Turning E-Mail into a Social Network

Ponca City, We Love You writes "Saul Hansell at the NY Times has an interesting article on his technology blog about his conversations with executives at Yahoo and Google about how they plan to turn their e-mail systems and personalized home page services into social networks. Web-based e-mail systems already contain much of what Facebook calls the social graph — the connections between people. That's why social networks offer to import the e-mail address books of new users to jump-start their list of friends. Yahoo and Google realize they can use this information to build their own services that connect people to their contacts. Yahoo is working on what they call "Inbox 2.0" which will display messages more prominently from people who are more important to you, determining the strength of your relationship by how often you exchange e-mail and instant messages with him or her. "The inbox you have today is based on what people send you, not what you want to see," says Brad Garlinghouse, who runs communication and community products for Yahoo. "We can say, here are the messages from the people you care about most." There will also be some sort of profile system attached to Inbox 2.0 with a profile users show to others and a personal page where they can see information from their friends. "The exciting part is that a lot of this information already exists on our network, but it's dormant," Mr. Garlinghouse added."

Comments

Re:When

[heinousjay]

You may have a hard time understanding this, but a lot of people in the world have what is known as "friends." These friends often like to keep in touch with each other by sharing thoughts, events, and other minutia. The Internet facilitates this through these mechanisms you hate so.

Also, congratulations. The 15 seconds you save on email is much better spent in bitter contemplation of your lonely life.

Re:Who'd'a Thunk?

[Anonymous Coward]

no one cares what you think moron. so shut your trap. you're an asshat.