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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."
(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?
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
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...
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"
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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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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 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.