Even in Research, we sometimes ship product. Last night, I put the finishing touches on the web page, ran the install one last time to make sure it wouldn't throw me off, and shipped SNARF.
SNARF is still an internal tool: it won't see the light of out-of-Microsoft-day for a few months, yet. None the less, a release to a possible customer base of, oh, 78000 people can make one a little jittery. Doubly so, because each person's run is sending us back usage data. Are we collecting the right data? Will it be analyzable the way we think? Will we come up with sufficiently-interesting analyses?
Because if this works, it's going to be GREAT. Great for the users, whose email experience should be vastly improved. And great for researchers, who will get truly interesting information about how much email flow happens, how quickly, and when.
(An overview of SNARF will be presented at the upcoming CEAS conference.)
July 14, 2005 09:34 AM | TrackBack | in Data and Documents