Made out of people

Not Just Any Email

The list of Most Wanted Gmail Features is a list that is, I think, meant to help gmail "catch up" to other mailers. The features listed on the site are all good and valuable things:

IMAP access
Import mail from other sources
Ability to save a draft
Ability to send HTML mail
POP3 access
Force different subjects into single conversation
Manually break up conversations

However, these all strike me as minor. They will help gmail catch up with other mailers, but they don't represent a departure.

And Gmail, to me, more than the 1 GB of space or the subtle advertising, really manages to be something kind of new. In particular, it's the first time I've had decent text search with a little bit of ranking. It's the first time I've had labels done correctly. And it's the first time that search hits come up with those labels correctly.

Maybe I'm the only person who really cares about that. But because it's those search aspects I care about, the feature list that I'd like to see for GMail (or for any other mailer) is very different.

• Person-oriented searches. I mentioned this in a previous message, but it didn't really come through, I think. The nice folks at Google think of email as a bucket of words. But an email from jansamsmith@hotmail.com is an email from "Janet & Samuel Smith", at least in my contact book. And that means that when I search for "Janet", that email should come up. Unfortuantely, the word "Janet" doesn't actually appear in the email itself.

• Similarly, person-oriented lists. This is an extension of the search. Why can't I pull all my interactions with Janet & Samuel? I'm sitting right here, looking at their contact book entry. And so I need to close the contact book, open the search box, and type in their email address... this should be a one-click.

• Which means, intelligent aliases. Because myfriend@ics.uci.edu is the same guy as myfriend@uci.edu and even my@friend.com, and I'm willing to spend the five seconds it takes to tell Gmail that, if GMail promises to remember that useful fact and keep it around.

There's a start. All these are direct, heuristic, user-interface-oriented tweaks that Google could apply to Gmail that would rapidly make it substantially more powerful. Some other time we can talk about how Google (or another mail company) could apply social network analysis and collaborative filtering...

Oh, yeah. None of these are specific to gmail. I want to see them in Thunderbird, or in Outlook, or in Apple Mail....

Update Joshua points out that these aren't "minor" tweaks any more than, say, whether a car window closes is a "minor" tweak--and, indeed, I'll grant that this is true. But they are, in some crucial way, "obvious" tweaks. They are the ones that a competent mailer should have -- and that most mailers do have. What I want is mailers that start looking outside the box, and rethinking what the email task is. The much-maligned (and justifiably so) Coordinator (as discussed by Winograd and Flores in their computers and cognition work) was a novel rethinking of the email task, and for that alone is certainly notable.

August 30, 2004 02:08 AM | TrackBack | in Social Networks