Social sorting the e-mail overload
Another very interesting post I found at Greg’s site about the growing number of e-mails we are getting each day. Our inboxes seem a never-ending, poorly differentiated barrage, requiring laborious effort to manually skim, sort, and prioritize. But why? What about some sort of ranking software that helps us manage the information overload, just like PageRank? Greg explains how it should work:
- Analyze who I e-mail, giving each person an implicit rank of importance based on my e-mail history.
- Add in any people I explicitly indicate are important.
- Propagate this importance through the network. That is, for each person I think is important, look at the people that important person thinks are important, and say those people must be at least somewhat important to me, then rinse and repeat.
Seems like this wouldn’t be too hard to implement at a large web-based e-mail site like GMail, Yahoo Mail, or Hotmail. They already have all the contact data right there. Build the graph, propagate, add analysis of the e-mail. I’m surprised it hasn’t happened already…
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2 opinions for Social sorting the e-mail overload
Jon
Jan 2, 2006 at 1:53 pm
That’s a really interesting idea. And you’re right - it likely wouldn’t be that hard to implement if one is already using GMail. Anyone else’s email application would likely have to be created from scratch since I don’t think Google is going to share the inner workings of their PR system :)
Dan _ (creative bloggers for a better tommorow)
Jan 3, 2006 at 6:35 am
That is a very very good idea. It is perhaps the best idea i have heard all day. I wonder if it will put people off? Perhaps there could be just a button you press and it will enter that mode, but the default mode would still be chronological.
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