Data Mining: Text Mining, Visualization and Social Media

Two Minute Rule: Intelligent Email Clients Needed

Fernando gives some more commentary on how technology has failed us in the area of email:

Some of us have been doing a bit of work on tools for helping manage email. Just a beginning. I totally agree that dropping any email that needs more than 2 minutes to respond is filtering all worthwhile thought from your exchanges, maybe from your day. What I would like is a convenient way to slow down email, especially the kind of email that doesn't need much thought. For example, I'd like an adaptive delay for my outgoing replies. If an outgoing reply is delayed by 8 hours, the reply to the reply will arrive tomorrow. Of course, some replies I want to go out right away. that's why intelligence and adaptation are needed for this purpose.

In addition, I think that one of the big problems with email is there is no direct relationship between the time stamp on an email and when the sender expects or requires a reply. This can be inferred in part by various priority settings, but these are easy to ignore and often mean different things to different people  (an ontological commitment problem if ever there was one!). Perhaps analysis of the content as well as past interactions with the sender could be used to provide a better sorting function...

Down With The Two Minute Rule

Scoble writes about the two minute email rule:

I love this new two-minute rule for email from Eric Mack (delete all email that takes more than two minutes to answer). I woke up today to find 48 new emails waiting. Damn, and it’s Sunday. Imagine how many I’ll have on Monday.

This is the problem with answering email — it generates more email.

Marc Smith of Microsoft Research calls the standard time based sorting of email clients the ADD sorting. This two minute rule is the type of thing that makes me recoil in shock and give up hope for a sane future for my daughter. Shouldn't we be removing email that takes less than two minutes to answer? I feel that something that doesn't require attention to interact with is worthless - I'd rather spend my time engaged with concerns that require real thought! Remember, if you get a reply from Robert Scoble it means he hasn't spent any time thinking about the answer.

What I think is really going on here is that for some reason email clients have never provided any real tools for content analysis and management - the market is actually wide open for some quite trivial new functionality (this is what happened with desktop search applications).

And Then There Were None

I have in mind a post entitled 'Is RSS the Email of the Blogosphere'. The idea being that email is horribly under supported, even 300 years after it first was used. One of the key issues with email is the lack of search in nearly every client out there. Actually, I don't mean lack of search (unless I'm talking about the *&^% Microsoft office web interface) but actually the lack of indexed search. This all changed in a big way when Google launched gmail - they really shook up the email client interface and did many things right.

Unfortunately, I guess they forgot about stability. Gmail was down last night and seems to be down now (interpolating, I'm guessing that it has been down all night).

Never mind, perhaps I'll look at using the new Yahoo email that everyone is talking about. Oops - my browser (meaning, in this case, my OS) is not supported.

Who's for HotMail?

As for the 'Is RSS the Email of the Blogosphere' post - feed readers are, IMHO, as broken as email clients. There are lots of things they need to get right and are still having problems with (e.g. the duplication of posts in Bloglines). A post for another day perhaps.