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Email Plugs Into Social Networking
An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft Research recently released SNARF, the Social Network and Relationship Finder. It works in the Outlook email client to prioritize and sort emails based on the relationship to the sender and other characteristics of incoming email messages. Trusted Reviews wonders if 2006 is the year of ordering information and reports on ClearContext, which does similar prioritization of emails as well as some email driven task management."
This was Google's plan with Gmail and Orkut. However, Orkut never seems to have really gotten off the ground in the way they'd hoped.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Anyone? Snarf snarf.
Hasn't Microsoft screwed up email enough already?
It sorts any mails ending with ASAP into trash and forwards any WMF pron-spam directly to your unpatched windows viewing application.
I predict that... this thread will devolve into bad Thundercats jokes, followed by someone posting a link to "A Night on Thundera"...
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
(Insert emo Thundercat joke here)
My text based communications have moved more to SMS and IM than e-mail, especially in the last 6 months or so. I've even seen many of my non-geek friends and family moving to SMS and IM over e-mail, there is definitely a much high signal-to-noise ratio over the spam cluttered e-mail Inboxes that many people have.
I moved from my own server (which we ran for almost 9 years) to gmail recently, and couldn't be happier -- I wouldn't doubt that my tiny company is saving thousands per year of maintenance and upgrades, and having our own domain name isn't a big deal anymore. It also offers transportability if one of my employees moves on or if we bring someone on for a contract gig.
The downside to e-mail is still the signal-to-noise ratio. Spam filters are helping, but lately gmail has been losing the battle (but hey, my gmail address is publicly listed on slashdot and other forums, so I can't complain). I also have to wade through what is important right now and what isn't, and marking people with a star hasn't helped much.
I don't know if I trust Microsoft to design and build the necessary algorithms and heuristics to sort e-mails in an effective way. This is the same company that has one of the worst letter writing analyzers in word, and we all remember Clippy, who probably still exists. Sure, Microsoft has an intense amount of data they can sort from Hotmail and MSN accounts, but I'm not sure if it will be enough. E-mails, in my opinion, are incredibly unfriendly for PCs to analyze -- it's like the game Go. Humans can wade through e-mails in microseconds, but AI programs have never shown me to be intelligent enough to get mistakes to number close to zero. Microsoft's other problem is I wonder how many people still use Outlook for the desktop? Most of my Exchange customers -- nearly all of them -- use Outlook Web Access. I doubt you can install a SNARF MSI somewhere in the chain to support OWA, right?
Google might have a step up against Microsoft (especially now with AOL and gmail), but even their server AI isn't ready for primetime.
From what I can tell, though, the person who makes the best e-mail sorting AI will definitely come out on top and they could also save e-mail as the prime communication method. I prefer SMS and IM for the instantaneous communication, high signal-to-noise ratio and ability to truly limit who contacts me. Maybe the solution is some odd combo of IM, SMS and e-mail?
Apparently this is going to be big this year.
I wonder how long before MS tries to by linkedin
http://www.linkedin.com/in/dougneedham
What if you don't want to be found?
Definitions of Snarf on the Web:
1. To grab a large document or file for the purpose of using it with or without the author's permission.
2. pilfer: make off with belongings of others
Oh the Microsoft irony.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
You can already do all of these things. It's called "sort."
Prioritize based on the "relationship of the sender?" Without a doubt, crap like this 100% of the time works against you, because it keeps choking on anomalies and changing things. There's no need to automate something that will eventually cost more time than it saves, other than the "ooh, shiny newstuff!!" factor.
Ummm, isn't snarfing when you blow large quantities of liquid out your nose?
Be a real patriot: Question authority. Think for yourself. Formulate your own conclusions.
I've never seen an email containing "$sys$fnord". Am I infected?
liqbase
Otherwise, the best you can hope for is to be buried in secred so your grave doesn't get desecrated.
Now big brother's not just watching you, they'll be sorting your E-Mail.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
the first 4 lines of the summary sounds like usenet, only more private and closed.
Frankly, as no system I know of has 100% efficiency in sorting spam from real messages, I don't trust it one inch in prioritising my messages either.
I wonder what criteria it uses to sort email - if it's simply looking at the email address, then it's going to take up the user's time in setting up relationships and sort criteria, something which I can guarantee most people can't be bothered to do.
I can hardly find the time to sort email into folders, which is why I'm quite fond of gmail - as it doesn't have folders, I don't feel guilty about not using them...
How long before Microsoft is awarded a patent for this? Anyone wanna bet? My guess is 14 months.
Snarf-It -- "Snarf-It.org is a state of the art torrent indexer born out of the ashes of the legendary Suprnova, built by the old nova members for their huge community. It has access to the largest torrent, nzb and nfo database in the world where you can find torrents for dvd's, games, movies, software, anime and television all within our easy to navigate site."
Of course the other Snarf is fine too: "snarf is a command line resource grabber. It can transfer files through the http, gopher, finger, and ftp protocols without user interaction"
How to Download YouTube Videos
Basically, what this is designed to do, is sort your email for you, so you can start off with the important emails first, think of it as a advanced form of sending priority emails, except that the receiver is the person who decides what needs priority.
From screen-shots, it looks like SNARF also has the ability to arrange emails by thread, like gmail does.
Free MacMini
If the mail is on gmail, it's theirs, not yours. When they leave, all that information goes with them. If the departure is
Granted, a savvy employee can archive his email and keep it at home, or even plop an automatic dup in their
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
You have no sense of humor!
All the more reason to continue using Lotus Notes =)
I been using SNARF for a few weeks and have gotten some value out of it.
If you get an extreme amount of email like I do, its a great way to get up to speed on things. You can prioritize them based on who is CC'd or see a nice graphical thread view that makes it easier to figure out what is going in.
Its definately not something that's fully baked yet, but SNARF is a very interesting tool with alot of potential.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
I'm coming to distrust anything with "Trusted" in it's name. It may be a backlash from the very concept of TCP and TCM.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Aha, blatantly and greedily ripping-off the original Snarf! We all know Billy G was a Dragon subscriber (not an idiotbox watcher) and, at recent board meetings, directly influenced the naming of this "technology product." Factoid: During a recent Congressional hearings to protect large companies from vicious upstarts, whereupon he was approached by Sergay Popstarofgooglevski, His Billness quoth, "My name is Kizarvexius and you are about to become bacon!"
Join the quest. See thrilling headear! Or download a random PDF.
(P.S. - Hey, dorks, your lame jokes about the stoopid Thundercats are not fucking funny, to anyone, at all, whereas this one is repeatedly redudant and somewhat self-reflexive, not to mention a run-on which reminds me of that time I joined a comic quest for wealth, power, and all that other good stuff...)
Troll? I'm not sure I see how (except to say that I've obviously been modded down to oblivion). Oh, well . . . stupid is as stupid does.
(Heard in the halls at Redmond): All your e-mail are belong to us! Mwahahaha . . .
Seriously I get maybe a 100+emails a day and that's after our gateway does its corporate job of despamming us. What's left is still 85% junk. How hard is it to simply dump all that unopened even if the volume is 2 or 3 times what I get. What's left is 15-20 useful emails a day, maybe. I'm sure I can keep in my head what those 15-20 emails are related to and if I can't I'll just reflag them as unread and get back to them later. Everything else gets read, tossed in a folder where it will most likely never get read again - just saved for CYA purposes, and eventually archived.
Maybe it's just me but my colleagues with 750MB email files either have borderline personality disorders or are just being anal.
How handy! Microsoft's EULA grants full access to my PC already and now they want to examine everyone's address books? Very nice for tracing relationships.
Thanks to Gmail, Orkut and Dodgeball (their recently acquired mobile phone-based social networking service) being under one roof, Google not only has the ability to know who you know, they also have the ability to know where you are and who you're with.
I don't want Google (or Microsoft or Yahoo or anyone else) to know that much about me. For this reason, I deleted my Dodgeball account immediately after the acquisition (and in general I've asked people not to email me using Gmail).
I gave it a try a month or so ago, but there was one major flaw that made it nearly useless to me -- it doesn't allow you to display by subject line, rather than by sender. The majority of email that I receive is from people I don't know, and showing me that I have a message from John Smith rather than the subject line is damn near useless. I don't remember them by the names, I remember them by the topics.
~~~
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At least they can surely use this to filter out some of the Micros0ft warez spam??
First of all, it isn't even an Outlook plugin, it runs as a separate app that starts when Windows does [just what Windows needs another of].
Secondly, it is completely empty of useful features, has almost no real ability to customize based on user preferences, and the interface is bad even by Microsoft's standards [for lack of a better term.]
If this is Microsoft's idea of innovation, I can see why they usually just find it easier to buy other people's technologies and then "extend" them.
That is 'Trust Me!' as in used car salesman talk.
'This is a beauty, no - it's never been in an accident or
soaked under 14' of water, Trust Me!'
Isn't Snarf the descriptive term for laughing so hard that you expell food and/or drink through one's nose?
This is a totally shameless self-promotion, but ...
I recently completed the first half of a book that features a program that does exactly this: plugs into your software and calcuates trust networks, then takes it one step further and applies firewall filters based on those networks. Basically, a P2P version of PeerGuardian, but smarter and more plugin-friendly. The author is Xochitl Green, a web programmer who quickly discovers that she's out of her league because there are people out there that don't necessarily want self-securing computers.
The first chapter of "Trust Network" is available for download from my site, and you can get the first half (up to chapter 18, about 150 pages) through lulu.com in either PDF or printed form, for what I think is pretty cheap. (There's even a large-print version for the visually-impaired.)
I'm pushing for the second half to be out by March 30. I don't claim to be Gibson, Gaiman, or Stephenson, but it's not Star Trek fanfic, either.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I use a simpler way to control unwanted email (spam and viruses) called Mail Filter. It offers spam/virus checks, disposable addresses and POP inbox filtering, plus copy/forward and auto-reply type stuff. With this kind of spam protection I don't need to use SNARF style social-networking credibility checks for my email senders.