Slashdot Mirror
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."
People sign up for social networks to be in a social network and they sign up for E-mail to get E-mail. I would much like to keep the frilly "crap" separate from my day-to-day email.
When Hotmail started throwing for-pay spam to my inbox and cluttered many of their pages with ads, I made a switch to Gmail. If Gmail throws a round of unnecessary social networking (especially without me opting-in) It may just be time to move along again.
Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.
But the real question is: is it really worth it? I mean, I spend a fair amount of time on Facebook, but even though Gmail has had a chat feature for years I've used it all of twice. When I want email, I go to the site for my email, and when I want to go on Facebook, I do that.
Sure, I understand that a lot of it is about attracting a larger user base to (they hope) make more money, but to me a unique venture would be refreshing to see.
The Web and Email let you connect with other people? Amazing!
Seriously, I don't really see anything too spectacular with the walled-garden social networking sites. They do some maybe useful munging of data, and they allow for the click-and-drool usage pattern. Really though, they're nothing you couldn't already do ten years ago.
Hum... I'm not so sure what "Social Networking" is, but I'm pretty sure its not Search. I mean, I dont think people go on MySpace or Facebook to search for information... They might well find stuff while they are "networking/socializing" but then finding and searching are different things...
I often find things I was not searching for... but normally not thanks to a Search Engine. While using a Social Networking tool maybe...
I often search for thing I cant find... Search Engine can help... but even there, if it doesnt exist a search engine wont find it. (Ideally, the perfect search engine would tell you, "what you are looking for doesnt exist" instead of "No page found"... but I guess you can dream...)
...just a hook into your inbox to see what you trash right away and who's email you'd keep around for a while, or respond to, before trashing. Funny, Gmail and Yahoo could both do it his right now if they wanted. Why the big deal over understanding "the social network"? Its always been there right under their noses.
My favourite social network, which I've used for decades, is USENET.
My thought exactly, but it's worth pointing out that mailing lists can be as useful and fun. I'm not surprised that any of the large email providers are looking to make more money wherever there's money to be made. What I am surprised and dismayed with is that so many people live in their browsers and set themselves up to be easy prey for this. It reminds of broadcast television. There might be a few good shows here and there, but the price is a loss of control and being required to swallow the advertising that's thrown at you at every turn. But that's exactly what people are willing and eager to do. And keep doing!
To use a cell phone analogy, I want email to be email and I don't want it to try and become or do anything else. If you can't get the features you need by doing it yourself (non-trivial, but hardly difficult), there's lots of better options (fastmail.fm, to cite just one example) that would allow most anyone to move away from likes of Yahoo and Gmail, or such slums like Hotmail.
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The bi-directional communication strength - how frequently do you and X respond to each other's mails? (typically kills spammers)
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The delay in your response - how quickly do you respond to the person from the time you saw the message in your inbox? (shows your eagerness)
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The length of your responses - how much effort do you put in to the replies? (polite responses "out of courtesy" may be factored out this way)
There are, of course, different interpretations of "importance" based on context - family, work, social circle. These above factors and more (domain name of the person X) can help determine classes of importance and re-order your emails accordingly. There is ample scope for innovation. People here are arguing about privacy and over-loading of services, but others (non-Slashdotters??) might find these value-additions attractive.