Regardless of my political affiliation, as a technologist I’ve been watching with interest as President-elect Barack Obama reveals some ideas about how bring aspects of the technology his campaign used so successfully into the executive office.

I’m impressed how quickly change.gov was released to publish transition information online. Obama plans to hire a national Chief Technology Officer which has caused quite a flutter among the Silicon Valley crowd and stimulated a lot of interesting ideas like opening select government data via standard APIs. And in one of the clearer signs we’re moving into a postmodern presidency, the weekly presidential radio address will also be broadcast on YouTube.

Notably, the potential for new technology to change politics is bi-partisan. Members the Republican party launched their own site to organize opinion and increase activism.

With the air abuzz with technology talk in Washington, it surprised me a bit to learn in the New York Times today that when Barack Obama is sworn into office, he’ll likely lose the ability to communicate via email “because of security risks and fear that messages could be intercepted.”

I certainly understand these concerns but find the notion of a President cut off from email disappointing. The email archiving controversy that plagued the current administration does underscore the risks of using email, but also points out the fact that the Oval Office badly needs a robust, secure, and compliant email infrastructure. Instead of fearing email, I would like to see the incoming administration propose some improvements and safeguards for email in Washington as part of the technology policy the proposed national CTO will responsible for developing and deploying.

I feel bad the President-elect may have to give up his Blackberry for another reason. Shouldn’t the person who holds one of the most difficult jobs in the world be entitled to play a quick round of Brick Breaker every now and then?  Hmmm, on second thought…

9/22 Update: I forgot to mention we added ability to view your Zenbe Calendars as ICal feeds in this post. See the new blog post on Zenbe support for the ICal format for more details.

Last week we rolled out some new features to the Zenbe Mail product. I’d like to highlight a few here:

“Back to…”

We’ve moved the back functionality out of the toolbar and into the sidebar in the Mail tab. Now you’ll see more information about what you’re going back to so you can better remember your context.

Set an end date for recurring events

You can now set an end date for your recurring events. In the “event details” dialog, under the “Repeat Event” section you’ll see options for choosing an end date:

Edit your alternate email address

We use your alternate email address to send you help on resetting your password if you’ve forgotten it and occasionally other important information. You can now see and edit the alternate email address we have on file for you. Click on the settings link in the upper-right corner of the screen and look for it in the top section of the settings dialog.

Birthday calendars

If you store birthdays for your contacts we’ll now create a “Birthdays” calendar in Zenbe for you to keep track of them. To add a birthday for a contact, edit the contact in your address book.

After the first time you add a birthday for a contact you’ll need to refresh your browser. Then click on the calendar tab and you should see a “Birthdays” calendar when you click on the gear on the right side of the toolbar.

Contact Us Form

If you need to contact us directly, please use the “Contact Us” link on our home page to use the new contact form. We can’t always respond to every inquiry directly but we try to keep up as best we can. Here’s a direct link:

Zenbe Contact Form

Skip Browser Warning

If you use a browser that is not “officially” supported by Zenbe, we display a warning message before you login. Now you can check a box to dismiss this warning message in the future:

Zenbe Goodies

We put together a little page of Goodies we’ve hacked together for people that want more integration of Zenbe into their browser experience. Check out our “Zenbe This” bookmarklet, Webmail Notifier script, and Firefox 3 mailto: protocol handler on the Zenbe Goodies page.

What’s next?

We’re working on a lot of new and interesting features. Here’s a sneak peek at a few things you’ll see rolling in the next several weeks.

IMAP Support

We’re releasing our IMAP server to production sometime next week. We got a lot of great feedback via our alpha testers and have found and fixed several bugs with their help.

Conversation View

We’re starting to alpha test our conversation view feature with a few users. Over the next two to three weeks we’ll be opening up the alpha test to even more users. Click here to sign up to be a conversation view alpha tester.

We’re still making lots of enhancements to the user interface, but here’s a little sneak peek at what a conversation looks like in Zenbe:

SSL Support

We know full SSL support is important to a lot of our users when they read their email. Right now we always make sure any login or password changes are encrypted by your browser. Now we are working to make more and more of the Zenbe Mail experience work completely over the https protocol for those of you who want full encryption for everything you do on Zenbe – starting with reading your email.

Superior Email Organization

We think there are better ways of finding email that’s important to you – without having to create lots of cumbersome rules. We’re working on an innovative UI to allow you to view email from only the people you care about in a single click. We’ll be sharing more details on that feature over the next few weeks.

Better iPhone Lists Integration

Right now Zenbe Lists for IPhone users have to go to a separate web site to manage their lists online. We’re working on making your iPhone lists available in the Lists Quickview within Zenbe Mail so you’ll have seamless access to your lists regardless of where you are logged in.

As always, thank you to all of you who have been using Zenbe, particularly those who have registered for our forums and given us lots of valuable feedback.

The responsiveness of the site should be much better now. We tweaked some options on our web server that allow it to serve connections more efficiently.

One of the side-effects of this server optimization is that it caused a bug with our rich-text email composer in the Safari browser. We’ve temporarily disabled rich-text email editing in Safari until we fix the issue, which we’re estimating at 2-3 days. We’re sorry about the inconvenience. Rich-text email composition still works fine in Firefox and Internet Explorer.

FYI -

We are experiencing some slowness and lags on Zenbe.com right now. We’re currently investigating the issue and hope to have things running smoothly in short order.

Just a quick note that the site maintenance has been completed and Zenbe is up and running.

I’ll write a more detailed blog post today highlighting the changes and giving you more news about what we’re working on in the next few weeks.

If you have any trouble with the Zenbe site, please first try clearing your browser cache. Here’s a link to a page that provides detailed instructions on how to clear your cache in different browsers.

Also, please take advantage of our user forums to check for solutions and report issues. You may also contact us using our new contact form.

Tomorrow we’ll some brief site downtime at 8am Eastern Time while we roll out an upgrade to Zenbe Mail.

We expect the site to be unavailable for only about 10-15 minutes. I’ll post an update here when things are complete.

We’re rolling out some new calendar features including the ability to set an end time to recurring events and to subscribe to ICS feeds of your Zenbe calendars. We’ve also tweaked the navigation a little bit in the mail tab. And we’re introducing a contact form to provide a better way to get in touch with us.

The main focus of the release though is to increase stability with some backend architecture changes we made.

I’ll elaborate more on the new features and what we’re working on next after we complete the upgrade tomorrow morning.

Several users have reported seeing items being duplicated when they sync their lists using the Zenbe Lists iPhone app.  This problem occurs when the sync operation is interrupted – either by the app exiting, or the phone losing network connectivity.  Any new lists or items that you have created may end up being duplicated (you won’t notice this, however, until the next successful sync operation).

Existing items – items that are already on our server – are not expected to have this problem.

We’re working on a solution to the problem, but until then we recommend that after creating new items you take extra care to make sure the next sync operation finishes normally.  Try not to exit the application until the little sync spinner finishes, and try not to do anything that might interrupt the network connection.

Thanks for your patience, and we apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

Hey everyone,

We’re looking for Zenbe users who want to alpha test our initial IMAP implementation.

For more details, please see the forum post about our IMAP Alpha Test.

We fixed the problem with the Contacts Importer that caused performance problems yesterday. Import away!

Update 21 Aug 2008: The contacts importer is now enabled.

Due to some problems with our contacts importer we had to temporarily disable it.

We’re working on a fix and will hopefully have a patch out by tomorrow.

We’re sorry for the inconvenience.