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

Optimistic

[ackthpt]

So spammers get into this, and you know they don't give a f**k how rude they are, they spoil it for everyone. Further, they've got your email address you use as a contact base and, just like it is with present email, you have to change addresses and notify everyone you moved.

My favourite social network, which I've used for decades, is USENET. I don't care about a home page to show pictures of my cat. I can easily leave a URL in my sig where people can go and see stuff if they choose and with a variety of newshosting sites I can hide my identity so people don't spam me. The downside there, is again, spammers. IIRC USENET is where spam was born.

My advice, go find a bar your friends recommend and hang out there. You might meet someone IRL.

Re:Optimistic

[studpuppy]

Wait.. you mean those guys from Nigeria aren't really my friends?

sniff, sniff...

Re:Optimistic

[UltraMathMan]

If the system did what the article says it will, prioritize email based on "how important someone is to you" shouldn't that work to reduce to effect of spam? Sure I'm probably overly simplifying things a bit, and yeah no technology is bulletproof, but the implication of codifying interpersonal connection and using that as a priority display basis - by quantifying your interactions with other via email - is in my mind a reduction of visible spam that makes it past other filters. Since one is unlikely to respond to spam and since spam doesn't often come from the same address, it could more easily be reduced with this method. In theory at least.

Re:Optimistic

[Garridan]

Until your boss's boss emails you, for the first time, because there's a catastrophic emergency that only you can fix. And it goes down to the bottom of the pile, with the spam. Whoops.

Re:Optimistic

[enoz]

The only way for your boss' boss to contact you in an emergency is via a gmail account? That's the real Whoops.

Re:Optimistic

[cayenne8]

You know...if I wanted to be on a 'social network'....I'd create a crappy looking bit of html, and join one.

I'd prefer to keep my email as email....that's what I primarily use as do most people I interact with personally and professionally......

Re:Optimistic

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly. All social interaction now occurs on the internet. Get with it. Bars are dying and within months will no longer exist. Social networking sites are now your only option for social interaction. And don't worry about meeting anyone IRL. "Friends" no longer exist, ever since the term was vitiated by social networking sites, where everyone has 800 "friends" that they will never see or talk to IRL. Nevermind that, social networking sites exist to bring people together! Not to make some people very rich. We could start calling them $ocial networking $ites, but since that's substitution of "$" for "S" in a non-Microsoft-bashing context, I guess it'll never catch on.

Social networking sites can kiss my a**; I'll keep my friends in real life, thanks. See my MySpace or Facebook profiles for more about this.

Re:Optimistic

[DuncanE]

Its funny you should mention usenet, because I always found reading posts though a nice news client much more enjoyable that reading posts on a online web based forum.

Similarly I find Facebooks internal inbox system to be a poor substitute for email, but unfortunately several of my friends contact me that way.

So rather than Google adding social pages to gmail, how about facebook giving us POP access to its inbox and RSS access to our friends feed.

Re:Optimistic

[value_added]

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.

Re:Optimistic

[Mr. Freeman]

Or that chick whose number you just got at the local chemistry convention. (HA! If only...).

Seriously though, first-time contacts will go straight to the bottom regardless of importance. Other incredibly important things will end up with the spam as well such as college admission office communication. I'm applying to several colleges. They have emailed me about 3 times each "we need your transcript", "we're still waiting on that second letter of recommendation", etc. I want these emails to be top-priority.

I think the Internet has run out of shitty "social network" applications and now they're trying to re-market stuff we already have. I.E. myspace and facebook operate on the exact same principle.
-- You have a page with information about you. People who don't know you don't give a shit about it, but they never see this page because they don't know you. The people who do know you (I.E. your friends) already know this information.
-- You have a comments box (myspace) or a wall (facebook) which is a shitty version of a chat room. People post comments to you which other people can read as well, like a chat room or IRC conversation. The only differences are that A) It's slower than IRC and B) People reply to comments on different people's walls. It's like trying to have one IRC conversation across 3 different channels at the same time.
-- You have instant messages. These are instant messages that are already available through 4 different instant messaging applications. The difference is that IM apps. run in the background whereas you have to be logged into a website for the myspace/facebook chat to work.
-- You have private messages. This is a shitty form of email, which you already have because you need an email address to sign up on any "social networking" site.
-- You have all of this being used at once. You send someone a PM, they reply to it on your wall, you ask them a question through IMs, they tell you to see the email they sent you already.

A "social networking" site is just a bulky way of packaging worse versions of applications that already exist into a crappy interface that attempts to slam them all together. It doesn't streamline communication, it just spreads the conversations we already have over a shit load of different mediums. It doesn't do anything but hinder communication.

I think they've finally realized that no one over 21 is buying into this crap so they decided to simply take something that everyone uses, change an algorithm that already works (Chronologically ordered. Ascending/descending) to one that hasn't been tested at all (more messages = that person is more important) and sell it back to us. I seriously have no idea how these companies stay in business.

Except that

[CaptainPatent]

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.

Let's Combine Everything!

[snl2587]

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.

e-mail filters?

[bitingduck]

I thought I already took care of this by creating mailboxes for people or subjects that matter and filters to put messages in them. It's worked pretty well for quite a while now, and I can check the boxes in the order of how interested I think I'll be in what they have to say. With some filters I can even prioritize things, so that if person A sends me a message about topic B, the topic B filter is higher priority and stops further filtering.

I even have a social networking tool from it, because if my friends send something to several people it's usually a small number (sometimes with one or two new people) and they use regular cc instead of bcc.

IIRC, email has worked this way at least all the way back to Pine.

keep it simple not 2.0

[wizardforce]

Dear Google, please do not fubar your email system my making it "web2.0" as it is currently not as broken as you seem to want it to be. I use your services because they are relatively clean, non-intrusive and most importantly not like Myspace. That is all.

Re:keep it simple not 2.0

[WallaceAndGromit]

Not only that, but relegating a message from an old friend or business contact that I do not speak to very often to some obscure place in my in-box just because your algorithm "thinks" they are not important to me will not endear me to your system.

Re:keep it simple not 2.0

[STrinity]

You don't get it. If we can synergistically harness the power of web2.0 for a social network, we'll have an engaged, community-based killer ap combined with bleeding edge e-vision that will allow us to implement solutions and solutionalize implementations.

Perfect!

[pete-classic]

Once they implement this they can sell top placement in your inbox to spammers!

-Peter

Who'd'a Thunk?

[mechsoph]

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.

Social Networking Lock In Misses the Point

[tjstork]

People that are into this social networking web site thing miss the point. Trying to say that Facebook or any other social site has some sort of a lock in is like saying the bar down the street has a lock in. People go to these places to hang out, and when it starts to suck, they outgrow, or just get bored, they go somewhere else.

Well, I guess this is good in a way.

[ghjm]

It means these systems will turn into walled gardens where their users only ever talk to each other, which is good for me because they're out of my hair.

Those of us who use e-mail for business probably rank the value of any given email by how *few* we get from that person (spam not included) - particularly if we work near sales. The one e-mail I got this month from Mr Big Shot Customer is vastly more important to me than the 30 from Sue down the hall nattering on about why the refrigerator isn't cleaned up yet.

-Graham

Search != Social Networking

[droopycom]

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...)

This would be great at work.

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

If it was ranked on order of who was important to me, I'd never see any email. Then I might get some work done!

what they really want is...

[hAckz0r]

...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.

Interact frequently != important

[meatmanek]

Who says that just because you talk to someone frequently means that their message is important to you? In fact, for me it's nearly the opposite.

I don't need to reply immediately to a conversational email from a family member or friend. On the other hand, more important emails come from people you don't necessarily talk with frequently:

A professor reminding me of the upcoming paper
My boss telling me that I don't have to go to work tomorrow due to weather
The credit card company/power company/landlord telling me that I have a bill due soon

Missing the point?

[hyades1]

Number of messages = how important somebody is to me? Please, God, let this idea crash and burn.

A lot of the people who are important to me, like my family overseas or friends I meet after work, I rarely exchange e-mails with.

On the other hand, there's this nasty little bum-kisser in the office who thinks I can be flattered into promoting him, and somebody in Russia who seems to be obsessed with the size of my penis. They e-mail me constantly.

I really and truly DO NOT need them moved up to the top of my In Box.

Re:Missing the point?

[riten]

There are many ways to decide on "importance" of a person in your life through the use of your e-mail behavior. No sensible developer will base on the "Number of messages" really. That's too simplistic. Importance can be determined in many different ways:

• The bi-directional communication strength - how frequently do you and X respond to each other's mails? (typically kills spammers)
• 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)
• 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.