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Microsoft Looks At Integrating Forums and E-mail
prostoalex writes "Scott Hanselman shares a document from Microsoft Research internal Web site on Gina Venolia's latest research in user interface design. Since half of the e-mail conversations require reply and then further replies, the model is not too different from current Web forums. Future Outlook versions might integrate the nested interface for e-mail conversations." Gotta say, that'd be pretty nice to have.
Great, we're going backwards... this is USENET, isn't it? I love that people first complain that new technology doesn't do what they want, but rejoice when new technology does what the old technology did, just at four times the cost. Really people, can we invent something new for once?
"Life's funny sometimes." "And sometimes it isn't." --Cat's Cradle
>Future Outlook versions might integrate
>the nested interface for e-mail conversations
They should better work on a noob-proof attachment handling and add a dozen of messageboxes when the luser double-clicks the attachment... 'Are really you sure you want to open nudeteens.jpg.exe?'
If they'd at least integrate a virus scanner... they did buy a AV company, why dont they use their knowledge?
Not that I use Windows or Outlook, but I am annoyed about the ~100 viruses I get every day... *sigh*
--
One by one the penguins steal my sanity...
This sounds a lot like sorting a folder by thread (in-reply-to/references, time, subject). Is there any non-MS e-mail program out there that doesn't allow for that? Pine does, Mutt does, Evolution does, Mozilla/Thunderbird does... does MS really need an R&D department to tell them that a 20-year-old standard feature would be useful?
I think that threaded email is only half of the solution. Some of my conversations use email, some Usenet, some use instant messaging software, some use issue tracking software, some use phone calls, and the rest are person-person.
Threaded emails is nice, but really it would be great if I had threaded multi-provider tracking of conversations. So, if a IM conversation leads to an email + a phone call, it would be great if that could all be captured in a threaded view.
Its all technically feasible, except for (perhaps) the person-person chats.
Most writers regard truth as their most valuable possession, and therefore are most economical in its use - Mark Twain
Thank you! Finally, someone clarified the issue. It's amazing how many people are waving the Usenet flag around in this thread and that is an apples and oranges comparison.
The distinction is less clear if you use a mail-reader/news-reader like Gnus. It threads both and allows references to/from each. I have mailing list topics that are threaded in Gnus and they work just like a newsgroup. Sometimes someone responds to a newsgroup post directly to me, I can use the "get-parent" operation and Gnus will fetch the newsgroup post they responded to.
No, it isn't just silly.
If you've ever been in a long multi-person thread, you know that writers will sometimes respond to more than one message in a single response. More than that, they're change the subject when the subject of their particular message is different from the rest of the conversation. This makes their e-mails more effective at communicating with the other people involved.
More than that, this research has applications to recognizing the relationship among different mails in my inbox without being limited to the things which a computer can recognize with simple pattern matching. That's useful: searching my mail store is a huge chore unless I know exactly what I'm looking for. Unfortunately, I need to search precisely when I only remember the general outlines of a conversation.
Ithink that the "invitation only" part of this might be a bit deceptive. How do you ignore somebody that works a couple of cubes down? God knows you have to ignore most people in chat rooms and nearly all of them on usenet.
.sig somewhere about usenet being in aspect and product like a panicked herd of circus elephants.
Maybe if Microsoft built a user adjustable moderation system, with some meta-supervision built in it would be easier to gracefully ignore the office yahoo. Something tells me that they may have to spend a couple of bucks for a license to this, I think I've seen it before.
Some kind of control is essential, I think. I half remember a
I think this could be great, but I hope they think about it before they do it. Having most of the world's emailers with acess to a slashdot would be a freaking disaster.
Why do I have this? I don't smoke.
I'm not sure if MS aren't talking about something different from what most of this discussion thinks they are. Rather than showing the thread of discussion of whole emails (which we're all used to in other clients) it might be they mean something more like this old discussion of what e-mail discussions should look like by Ka Ping-Yee..
/. that, the idea is that it shows the responses to pieces of your email - the kind where someone says "see my responses inline" and responds to each of your points piecemeal, then you do the same to their responses, and so on.
;)
In case you manage to
I've often thought it would be cool to write something to parse emails the KPY way, but the heuristics would have to be pretty damn clever to deal with supercite. Specifically what I wanted was something that combined KPY's ideas with text-autosummarization , and some 'author ranking' information to produce mailing list summaries from gmane which are like Kernel Traffic and Cousins, or the now-defunct Eclectic.
Oh well, I can always wait until MS put this in Outlook 2010
Problem: doing this requires first solving the natural-language parsing problem. We're on our third generation of linguistics PhDs who can't find a solution to that problem, I don't think one researcher at MS has managed it, and without that breakthrough we're left with a simple threaded view again.
I'd like to see some sort of Wiki integration with email. It would allow me to edit the message. After saving the changes could go to all the recipients and original sender and they could see the updated version.
It's remarkable what they just did to make hotmail unusable:
1. You can no longer open your messages in another window, (to have them load in the background).
2. Once you open a message, you have to read the remaining ones in order.
3. Once you reply, you need to advance through a confirmation screen, then click to get back to the main menu, where you have to start this nonsense all over again.
All because they now force you to use javascript to view a message, in effect taking away certain web features (the ability to spawn multiple windows, load in the background) and turned it into a single-interface client...one that inherently takes SEVERAL SECONDS to get from one screen to another. I realize that some of this is to drive more ad views, but they've done this sort of thing before without doubling or tripling the effort required to read mail.
hm, limiting functionality, slower response times? Sound like par-for-the-course MS improvements to me.
It's finally enough to make me kill that address, which is annoying since I've had it since before the MS 'occupation.'
Actually, I'd like to see someone other than MS devise a popular interface like this first, such as an open source developer. If such a release was Outlook compatible and Linux compatible (of course) and gain some ground in the business world, it would be less likely that MS will devise their new email interface and require new costly per user licensing, instead of simply offering it as an upgrade.
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