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."

Comments

Google, Gmail, and orkut

[User 956]

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.

E-mail needing new features?

[dada21]

(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?

Re:E-mail needing new features?

[Threni]

>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'm not sure little 160 character SMS messages which cost me 10p each to people who have mobile phones are in quite the same league as an email which can contain just about anything (or a link to anything else).

If you're bothered by spam then just set up a whitelist filter. My Gmail account is set up with 40 odd labels and a few more filters - I read stuff from my friends, family and work first and skim through the rest of them later, and Gmail's spam filtering does a pretty good job - in fact I'm so impressed I've uninstalled Thunderbird and do all my emailing over Gmail's web interface.

Re:E-mail needing new features?

[drix]

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 domain name thing is big for a lot of people. My prediction for 2006 is that Gmail will start hosting vanity domains, i.e. allowing you specify gmail as your primary MX and letting you send and receive mail from your own domain instead of gmail.com. Seems like a simple moneymaker that a lot of people would pay for.

Re:Somebody please tell me they're kidding!

[duffbeer703]

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.

This is just stupid

[geekwithsoul]

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.