This is really cool:
“Email Thread Visualization” via infoesthetics.
This entry was posted by adam on Thursday, June 29th, 2006 at 5:15 am and is filed under Usability, art. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
It has always annoyed me that programs try to make me treat email conersations as a graph, while I think of them as a DAG (directed acyclic graph). I am not just replying to a message, I am replying to several thoughts, possibly in different parts of the tree.
Josh: yes.
Actually, this is why I now think that such complex visualizations of threads are a red herring. Instead, the Gmail model of a “conversation” is more useful, if you ask me… it’s all one conversation proceeding through time.
BTW I think one list-archival website uses a visualisation something like that…
This is from IBM labs – reinventing mail:
http://www.research.ibm.com/remail/
Worth reading some of their publications! Some of this kind of stuff has been implemented by GMAIL among others.
There are a ton of interesting email visualization projects created in the past 3-4 years:
Marumushi has many impressive applications (including Newsmap and a Carnivore PE frontend)
http://www.marumushi.com/apps/socialcircles/
Danah’s work was recently featured on the TV show Numbers:
http://jheer.org/vizster/
Themail project:
http://alumni.media.mit.edu/%7Efviegas/projects/themail/study/index.htm
Just to name a few – there are so many others. Obviously there are implications for the security and privacy fields and no doubt national security folks are all over this stuff (they have a lot of our e-mail and other communications to process!).