Turning E-Mail Into a Social Network

Sometimes consumer vendors (and people that cover consumer trends) can learn from enterprise software vendors and historical trends related to knowledge management and collaboration. Analyzing e-mail to derive relationship connections is not new at all - if you turn back the hands of time you will come up with Tacit and other vendors that were in the "expert location" business back in the late nineties that mined e-mail systems to establish expertise and associations between people. Vendors like Contact Networks continue to exploit this source of relationship information as part of their solutions in the market. Microsoft is undertaking a similar approach with its future Knowledge Network system.

So we have "social network sites" (credit to Danah Boyd) which are explicit entities where people declare relationships - and we have inferred social networks which are derived through observation and analysis. These types of services (inferred social networks) are more-or-less application features that disappear to some degree into the background context of the system you are interacting with at the moment (an e-mail system in the case of Yahoo). The idea of surfacing contextual social graphs based on the activity at-hand is an important trend to note. As developers work to add "social awareness" to applications (just like we add presence-awareness), it is important to begin thinking of the relationship/connection engine as an important middleware platform component within enterprise architecture.

Ignore Orkut, OpenSocial, Yahoo Mash and Yahoo 360. Google and Yahoo have come up with new and very similar plans to respond to the challenge from MySpace and Facebook: They hope to turn their e-mail systems and personalized home page services (iGoogle and MyYahoo) 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 the social networks offer to import the e-mail address books of new users to jump-start their list of friends. Yahoo and Google realize that they have this information and can use it to build their own services that connect people to their contacts.

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This has several features. First, the e-mail service is made more personal because it displays messages more prominently from people who are more important to you. Yahoo is testing a method that can automatically determine the strength of your relationship to someone by how often you exchange e-mail and instant messages with him or her.

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Yahoo Mail will also be extended to display other information about your friends as well. This can be a link to a profile page, and also what Yahoo calls “vitality” –- updated information much like the news feed on Facebook. There could also be simple features that are common on social networks, like displaying a list of friends whose birthdays are coming up.

Inbox 2.0: Yahoo and Google to Turn E-Mail Into a Social Network - Bits - Technology - New York Times Blog

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[Henry]

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