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."

Re:Optimistic

[studpuppy]

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

sniff, sniff...

It'll never catch on...

[Anonymous Coward]

It'll never catch on. If there's no way to on-line stalk your ex or the gal/guy you had the crush on in High School, why would anyone use it?

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.

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!

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: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.