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."

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.

Privacy Concerns.

[twitter]

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 ...

Yes, this is a fairly standard email client tool that could use a few minor improvements without third party disclosure. Kmail makes it easy to organize your email with a right click create filter option. It's also bright enough to notice mail lists so you can organize that way too. This can be improved on by noticing how often you email those on your filter list and making those folders more prominent, but that's not important. What matters is that you know what folders have mail from what person. You already know what mail is important to you better than any algorithm can tell. Third party interest in your contacts is creep to say the least and it should be against the law for ISPs to collect and store the information.

Really free networks can help insure privacy by letting people run their own encrypted mail and messaging services. The real reason ISPs and Government have forced ISP only mail service is so they can wiretap and advertises more easily. Spam has not been defeated by blocking port 25.