.

Compacting information on a webpage can help give a visitor quick overview of all the content on the page.  It can also be a cool little effect when you click on a bar and it expands with text further elaborating on such topics.

One place I’ve seen this accordion effect more frequently is on Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs). There’s a question, and then a larger answer. Having all the questions grouped together allows the visitor to skim over each until they find the appropriate question and its answer.  When you find the question you’re looking for, clicking on it displays the answer.

It’s all good until you want to read more than one answer on the page. You have to click on each question. This can sometimes cause a side effect of closing any previously opened answers. This prevents seeing two (possibly related) answers at the same time. What benefit is there when you’re hiding everything I’ve selectively chosen to read. If I really don’t want to see the answer, I’ll click on the bar and have the answer disappear.

The accordion looks to be the next generation of the FAQ, the first being a little repetitive. Old FAQ formats had an index of questions, each being a (anchor) link. Clicking on a question would take you down the page to the question accompanied with an answer. I actually prefer this, as all the questions and answers are on page, one after another, always displayed.  Even if it’s repeats the question twice.  It provides both formats (short list of questions and the long expanded version) depending on what you’re looking for.

There are two uses of an FAQ. One is to find a single question, which the compact mode is good at. The other is to explore the common questions and answers to gain more insight on what the service or product is all about.  A simple solution is to add an expand all button if you do choose to go with the accordion style FAQ that will serve both worlds.

There’s an internet startup creating a website for almost anything out there. Or almost anything. There are websites to aggregate your Twitter followers, blog feeds, contact lists, and instant messages, to name just a few. They are meant to help you with consuming and utilizing all the web 2.0 data that takes way more than you have time for.

Some inventions are less important. Shortening urls is more aesthetic than critical for comprehension. A long url in an instant message or email can be overwhelming when viewing on a small screen. An email message could slice the url in half leaving the link destination appearing invalid when it is just missing a few more parameters.

The short urls are very popular due to many sites using them because of their short length. Twitter, with it’s 160 character limit, converts most urls into short urls to fit more content into each tweet. A tweet to a Google map location would probably take that many characters alone.

One website, longurlplease.com, is the opposite of these short urls. The founder dislikes these short urls as they provide little knowledge of where the url really leads to. It’s a mask that could hide a malicious website with a virus, a valid point.

The website provides an api and Firefox plugin that expands the short urls on a page you’re viewing into the urls they point to. You can see where the links go to, and as the founder stated, you can see if you’ve visited the page before.

With new technology that is suppose to help simplify our lives, there is new technology that counters those efforts, for the good and for the bad. In this case a short url has a good meaning, to clean up long urls, and a bad, to see that long url, and both are right in their own worlds. It all depends on what you like more.

When building or upgrading a product, it’s often very helpful to get feedback from the users who use your product. Does something work well or could it be improved? Is there something that design missed that makes the product much better.

For websites, there are a number of services that provide you with HTML code that adds a Feedback tab to the side of the page. It’s always visible to the user, yet unobtrusive. Clicking on the tab brings up a little box with either a form for you to submit an suggestion or bug, or a list of suggestions that other users have added that you can vote on.

Being able to view another user’s suggestion can spark interest in submitting your own suggestion or to comment on an existing idea to flesh it out. Websites used to use the old fashion contact email which was a one-to-one correspondence. The user would email the website, the website would email back saying thanks. The end.  There was very little interaction.

An alternative to email was a forum. This was often time consuming to set up, to manage, and to keep track of. Off-topic discussions made feature requests hard to keep track of.  It allowed for more interaction between users, but was difficult to follow suggestions.

The feedback services today allow users to vote for the features they want most. This helps aggregate the texturized “I like” to a number that can be sorted. Depending on the feature, they can be made a higher priority in development.

Websites can also respond to feature requests publicly, for example mentioning that such feature is already available. If a feature is in the process of development, everyone can look forward to it instead of asking for it over and over. When a feature is completed, it is placed in the completed list for everyone to see.

For those who are familiar with developer bug tracking system, the user feedback services are more user friendly to visitors of all skill levels. The simpler it is for visitors to submit ideas and comments, the better chance the website has to get quality ideas, making a product even better.

When collaborating with a team on a document that is constantly being modified, it’s difficult to keep track of all the different versions being emailed back and forth. For each email you get, time is spent opening each and reviewing what changes were made.  Do you have the latest version? Did someone include a comment in one that didn’t make it into another version? It becomes a headache that no one wants to solve, often having to merge all the versions together by hand.

Online collaboration sites help with merging changes in real time. With everyone working on a centralized document, new changes can show up immediately and allow others to adjust their parts accordingly. No one is left in the dark and no changes are lost.

Keeping the document in one place prevents an overload of email attachments that you have to open. Some offer version control so you can experiment with changes. If a paragraph doesn’t fit, you can roll the document back to a previous version.

Allowing a group to chat alongside the document allows further communications about the changes being made, or that need to be made.

Using a web service also allows greater accessibility and compatibility. No need for costly word processing software to be installed on every workstation. Using the browser and an internet connection, everyone can be equally involved. There isn’t a compatibility issue with all major browsers being supported equally.

With projects like accounting where there are spreadsheets, multiple people can check the formulas in realtime to avoid costly mistakes down the line. If a complex formula is needed, collaboration can be helpful to quickly construct the most efficient formula.

Lastly, you don’t have to be near your teammates to collaborate on a document. Whether you’re in the same conference room or the same office or across the world, you can work together and get things done.