Email 2.0

We leave a stream of digital evidence behind us all day and every day in both our professional and personal lives. Email is the most ubiquitous source of this and so from an organizational mapping perspective it is a logical choice for harvest when it comes to tools like those developed by Trampoline systems and others for mapping networks.

However, this is a very forensic view of the world and, while really useful in fact-gathering and analysis, misses the extraordinary possibilities that arise when we move some additional smarts into the basic email client for real time analysis.

Here are some thoughts that have occured to me as I process the daily email load, thoughts about how email should work given how much better we have made everything else.

Right click on any email would tell you (in some easy to visualize way) what thread this mail was from; who else was on it; what threads had spawned from it; which spawned threads had ended and which were still active; where in the thread this particular email was and what your current status on this thread was; are you remiss in replying, by one cycle, by two etc etc.

In another view, a click on your inbox would show you every open thread you had, which ones were open longest and were most urgent.

This would have the additional value of being also able to actively alert you (if you so choose) to open threads, possibly auto categorized by priority based on your current projects. This last determined by a simple subject matter analysis algorithm always active on your inbox.

Further to this thought, when the email client had figured out the likely content matter of the message it could possibly discern if there open tasks or questions in the email that pertain to you.

This in turn would allow it to build an Action Items list that would contain things like "Important Invitations I have not responded to", "Questions from key people I have not responded to" and follow up items from yesterday's project meeting needing action today.

It would also allow you to create connections between threads manually so you could create a working messaging tree for a project which would in turn mesh with a social network tree.

How and when this sort of thing will come into being is uncertain but, the subject is a very interesting one as we seek to establish more ways to understand how our virtual connections with others operate.

This would in my view be Email 2.0