E-mail as Social Network: the Pitfalls - Pitfalls

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You may or may not have been around or paying attention when the first search engines came out - or even when Yahoo started more than a decade ago. If you weren't, you probably don't remember how horrible they were at returning relevant results. Google's original algorithm, which treated links to web sites like "votes" for the site in question, was hailed as a major breakthrough. Today, of course, Google's algorithm takes into account more than 50 different parameters to make sure that the results it returns are truly relevant to searchers' queries.

So the search engines have learned something about relevance, but judging how important a particular e-mail sender is in someone's life is another trick. I don't see how they'll be able to pull it off unless they include some kind of user-controlled ranking system as a factor. I very rarely get emails from certain people, but when I do I want to see them right away. I belong to several mailing lists; e-mail from them is less important.

Yahoo and Google also face the same factors as any social network in implementing something like this: they aren't the whole world. People with Yahoo accounts receive e-mail from people who don't have Yahoo accounts all the time. So the profile feature won't work very well. Even if they do have Yahoo accounts, the profile won't give you a full picture of that person's online activity.

Take me for example. I belong to several social networks, in which I participate to a greater or lesser degree as my time and inclination allows. The computer programmers I know would consider me a real slouch when it comes to e-mail addresses; I have only three. This doesn't count the various IM clients I have, to say nothing of the instant messaging and e-mail-equivalent tools that are available with the social networking accounts I have. It's this kind of fragmentation that Yahoo and Google are trying to fight with their seamless social networking initiatives. It's arguably a losing battle.

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· I hope you found my article interesting and informative; thanks for reading. Do you...    · I think Google goes on the right way mixing email and social media. Social media...    · Thanks for your comments! It's true that the market is young, so we'll see how...    · I think that email as a social network is something already running in Microsoft...   >>> Post your comment now!