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.

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.