MR. KOJO NNAMDIFrom WAMU 88.5 at American University in Washington, welcome to "The Kojo Nnamdi Show," connecting your neighborhood with the world. It's Tech Tuesday. Remember when people used to sit down and write letters? If not, you can ask your parents or your grandparents about it. Things like penmanship and word selection mattered. Then along came this thing called the Internet and electronic mail, letter writing died, e-mail killed it. And a whole generation of young people grew up unaccustomed to strange contraptions like pen, stamps and stationery. Two decades later, some people say e-mail is on its last legs too. Young people don't send them. They tell us electronic missives take too long for a generation weaned on text messaging and status updates.

MR. KOJO NNAMDILast week, Facebook unveiled a new messaging system targeted at this demographic, a platform some are calling Google's Gmail killer. Of course, you might not actually believe all those pronouncements. This holiday season, every tech company, it seems, is promising some sort of game-changing technology. So how do we separate the hype from the genuine game changers? Joining us in studio is Ben Bederson. He is a professor of computer science at the University of Maryland College Park. He's also cofounder and chief scientist with Zumboni, a company at -- Zumobi, a company that designs apps for Smartphones. Ben, good to see you again.

MR. BEN BEDERSONHi, Kojo. Nice to be here.

NNAMDIOf course, you can join this Tech Tuesday conversation at 800-433-8850. Do you see anything wrong with e-mail? Do you see a need to move on from e-mail? 800-433-8850. Or you can go to our website, kojoshow.org, join the conversation there. Send us a tweet, @kojoshow, or an e-mail to kojo@wamu.org. Ben, I ask you. Are the days of e-mail numbered?

BEDERSONYou want the long answer or the short answer?

NNAMDIEither-or.

BEDERSONWell, I'll start at the short answer.

NNAMDIOkay.

BEDERSONNo.

NNAMDIOh. (laugh) Then we got to go for the long answer.

BEDERSONSo, you know, there has been so many predictions about technology is replacing old technologies. The main one being paper. But most of the time, when new technologies come around, it tends to increase activity. It increases what people do. And there's a wide -- the world's a big place -- there's a wide range of people and their interests and activities and cultures and workplaces and what they do. I think Facebook messaging is probably gonna be big. And I think e-mail is gonna be big too.

NNAMDIE-mail is gonna stay big. It wasn't so long ago, Ben, people used to sit down and write letters. Then along came e-mail and decided that letter writing was becoming outdated. My own father, who only was schooled up to the age of 14 years old, was a prolific letter writer. He had excellent penmanship and he communicated, he corresponded with friends of his who were in college, in different parts of the world. And they encouraged it because they said his writing was so good that it informed their writing on essays and tests that they had to write. Now, decades later, for most Americans, letter writing died. E-mail killed it. Now, two decades later, some people are saying that the days of e-mail are numbered. But here's my question. Ten years from now, are we going to be lamenting the end of e-mail or will it still be around?

BEDERSONYou know what, I just don't see it going away. And the reason is that e-mail is just so flexible. It gives the users of it a tremendous amount of control. You can be just as terse or as prolific as you want. You can, like, blast it out into the public or you can have fine control over where it goes. You can archive it. You can access it from big devices, from small devices. You know, there's just so many ways to use it that I don't see it going away. But at the same time, that doesn't mean there isn't incredible opportunity for other, I'll call them -- niche is probably too narrow a word, but for other modalities of communication.

NNAMDIAlso with us in studio is Rob Pegoraro. He is personal technology columnist with The Washington Post. And we mentioned earlier that last week, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled something cryptically called Project Titan. Rob Pegoraro, being one of the few people who has had the opportunity to try this out. Rob Pegoraro, good to see you again.

MR. ROB PEGORAROThanks for having me.

NNAMDIWhat is Project Titan?

PEGORAROIt's -- Facebook now calls it Facebook messages, which confusingly enough is what they called their messaging system before. (laugh) One way to look at it is simply letting people use their Facebook inbox as their inbox for everybody. Another way is, Facebook wants to replace e-mail.

NNAMDIYou tried it. How's it work? (laugh)

PEGORARODoesn't really do a whole lot for me. If you live your life in Facebook; that's how you can stay in touch with everybody.

NNAMDIA lot of people do, yes.

PEGORAROYou know, this means you're accessible to the shrinking majority of people who are not on Facebook. They can e-mail you at the -- at this Facebook.com address. That message shows up in your inbox just as if they were on Facebook. But if you already have an account, it doesn't do a whole lot. You can't bring over your existing messages. It's just another inbox you need to check.

NNAMDIBut Facebook, it's my understanding, would consolidate messages with friends and colleagues into one stream, in a little bit like the way you and I get out textbook message -- or text messages on our iPhone, if we, you know, it's synchronized with -- it's consolidated with all the messages we got from that one person over the course of the past, oh, six months or so.

PEGORAROTheir idea is it’s every message you send back and forth to somebody over your life, every e-mail, every text message, every Facebook chat session.

BEDERSONI think...

NNAMDIThat's their idea? That they'll just...

PEGORAROYeah.

NNAMDI...they'll consolidate all that.

PEGORAROBut would you really want all of your communications organized by the person you had the communications with? I mean, I think that the bigger trend is organizing by conversations, which Gmail really got going. And the idea is, you know, so, Kojo, you and I might have an e-mail conversation, but it's about one thing. And then we go have another conversation with Rob about something else. And those are just two different conversations. And you want all of the, you know, things to be related by topic, by time and by person. But by limiting it to by person only is just is, I think, unrealistic about how people communicate.

NNAMDIWell, Zuckerberg says, "Current e-mail programs don't do a good enough job, allowing users to set the priority of what they see. He said there's no sophisticated way of sorting e-mail before it gets into your inbox. You can only block certain users. E-mail is too slow. It is too formal. Are all those things really wrong with e-mail, Rob Pegoraro?

PEGORAROSome of the things he says are true in a lot of consumer e-mail implementations. If you look at the account you get from your average Internet provider, it's pretty limited. You can't really take the address elsewhere. If you change Internet providers, you need to change your address to your next Internet provider service. And, yeah, a lot of e-mail programs are not that slick or helpful at filtering things. Gmail is an exception. You know, it's got all this intelligence built into it. Google has this priority inbox feature that tries to figure out what actually matters to you.

NNAMDIWell, I'm halfway decided about in between whether to go to Constance's -- yeah, let me go to Constance's e-mail. “What a joke. In a recent security survey,” says Constance, “Facebook got a failing grade for security. If you send a message on Facebook, you might as well post it on craigslist for all the privacy and security you're gonna get. Can you see businesses using Facebook e-mail to send secure communications to their employees and customers? I can't, and I'm not going to expose my friends and myself to that kind of potential exposure either. Okay. Teens are impatient with the slow speed of regular e-mail and want something faster, but I wonder if they'll be so happy with Facebook e-mail when in their 20s and 30s, they're looking for jobs and missing out because embarrassing e-mails from Facebook are still around.” Something to consider, Ben?

BEDERSONMore than consider.

NNAMDIYeah.

BEDERSONYou know, Facebook did get a couple of things right. I mean, I agree. And in fact -- I think their key innovation is this notion of the filtering based on friends and friends of friends, and so it definitely is really likely to be helping with spam. But that's one positive. The idea that you could, you know, put your -- all of your personal communications and your business communication and your private communications in a place and a company that is private, that has no reason to do anything except to follow their policy, which they may change tomorrow, I think, is asking for trouble.

NNAMDIA lot...

BEDERSONI think people are moving to Gmail but with some hesitation. But Gmail -- Google has really explicit polices about what they will share and how long they will keep private information for. And to date, they've been reasonably good about following those policies. And when there's a problem, they're pretty transparent about it. Facebook has not been.

NNAMDIYou go ahead, Rob.

PEGORAROI’m -- to sort of throw in two maybe contrarian notes. And one is, you know, you shouldn't pretend that Facebook e-mail is so insecure compared to everything else because every message you send, unless you encrypt it, which nobody does, it's sent in the clear. So anyone can snoop on it on the way. If you send a stupid e-mail to somebody and they have an interest in sharing it with people, they will do it. They don't -- you and -- that other person don't need to be in Facebook to do that. And Gmail have their problems, too. They had an issue a few months ago where somebody was snooping on people's accounts, and that they punished the guy. But Google wouldn't tell me -- I said are you gonna press charges? You know, what -- and you think they'd say, oh, yes.

BEDERSONRight.

PEGORAROThey wouldn't answer that.

BEDERSONNo. And, in fact, Google has a bigger -- I mean, everything you said is true. But the bigger problem which is they're still subject to subpoena. Right? If you are in some kind of hot water...

NNAMDIYeah.

BEDERSON...and your e-mail history for the last 10 years is sitting on Google servers and your adversary wants them and they get a subpoena to Google, Google is probably gonna say here you go. And if you on the other hand had used some, well, hard-to-find service provider that you can really control, but if you own your own servers, like most companies and many universities and other institutions...

PEGORAROBut how many companies use BlackBerry mail service to get to people out of the office?

BEDERSONThat's right. So...

NNAMDINevertheless and in spite of all of these, Ben, you work at the University of Maryland, so you have a umd.edu e-mail address, but you’ve steered all of those e-mails into your Gmail account.

BEDERSONYeah. I did. And with a little bit of trepidation. And I recognize I'm fully cognizant of the risks I put myself at, but the reality is that today, Gmail offers so many services and has such power that it is faster than having all of the messages on my local computer. I have better search capabilities. I can integrate several different accounts, so I can both receive and send e-mail as if I was from UMD, as if I were from my personal account. So I'm using their servers, but I still am, you know, acting as if I'm...

NNAMDIYou're persuading me. Rob might be able to help me with the last step. Because here at WAMU, Rob, we use Lotus Notes as our e-mail platform...

PEGORAROOh, I'm sorry.

NNAMDI...and when I want to log on from home, I have to use a somewhat clunky program. The last time we talked about mobile technology and e-mail accounts, you told us about how to steer our work e-mail into a Gmail account. Please explain.

PEGORARORight. Exactly. What you can do, you know, Lotus Notes has this insanely complicated workaround where you can just tell it every message that comes my way just redirect it instantly to Gmail. And so you can access it through Gmail's website. Gmail also offers a great offline synchronization feature, so you can then read that in a regular program. You can read it in multiple programs on your phone, on your work machine, on your home machine. And the advantage there is, you know, should Gmail have an outage, you still have the local copy, so you're not wondering, you know, what did Kojo e-mail me about last week?

BEDERSONRight.

PEGORAROI don't know. I can't get to it right now.

BEDERSONAnd if you're used to Outlook or Apple Mail or whatever it is, you can still use your favorite mail client even with Gmail as a service provider.

NNAMDIWell, Rob, we're gonna put a link to that on our website at the end of this broadcast, so you can understand also how to steer your work e-mail, especially if you have Lotus Notes, into a Gmail account. Here is Matthew in Beltsville, Md. Matthew, you're on the air. Go ahead, please.

MATTHEWYeah. I have a comment on the future of e-mail generally as opposed to Gmail versus Facebook, which is I'm open up to -- I basically got on the Internet and to Usenet just before what was called the endless September. And Usenet, while it's still around, is pretty moribund because essentially it's worldwide between the spammers and the flamers and whatnot. It just isn't useful anymore. I actually use it occasionally to find obscure music, but that's really about it.

MATTHEWAnd I think the thing that's the biggest risk to e-mail is a similar tragedy of the common situation. I've already been told that something like 80 percent of e-mail traffic is spam, and, you know, I think there is a point where it may, you know, between the spammers and the phishers and all the rest of that, that you know, people may simply have to find some other way to communicate. And I'll take my answer off the air.

NNAMDIWhat do you think, Ben?

BEDERSONWell, you know, I hate to say too much about Gmail. But I will say, having used many, many other e-mail services before, it does, by far, the best job at spam elimination. And the reason is because it's just as easy to mark an e-mail as spam -- you press the exclamation point -- as deleting it by pressing the delete key. And every time you mark one as spam, now Google has the centralized server of the entire, you know, all of the people using this or, you know, they're -- telling what e-mails are spam. And so, they're having a lot of information about identifying what are bad e-mails and eliminating them. So they seem to be ahead of the game. But as I said, Facebook is on the money. Connecting your e-mail to your social network so that you can use that to prioritize your e-mails and to know which are likely to be trustworthy is, I think, unquestionably a part of the direction of the future.

NNAMDIBut you know, Rob, on the surface of it, Facebook doesn't seem like it would be a natural competitor to the Gmail. Most people use it for socializing, for posting pictures and use e-mail for direct communications. But Facebook has one thing, that in the eyes of some, could be a game changer if it's applied to messaging, the social graph. What do people mean when they talk about the social graph?

PEGORAROWell, the idea is Facebook, you know, once you sort of map out your friendships on Facebook, Facebook can sort of know about that and decide that, you know, theoretically you've put this person on your family friends' lists and so they're one of your closer friends. You check on them all the time. And so, their message should have priority over some distant relationships, some acquaintance you met through work that only gets a little access to your data. Of course, for them to do that, they'll need to know a lot about your life. The whole saying -- the great thing about Facebook messaging is they know who your friends are. The bad thing is, they know who your friends are. And of course, the other e-mail systems, Google and the others, have an implicit social graph because they have your address book, and everybody in your address book and everyone that you've sent e-mail to is kind of an implicit indication that you are interested in receiving e-mail from them. And so, they tend to get priority in the sense of not getting marked as spam.

BEDERSONAlthough there is a problem there that a lot of people are very slow to update their address books. I mean, I'm always finding old mailing address, especially this time of year when you're putting together a Christmas card list.

PEGORAROMm-hmm.

BEDERSONYou know, oh, wait. This person doesn't live in that state anymore. Oops.

NNAMDIThis e-mail we got from Elaine. "I had never used Facebook. I'm pretty satisfied with Yahoo. What am I missing?"

PEGORAROWell...

BEDERSONWell, where do we start?

PEGORAROYeah. I think you stumped us there because they're kind of un-comparable, right? It's not -- Facebook and Yahoo are not the same things. It's not one or the other.

BEDERSONOne is an e-mail system and one is -- you know, think of Facebook as you can use it as your sort of private little bulletin board, the equivalent of the whiteboard you might have had outside your dorm room years and years ago.

PEGORAROPeople still have that?

BEDERSONI don't even know.

PEGORAROI don't know (unintelligible)

NNAMDIAnd Yahoo is a portal, basically.

PEGORARORight. But, you know, I was -- thought you're gonna say, it's not so much who's -- how does Yahoo compare to Facebook but how does Twitter compare to Facebook. And that's where the kind of...

NNAMDIOh, we're gonna get to that. Allow me to take a short break. When we come back, how Twitter compares to Facebook and any other questions you have about new technology gadgets that are -- or software that are being released in this holiday season that you might be interested in or not. 800-433-8850. If you have already called, stay on the line. We will get to your call. Or you can go to our website, kojoshow.org. Join the conversation there. It's Tech Tuesday. I'm Kojo Nnamdi.

NNAMDIWe were discussing the end of e-mail and other tech prognostications with Rob Pegoraro, Personal Technology columnist for The Washington Post, and Ben Bederson, professor of Computer Science at the University of Maryland-College Park and co-founder and chief scientist of Zumobi, a company that designs apps for smartphones. Taking your calls at 800-433-8850. We talked about Twitter before we went to the break and decided we would talk more about that when we came back. Ben Bederson, talk a little bit about Twitter. It's very efficient at disseminating real-time news and e-vites and all of that stuff.

BEDERSONRight. So, you know, the core difference, first of all, the structural difference between Facebook and Twitter is that, when you communicate with Facebook, when you post your message or your statuses, is they're generally for, to and for the people in your social graph, the people that you've intended to read this. Twitter, on the other hand, is only a one-way graph. That is, when you write something, you just put it out there for the world to see, and instead, you listen or you follow only the people that you're interested in following.

NNAMDICorrect.

BEDERSONAnd so, then it kind of becomes a little game of can I say interesting enough stuff so that people in the world find me and wanna listen to what I say?

NNAMDIYes.

PEGORAROI think one of the big things that is distinguishing these different tools is culture. And it's something that we really, really have to talk about because there is youth culture. There is professional culture, right? There is, you know, I call it artistic culture, whatever, all different kinds of things. And different groups, different cultures have different interests and different styles of communication. Twitter gets used in lots of ways and it was critiqued at the beginning for people talking about what they had for breakfast. But those people didn't get a lot of followers. And so, right, they kind of, you know, are still there but no one cares. I see Twitter getting a surprisingly large amount of use among the professional set because...

NNAMDIJournalists are one of the biggest sub (word?)...

PEGORAROOh, yes.

NNAMDI...users of Twitter.

PEGORAROOh, yes.

BEDERSONAnd every computer scientist, every technologist I know almost, you know, uses it. And it's because people want to find out what out what is the latest, what's going on, both in sort of the consumer electronics world, but also in the research world.

NNAMDIBut here's the problem for those of us who are journalists who use Twitter a lot. When we get ready to sit down and collect our thoughts, we also want to retrieve our thoughts, our thoughts of six weeks ago, six months ago and we can't do that on Twitter.

PEGORAROYeah, well, you know, the library of Congress will eventually have a complete archive of Twitter messages searchable. But, yeah, I would, you know, at some point, people are gonna wanna write their memoirs. And they're gonna wanna be able to see what was I twittering about on such and such a day. Facebook added a download your data feature a few weeks back. And I think Twitter needs to do that as well because, you know, we're writing our own history here and it shouldn't all be transient, even though people think of Twitter as this evanescent medium. But, yeah, you wanna know what you were talking about and it's useful a public notebook, but you wanna look through your old notebooks every now and then as a reporter.

NNAMDIAnd speaking of different cultures, Ben, we got this e-mail from Scott. "I can't see why any business would be using Gmail for its officially sanctioned e-mail. Maybe I'm prejudiced but it seems unprofessional to have a generic domain name for business purposes. I compare it to having a professional title and having a hotmail account. It lowers my opinion of the service. I think having e-mails in the cloud is a great idea but it has to be secure and brandable if that is a word, brandable that is."

BEDERSONThat's -- I agree and that's not an issue. You can use the free version of Gmail in which case you can use Gmail.com. If you own your own domain name, you can actually send e-mail with Gmail servers from your own domain name. And Google will very happily sell you a service where they will give your whole company company-wide support and branding and enhanced features and all kinds of others.

PEGORAROAnd you can do this as an individual too. Just Google apps standard.

NNAMDIOn to the telephones, here is Daniel in Washington, D.C. Daniel, you’re on the air. Go ahead, please.

DANIELHi, this is Daniel. And I just wanted to talk about what you just said about the domain name with issue, which I think is very important for people who have confusion between what it -- I would call a user account and their identity. When they're on Facebook, for example, their URL user account is Facebook.com slash your user name. Often with e-mail, the same thing, what Gmail and things like that. For businesses, they generally get their own domain. But I think, eventually, if we all had our own domains, then we could take their identity with us to the various systems that pose for communications networks. And then also, we could take their own friends with us too because if they all have their own independent of the technology network, their own identities, their own URLs, friendname.com or whatever it was, then we'd be able to say keep that list together independent if it prevents messaging or some Facebook or Twitter, type of thing.

NNAMDIDaniel also sent us an e-mail outlining the same thing. What do you think, Bob?

PEGORAROWell, that's exactly what I did. I mean, I've been on e-mail since 1994 and I've had all these different addresses. If you're still trying to e-mail me at capaccess.org, you can -- remove that from your address book, please. So I registered one domain name that I use for my home address and another one that I can use as a back up for work. And -- but it’s not, you know, the easiest thing to do. There are companies that will sell you a domain name, you know, let's you register one for cheap, but connecting it to your e-mail account is not obvious. And there are name space issues. If your name is, say, Rob Pegoraro or Kojo Nnamdi, somewhat, you know, not completely coming in the phone book, not too bad. If you are my friend, Scott Smith, you (laugh) -- it's a little more complicated. You got to be more creative.

NNAMDIYeah, that's true. And, Daniel, thank you very much for your call. Along that line, we got an e-mail from Winnie, who said, "I understand how youth would have no need for e-mail. But adults have multiple tasks and responsibilities that require e-mail," which is I guess the point you were making, Ben. "Personally, I like to have multiple e-mail addresses to handle multiple types of e-mail. Gmail for newsletters, Yahoo for family and friends. Hotmail for online transactions and, of course, work e-mail. I also have Verizon but rarely use for the very reason that if I change providers, it won't be a problem. I can check these various accounts at different intervals rather than be forced to handle to them all at once or have to organize them in one account."

BEDERSONI think that writer brings up a lot of really good points. So the first is about sort of this cultural difference. And I want to bring up a sort of related issue. People often say, well, the youth are using Facebook. And as soon as they graduate college and go into jobs, they're gonna take Facebook with them and write -- Facebook will then -- that's when Facebook will take over the world. And I think that's a wrong-headed view. And the reason is because people have been...

NNAMDIWhen I was a youth, I spoke as a youth.

BEDERSONThat's right. When people graduate college, they go into the workforce. They're joining the workforce culture. And they are the minority. And they are gonna join the majority culture. In fact, people have been growing up for a long time and not taking that youth culture with them. So I don't think that argument, you know, gives too much weight.

NNAMDIOkay. Go ahead.

BEDERSONOh. I was going to say, as far as maintaining multiple, you know, identities e-mail. I think that makes total sense. There is a question about whether you wanna be launching four or five apps to, you know, access your four or five different things or whether you'd rather have them more integrated. And this -- they're both reasonable approaches, and I think it depends on how this, you know, the style of the individual, how much you get of each time, how often you need to check each one. Personally, I do a lot of checking of all of them, which is why I'd rather have them integrated. But I think for some people, it makes sense to keep them more separate.

PEGORAROI usually just say have a separate address that you hand out for online transactions and then you have your home account. So you're not getting inundated with newsletters and, you know, account bills due notices at your home e-mail.

NNAMDII was about to ask, what does our e-mail address say about us?

PEGORAROWell, hopefully, that we're all erudite, you know, wordsmiths.

NNAMDII don't know exactly when the wave breaks on the technology or service goes from being cool industry standard to being an afterthought. But I guess we know it when we see it. Right now, Gmail is the default service for most techies as opposed to AOL or Hotmail accounts. AOL actually unveiled its own updated web-based e-mail program called Project Phoenix for a limited number of users. Has that taken off at all?

PEGORAROWell, no, because you have to get an invite. I've tried it. And it is a nice separate -- it's not this ad-cluttered mess. They've got some useful features. AOL, you know, hasn't gotten credited for some things they've done online. They were before Gmail. They offered this synchronization feature I like in Gmail. It's called IMAP after the protocol it runs on. But then, you know, AOL has been really slow to try to catch up. And I wish more companies would take Gmail's challenge seriously. Yahoo did a redesign of their mail service, which to me is useless, because they still won't let you download your messages at all without paying. And that's not acceptable to me. I wanna be able to take my data with me if I get tired of the service.

BEDERSONAll right. I will say, you know, Google has also been on a frontier of having the most inexpensive or free storage. So I think they give you now about 7 gigabytes of storage for free. And if you want more, it costs $5 a year for another 20 gigabytes. So, I mean, they really are, you know, making their money elsewhere.

NNAMDIHere's Enrique in Fairfax, Va. Enrique, you're on the air. Go ahead, please.

ENRIQUELucky. Sorry. I had to deal with the dog for a moment. Yes. I was calling regarding the issue of, actually, you touched upon the identity, the multiple identities to -- that we use online. But the title of the show stating the end of e-mail, seems -- I don't -- I really see it. Because we use these many identities for online transactions, even very secure online transactions. The -- my bank to access my online account to my bank. If I forget my password or anything, it goes back to my e-mail. And they trust that it's me receiving that e-mail, it’s almost a very deep trust of identity. And although we have separate ones, we are -- it's, you know, it's very essential. And I think it's become very essential, almost very much (word?) as your address on your -- a very essential aspect of your online identity. And so I'm just putting it out there.

NNAMDIYeah. Indeed. Ben Bederson, it occurs to me that, you mentioned this early, e-mail serves all sorts of forms and functions. It's almost an umbrella technology. It's used very differently by different people -- can be a formal letter, can be used to apply for jobs, can be used as a document of records. It can be used to break news. It can coordinate among large groups of people. It's how a lot of people get communications from their banking systems about the state of their online banking.

BEDERSONYeah. I mean, I agree. I think one of the core reasons that e-mail is so successful as it was, the first communication system that really successfully despatialized and detemporalized communication, which means they made it so right. In the olden days, our, you know, our cavemen and women, our forbearers, used to actually have to be in the same time and place to talk to each other. Can you imagine? (laugh) And then we had, you know, like your father, there were these incredible letter correspondences, where you could be at different times and place, but it was very slow process. It didn't have a good archiving. You couldn't involve many people. And so e-mail really enables all of these things, because they let you communicate over time and over space with sharing, with integration with other tools, right, with all of these other features that are just really fundamental towards human communication, which on -- and creativity and work and, you know, it's really the essence of who we are.

NNAMDIThe demise of e-mail, it would appear, is significantly over exaggerated. (laugh) Here is Matt in Washington, D.C. Matt, you're on the air. Go ahead, please.

MATTHi, guys. I just wanted to, you know, comment on the fact that, you know, we talked about e-mail killers and those types of things. And one of the benefits that you were saying were, you know, a close group of contacts, less spam. But it seems to me that every time I adapt a new mail system including snail mail, which I still get tons of spam, what I call, you know, from pizza places and Chinese restaurants in the neighborhood. But how long before these spammers are going to be in your Facebook and in your Twitter? And, you know, do you see that? And how long do you think it'll take them to adapt? And what will be the repercussions of having, you know, that type of influx into what I use those accounts for, a very personal and very, you know, localized communications. But once a spammer gets that, it really ruins the whole system. I have thrown away multiple e-mail accounts because they become so inundated with spam.

PEGORAROWell, in some ways it's already happened. You see these, you know, scams running around Facebook, where the people either exploiting a little vulnerability on someone's browsers to vulnerability in someone's head to get them to post some bogus offer on a -- as their status update, maybe e-mailed their friends about it. Yeah. It's a risk. And, you know, I will say that's the downside. If you actually do what I've done and set up your own domain name, you know, you've done that so you can have the same address for the rest of your time on this earth. So I can't just throw it away. (laugh)

NNAMDIThat's true.

PEGORAROSo you have to hope that the filtering gets better than the spammers and stays that way.

NNAMDIMatt, do you ever use any of the snail mail spam to select your pizza or your favorite Chinese restaurant?

MATTWell, I do that by opening the door when they put the note. And then I say can you please stop doing it? (laugh) And that doesn't work. But that's a very face-to-face anti-spam message.

NNAMDIOkay. Thank you very much for your call, Matt. I guess Matt doesn't use those services at all. Here is Susan in Oak Hill, Va. Susan, your turn.

SUSANYes. Hi. I have a 14-year-old, a middle schooler, who, on a daily basis, begged me to let him get a Facebook account. I think he's the only one in his entire middle school who doesn't have one. And my question has to do with teenagers and their impulsivity and the privacy of Facebook. My concern is it used to be being popular with just talking to kids in hallway and having someone to eat within the cafeteria. And now, the criteria is that you have 500 or plus friends on Facebook. And I have looked on some of the teenagers' sites, the other middle schoolers, and they write some things about each other that can really be looked at cyber bullying. There's inappropriate pictures that can be, you know, kind of soft porn.

SUSANAnd my question is, as a parent, how can you become more knowledgeable about this and protect your kids because Facebook is really -- it's really an adult site where once you put something out there, whatever your kid likes or says or shows pictures of, it's really out there forever. And I don't think, especially young teens, have a very good filter about that sort of thing. So I'd appreciate your input on that.

NNAMDIThe digital...

SUSANI'll take it off the air.

NNAMDI...parents' responsibilities, Rob Pegoraro.

PEGORAROYeah. Well, you know, I think Facebook is kind of an accelerant. Maybe I should use that in a sense of arson investigation -- it makes it easier to do things that kids have always done, which is being mean to each other and share vile gossip and all these things. (laugh) You know, it lets that spread faster and it sticks around. But, you know, high school has never been a picnic all the time for the same reasons because we're the same defective human beings at that age and any age. Yeah, I mean, I think you've got to be on Facebook with your child and sort of, you know, know what they're up to, and make sure that you can, you know, they're not putting a lot of privacy filters in front of what you can see. And, yeah, the people have to learn that these things do happen and you need to sort of think a little bit like a marketing or PR type on Facebook.

NNAMDIYeah. And these -- if all of the other kids in that -- in your child's 14-year-olds group have it you cannot assume that all of the other parents are simply being irresponsible. (word?) that they have found methods of monitoring their children's Facebook pages.

BEDERSONYeah, I guess I would just add to that. There is always a balance in being a parent between protecting your child and educating your child to exist in the world. And it's a tough balancing act and you have to make your own choices based on your own values. But that said, I tend to think that you can't -- it's impossible, in this day and age, to protect your child from technology forever. You know, whether it's 12 or 13 or 14 or 15 or 16 that you let your child on, you probably can't never let them on. And so, when that happens -- and there's question of how do you do it. And I think, as Rob suggested, at least starting off, having it being very transparent, very open, make it very clear that, you know, there's gonna be perhaps a very long probationary period where the parent is, you know, overseeing...

PEGORAROBut it's always been like that. I mean, my mother grew up in New York City. At some point, she had to take the subway for the first time by herself.

BEDERSONThat's right. And so, right, you slowly move away. But there are ways you can start it easy. You can also have -- I mean, even though -- I like laptops. Some families I know don't have laptops. They only have desktops in the public parts of the house where the screens are facing the center of the room, not facing away, so that it's harder -- it just sort of sets the expectation that what you do on the computer is transparent in this part of family life.

PEGORAROYeah.

NNAMDIGot to take a short break. When we come back, as you know, holiday shopping season is ramping up as we speak. This Friday is Black Friday. Next Monday, Cyber Monday. So we'll talk a little bit about what's available in this holiday season that you may or may not be interested in. You can still call us at 800-433-8850. It's tech Tuesday. I'm Kojo Nnamdi.

NNAMDIIt's tech Tuesday with Ben Bederson, professor of computer science at the University of Maryland-College Park and co-founder and chief scientist of Zumobi, a company that designs apps for smartphones, and Rob Pegoraro, personal technology columnist with The Washington Post. Rob, it's holiday shopping season, many of the must-have items are tech toys like e-readers, video game consoles, tablet computers. What items are you most excited about?

PEGORAROI'm most excited for the holidays by having some time off.

PEGORAROYou know, a new parent, so...

NNAMDIOh, good for you.

PEGORAROYes. No, I don't know. There's a lot of interesting things happening. This whole year, it's been all about smartphones. There's so little interest in laptops and desktops compared to prior years. It's not that those things have become commodities, they're just -- they're not evolving at the same rate. The tablet market is really interesting. You know, Apple came out with the iPad. Perhaps you all have heard it by now.

NNAMDIYeah. (word?)

PEGORAROAnd, you know, now we're seeing tablets based on Google's Android operating system. Not a whole lot, not as good as they could be, but I think other people have realized you don't make a tablet by taking your desktop copy of Windows or Mac OSX and cramming on this tiny device. You take a smartphone OS and put that in some touch screen device.

NNAMDII got an iPad because when Allison Druin brought one in here one day -- that would be Ben Bederson's wife...

PEGORAROAh.

NNAMDI...and I was hooked and had to go out and get one...

PEGORARODoes she get a commission on that sale? (laugh)

NNAMDI...immediately at the time. Ben, a broader question here, before you talk to us about Google Voice and WUPHF, whatever that is, technology companies are obviously in the midst of intense short-term competition for consumer dollars. But it occurs to me that there's also a long-term game going on here. Each of these companies -- whether it's HP trying to challenge Apple for the tablet computer, Barnes & Nobel and Amazon jostling for the e-reader market -- each of these companies is trying to affect which platforms and technologies become industry standards, are they not?

BEDERSONAbsolutely. You know, it's both an issue of industry standard and an issue of establishing the social graph and getting the customers in. You know, once you get your e-mail on to Gmail and you've got it all configured, and you have it connected up to all of your devices and you've started giving out that e-mail address out, right, you're a lot more hesitant to switch. That's the easy one. The platform is kind of a tougher one. So that's more like the Facebook social graph, where once you have established your link to your 500 nearest and dearest, right...

NNAMDIMm-hmm.

BEDERSON...and everybody that you know is on Facebook doing that, it's pretty much impossible to move to another platform because you would need to have your 500 friends all move at the same time. Only 50 of your friends move to another platform. Well, now you're stuck with communicating with, you know, only 50 of your friends. And, you know, what a horror that would be.

NNAMDIRob?

PEGORAROExactly. It's a sort of lock-in effect. I mean, people have been trying to do this all the time. You have these issues. You have all these programs you bought for your Windows computer, your Mac computer. You're not gonna be able to just put them on the next computer if it runs a different operating system. Facebook is another version of that. But, yeah, they do have this extra network effect where the utility of Facebook increases as more friends and viewers get on it, and then makes it harder and harder for everybody to leave.

NNAMDIDoes that analogy work in the competition among Amazon, Barnes & Noble and the iPad all competing for e-book customers? What kinds of gambles are they making?

PEGORAROWell, there you have this extra ingredient digital rights management restrictions on your downloads, which keep you from taking a book you bought at Apple's iBook store...

NNAMDIAnd passing it on.

PEGORARO...and loaning it or reading it on a Kindle device. You know, there are Kindle apps for all the major mobile platforms. So that's sort of an answer. But, still, say, what if you buy a Palm webOS phone? There is no Kindle reader for that, so you can't read your Kindle purchase there.

BEDERSONYou know, a related issue is also just standard old file formats. You know, one of the reasons that Microsoft has been so successful is because they have had kind of a lock on the universal Office file format. But one kind of interesting thing is, just these last couple of months, Microsoft finally released a good version of Office for Mac. They've had kind of lame versions for many, many years. And one of the things that they touted is good file format fidelity across platforms. So -- right? Sometimes, the companies lose the platform wars, and then they have to open up and make their documents -- their systems more accessible across other systems.

NNAMDITell me about Google Voice.

BEDERSONSo Google Voice is a whole other thing. We've been talking about text communications. But once you go to voice communications, then a world opens up of a whole new set of things. So Google bought a company called GrandCentral maybe three years ago or so. And the essence of the product is that you get a new phone number, and what you can do with that phone number, initially, is just forward that to whatever phone you want. So if you have, say, a home phone and an office phone and a cell phone number, which many people do, you can just go to their website and, very easily, with a click of a mouse, just click a checkbox saying, which phones you would like to ring when someone calls that phone number.

BEDERSONAnd so -- and if you're traveling and staying at someone else's -- at the hotel or anything, you can add any number you want. And so now you can just answer the phone wherever you are. You don't have to give people out multiple phone numbers. So that's pretty cool. But the amazing thing is that Google is giving away the service because they want to own your voice, as well as owning your text. And so recently, they have started integrating Google Voice with Gmail in kind of an amazing way so that when you just open up your Web browser, if someone calls that number, you get a little popup on the bottom of your Web browser that says, ding-ding-ding, ding-ding-ding, call from Kojo. You better answer it.

NNAMDIOh.

BEDERSONAnd then if you have a laptop with a microphone and speakers, you just press click and you just start talking. And now you have a hands-free, high-quality voice over IP telecommunications system. So, you know, you can imagine that there is a lot of people caring about the money to be made or lost in voice communications. But Google Voice is currently, I think, the best innovative player in the space.

NNAMDIOkay. And finally, what is WUPHF, W-P -- W-U-P-H-F?

BEDERSONSo if any of you that are -- love the Office may have seen this kind of funny -- the spoof. This was an episode where this guy comes promoting this new product where you can make a WUPHF. And what a WUPHF is, is this new communication system, and he says, quote, "When you send a WUPHF, it goes to your home phone, cell phone, e-mail, Facebook, Twitter and home screen all at the same time." So of course it's got these pretty funny clips.

NNAMDIOh, yeah. Well, some people find that a little creepy, actually. But I won't call any names. Dorie Anisman. Let's go to the telephones and talk with Janie in Owings Mills, Md. Janie, you're on the air. Go ahead, please.

JANIEHi. Great program as always. Question for your guest. Can I still ask about Facebook?

NNAMDIOf course.

JANIEThe question I've got is I would love him to share with us some of the most sophisticated professional business uses that are available now on Facebook.

NNAMDIProfessional business uses on Facebook. Rob?

PEGORAROWell, it's a good way for customers. I mean, if you figure you're a company and you, hopefully, have customers that are probably talking about you on Facebook, saying, oh, great service or terrible service, you can pretend that conversation is not going on, which is not gonna make it go away. Or you can try to get in the middle of it, establish a Facebook public page where you can then post updates of what's going on, take questions from people. You know, I should say that I've done that myself and as has our gracious host. It's kind of a common thing these days. If your customers, your readers, your listeners are there, go out and meet them there. Don't make them come to your own site. Same reason a lot of companies use Twitter to answer complaints and comments from customers.

BEDERSONRight. Going forward, I suspect you'll see a lot more use of these kinds of social networks for recommendations. I was just reading about a startup that's integrating with Facebook to make it so it's easier to find a plumber, a lawyer, a doctor. Because how do you normally find one? You ask your friend.

NNAMDIYep, indeed.

BEDERSONSo why not ask your friend's friends?

NNAMDIMake sense to me. Here's Dale. And thank you for your call, Janie. Here's Dale in Ellicott City, Md. Dale, you're on the air. Go ahead, please.

DALEHi, guys. This is more of a sort of a futuristic question. I'm wondering, I've got two young kids and, you know, as they were being born, I actually went on to Gmail and create an e-mail accounts in their name so they can have those. And, of course, I've been using those as sort of a electronic time capsule. So when we send up birthday party invitations and whatnot I always CC their accounts.

DALESo, you know, to me, it's a nice thing for them to have when they're 15 or 16. I'm not sure they're gonna appreciate it then, but who knows? But anyway, thinking further into the future for myself, you know, what -- you know, I wanted to will my e-mail account to one of my kids. You know, is my e-mail account my property in the sense of title like, you know, or is it gone and poof when I'm gone? You know, does everything gets deleted or -- you guys that were talking about Twitter in a sense of, you know, doing your memoirs at some point and not have enough of that information there. You know, what happens to my e-mail account when I'm gone?

NNAMDII can hear the lawyers discussing it...

BEDERSONYeah.

NNAMDI...even as we speak, Rob.

PEGORAROThere's sort of two heads to it. One is the actual mail service so that when people send, you know, when people send me an e-mail at robp@washpost.com, you know, it gets sent to my inbox. But the others, they couldn't let it stash up messages. And really what you want, you know, once you're no longer around, that's not really helpful to have that service. But the messages, I mean, they're your property and you should be able to take them with you. Like I was saying before about Yahoo!, you have to pay to download. That's not the case with mail services. You should be able to have your own archive on your own computer. You can look through it at will. And yeah, hand that stash of messages over to somebody else, to your biographer, to your kids, whoever.

BEDERSONYou know, probably one practical bit of advice is that just like we often give keys to our neighbors and access to our financial information to our spouses, you probably should be giving your important passwords to your spouses and people you care about, too, because who knows when they will need to be accessed to it, whether you're not here or whether you're just across the country.

BEDERSONThe other thing I just wanna clear up, I think a misunderstanding, Twitter does let you access all of your history. You cannot download it but you can search and see everything. You can see your whole stream. I don't think there's -- is there a limitation now going back in time as to your own history?

PEGORAROI don't know. I think you can only go so many -- you know, click page down so many times on the Twitter site. But it may be things that...

NNAMDIWell, we got a tweet from @scottgearhart (sp?), who says Momento is an iPhone app that will download your Twitter and Facebook post for the purpose of archiving.

PEGORAROHmm. Yeah. Got to try that.

BEDERSONSo that's certainly coming or I think is likely to be available if it's not easily available through the UI right now.

PEGORAROYeah.

NNAMDIThank you. And thank you for your call, Dale. Here's John in Ashburn, Va. John, you're on the air. Go ahead, please.

JOHNHi, Kojo. I'm a longtime user of home computers. I've got my first one in 1983, have been on the Internet. So I'm not a technophobe, but I have had to resist the steadily mounting pressure from my daughters and my other family members to open a Facebook account. And I refused to do that out of concerns for privacy. I remember 10 years ago when Microsoft was the Darth Vader of the industry for having all these flaws in its security and privacy applications.

JOHNNowadays, it seems like Facebook is trying to take the crown away from them by deliberately building in all these windows and side doors into an individual's life so that others can get at them. And you were talking about Facebook messaging. A recent technical blog writer had to say, "You should run away from," and I'm quoting, "run away from Facebook messaging." And she listed three main areas. One, you can't delete messages. They are there forever. There are no subject lines. As she says, all of your communications to any one person are bundled into one giant thread of e-mail, text and chat. And then last but not least to me, something called automatic friendships, and again, I'm quoting.

JOHN"When my mother joined Facebook in order to see my photos, she was automatically added to my Facebook friend list. My Facebook is under careful lock and key. But all I had to do is send my mother one thing and she was automatically granted full access to my Facebook account." So, again, quoting, "you send an e-mail from your Facebook e-mail account to your boss or a client, an employer, your grandmother, and they can sign up for a Facebook account and see everything you posted." Now, if that's accurate, I mean, who in their right mind would go to that?

NNAMDIWell, clearly a lot of people, presumably, in their right minds are.

PEGORAROWell, you can just go on Facebook and listen. A friend of mine used the phrase friendradio to describe that kind of use. You just sort of know what's going on. You don't need to broadcast yourself.

NNAMDIAnd I'm afraid that's all the time we have. Rob Pegoraro is personal technology columnist with The Washington Post. Rob, thank you so much for joining us.

PEGORAROYou're welcome.

NNAMDIBut wait, we have a few seconds left. We got this e-mail. "I'm a 30-something part-time working mother of a preschool. I'm feeling overwhelmed with all these tools. What do I tweet versus e-mail versus text? Can someone give me ideas of what to use when and for what purpose?" You got about 20 seconds, Ben.

BEDERSONUh, focus on one thing, (laugh) right? If you really are...

PEGORAROYeah.

BEDERSON...seriously limited, I would say pick e-mail and focus on e-mail.

PEGORAROYeah.

NNAMDIBen Bederson is professor of computer science at the University of Maryland, College Park and cofounder and chief scientist of Zumobi, a company that designs apps for smartphones. Ben, good to see you again.

BEDERSONThanks, Kojo. Nice to be here.

NNAMDIRob, thank you for joining us.

PEGORAROYou're welcome.

NNAMDIThank you all for listening. I'm Kojo Nnamdi.