Comments on: Email Thread Visualization

By: Nudecybot

Nudecybot — Thu, 29 Jun 2006 14:39:10 +0000

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!).

By: Justin

Justin — Thu, 29 Jun 2006 11:36:05 +0000

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…

By: Josh

Josh — Thu, 29 Jun 2006 10:46:08 +0000

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.