In the beginning, we communicated with each other through grunts.  Life was OK.  Eventually we developed language and life was better.  Then the written word, the printing press, and the telephone evolved and life was better still.  In our lifetime, some smart people invented e-mail so we could respond when it was convenient and life was great… until someone developed a feature called Reply All.

My favorite Reply All story occurred when I was with Hewlett Packard.  Every once in awhile the HR department would send a note to the general list for the Colorado part of the company and some busy cubical dweller would hit reply all to tell the 10,000 people she had some problem and couldn’t be at the meeting on Thursday.  To which another dozen people hit reply all to tell her not to reply all. Which resulted in a few hundred more people replying to all that replying to all to not reply to all is idiotic and at some level post-modern.  Usually at this point HR sent another note out telling the employees that continuing to reply all would result in a write up since it was causing problems with the mail server.

Incredibly, Reply All has become the de facto system by which companies collaborate on projects.  Why would we use such a clunky, outmoded, gaff prone system for mission critical work and revenue generating project communications?  I’d have to say first it’s an easy way out.  Everyone already has Reply All on his or her computer.  But it’s even more the result of not being aware of better alternatives.

So here we are in 2010 an Market7 offers a better way to collaborate and communicate on projects.  By being web based anyone can be offered access to the projects without installing any software.  It’s easy to use, easy to set up and designed specifically for improved communications and efficiency.   If you’re already using it, you know life is now better.  If you’re thinking about it, sign-up free at www.market7.com/free and allow your life to get better too.

A cool new feature area in our latest release is visual depiction of who’s available when, and what is nature of any conflicts, while events are being scheduled, demonstrated below. Last couple weeks have also included a good amount of behind-scenes work including architectural upgrade for our increasing usage, and some bug fixing (should you notice any, please let us know (info or support AT market7 email addresses), and we’ll get on it quickly). OK, here’s the visual availability functionality:

It started a few weeks ago when we noticed our customer @switchmarketing recommending our service to @lilipip. @lilipip is the identity of Ksenia Oustiougova on twitter. She is the founder of a company called Lilipip that does gorgeous explanatory animations.

We tried a little bit to @reply and otherwise get some attention from @lilipip, and then last week we saw more twittering about her trying us out like this one, and this one. It was a rather public and pithy review of us including what she’s liked about our accomplishments and what she hopes to see from us going forward. A little more @replying by us, and soon a couple direct messages, and we were invited to converse by skype.

We pretty soon tried to voice-call by skype, but, in perhaps the story’s most dramatic turn, got an immediate text chat reply athat Ksenia was not talking due to suffering from a sore throat. But she very generously engaged in a 15 minute chat session about her experience with and reflections about us. With dozens of ideas laid out in our communications over various media, many about her specific needs and interests as an animator (as opposed to video producer), we now felt compelled to share a compilation of our reactions and intentions, in more lengthy & consolidated form than twitter or skype best support, so it was time for a new medium.

We sent an email of about 10 paragraphs laying out exactly what our service has now related to the preferences expressed and what our roadmap is for those towards which we are still building. Several elements were really just now arising through this particular interaction and its good ideas being raised for which we are grateful. And yesterday we received a reply back from Ksenia with her point-by-point reflection on what was raised in our email including some more new, good ideas. The email exchange also included our appreciation of the video with her entrepreneurial story on the lilipip site and its equivalent in a podcast of our founding and philosophy we did last week.

twitter, skype, email, podcast — a rich array of new (in most cases very new) communication methods, each used distinctively for an overall open and productive communication not only towards forming a new customer relationship but also towards authenticating and accelerating our progress by continuing to evolve our services based on direct, insightful feedback from our marketplace. We hope Ksenia’s throat is recovered.