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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.
(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?
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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.
What if you don't want to be found?
Hide.
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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...
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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"
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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.
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I wouldn't be surprised if we eventually see the development of something like this being subsidized by spam vendors - the next gen Outlook malware wil happily report that it has gone out of its way to find you other people who N33D $ B1GG3R PEN15, just like you, and enrolled you in 4 different "anti-virus products" that it has taken the liberty to "opt you into".
Of course, it will also note that at one time you read Lord of the Rings, and you will be bombarded with offers for juvenile, poorly written fantasy with 1-dimensional characters and boring plots, as well as all sorts of cheap rings and other [tt]acky jewelry.
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.
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 agree. I went ahead and tried it out and found it to be seriously lacking in useful features. I also have to question why it runs as a separate app instead of a plug-in for Outlook itself. You'd think Microsoft would have at least been able to integrate it into their own damn mail client.
It is a mildly interesting tool poorly implementing a mildly interesting idea.