1. For most people, this is a non-issue. I know a lot of people who actively publish the URL and location of their shared items feed. I even keep mine on my blog, including the most recent items I’ve starred. For most people, having others see the items they’ve shared is not a big deal. If you really want to keep track of stuff and not share it with the world, just create your own tag – I use the tag “followup” for interesting stuff I find but don’t want to share with the world.

Also, it’s not as if the GR team really “exposed” any private data. Your shared items feed was always publicly available – it was merely obfuscated with a long and gnarly URL.

2. “Passively social” products are going to encounter this problem time and time again. The advantage of passively social products is that they don’t actually require you to “friend up” your network to get started. In an ideal world, a passively social product will be able to infer or distill the appropriate social network with which to share your information. We’re clearly not there yet, so the only thing we’re going to get from these first generation products is a very coarse set of relationship data. Knowing that I’ve communicated with someone on Gmail is a very coarse signal – it’s better than nothing, but not enough information on which to make a high-quality decision.

As excited as I am about passively social products, it’s going to take awhile to be able to match the user experience associated with actively social products like Facebook and MySpace. Without explicitly declared (and verified) relationships, passively social products are going to need multiple signals to make good decisions about the circle of people with whom I’d like to share data. For example, if a passively social product had access to my IM, phone, email, and calendar logs, I bet it could make some really good decisions about the folks with whom I communicate and the strength of those connections. There isn’t anyone who has that information today across all those platforms. As a user, I don’t have it myself and couldn’t even turn it over to a trusted 3rd party to analyze it even if I wanted to do so. And I can’t think of a single company I trust enough to provide all of that information. I would maybe trust Google, but I’m not sure – that’s a lot of information and power to turn over to a single organization.

Tags: googlereader, web20, privacy, google, opensocial, social networking

So what’s next? Well, I think what’s next (and by far most interesting) is some concept of the “strength” of a connection. Specifically, today I can see a lot of my friends’ social networks, but I have no idea for the relative strength of connections. Sure, if I see Person A knows Person B, I can always make an offline inquiry to see if that connection is strong or weak. But very soon I think we are going to have tools like Xobni that profile communications patterns and surface that information both to end users and to other applications. And it won’t be just social networking and community applications that benefit. Enterprise applications (collaboration tools, CRM tools, HR/recruiting systems, etc) will all benefit from having access to some of this information. We’ll call this contextual “strength” Phase III.

Phase III is really interesting to me because I think it has to be a largely machine-driven approach. Communication patterns are too dynamic for any user to bother continually updating “strength” of connections. Also, as Xobni has shown me, if you are a power emailer you’re likely to be surprised by who shows up as ranking highly. There’s no reason the same can’t be done for IM. I’m not sure that I’m going to turn my phone logs over to some 3rd party analytics company, but IM and email would be a pretty decent picture of what I do and with whom I communicate. Passive profiling of communications patterns is going to be really interesting and I think will expose really interesting information about the nature of communications. I think Xobni is on to something really cool and big as it’s delivering value to me today (even though I have to use it in Outlook) and I can see a path to a lot more value in the future.
As an aside, I think this is the best shot that Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo have to wedge their way back into social networking relevance. They already own the message stream and have the data they need to get a sense for who knows whom. It will be interesting to see whether they choose to open this information up and let other applications take advantage of it or whether they use it for the bedrock of their own auto-generated social networks.

I’m not always the fastest on email (that title goes to my friends who work in venture capital), but I do try to be consistent in the time window for my responses. I tend to work under the theory that being consistent is the next best thing to being fast. My biggest concern is making sure that I do my best to get back to people in the time window that’s consistent with previous interactions.

Right now, the only two lenses through which I can interact with my mailbox are the traditional LIFV (last in first visible) approach or by the use of folders/labels. Neither one of those approaches gives me any sense as to the messages that really require my attention.

As email has become a more important communications tool, I’ve seen most of the big pain points get attacked. For me, spam is a non-issue; I still get spam but not so much that it can’t be managed. I also have tools that allow me to search through my email pretty effectively and retrieve messages where I’m looking for specific messages or keywords. The last big mountain to tackle is relevance. Relevance is hard to tackle because it means many different things to other people and unlike spam and search, the mark to hit is not a quantifiable goal (make all messages searchable, achieve a 99.99% spam capture rate, etc).

I’ve seen a lot of people talk about building more relevance into email. A lot of times it takes the flavor of “we’ll look at your inbox, your calendar, your task list, etc and magically divine relevance based on those factors.” That strikes me as a hard approach to pull of, partly because those are incomplete sources of data (for example there are people who I speak to on the phone a lot and when I get email from them it’s pretty important – you might not pick that up if you just look at my inbox and calendar) and for another reason I’ll get to later.

More than anything, I want an email analytics product that’s smart enough to do exception reporting and help me view my email through the lens of messages that are “out of bounds” in terms of the time it’s taken for me to reply.

To build a good analytics product, you need to have parameters that can be measured. For websites is page views, visitor activity via logs, etc. For feeds its distribution, readership, and clickbacks. You get the picture. Email has the same characteristics. You can see volume of communication, direction of communications, time between receipt and reply, time of day when I’m most active on email etc. Simply put, there are definitely enough parameters to build a statistical profile of my mail usage habits. If you focus just on power emailers, you’ll certainly have enough data to make things work better.
There are two things that cause wrenches in this whole plan. One is just simply the problem with out-of-bounds events. Say, for example, I got an email from Bill Gates. He and I haven’t exchanged emails before. But if he found fit to email me, I’d say that’s pretty important. Any system that relies on historical communications patterns has the danger of missing these types of events. The same can be said of emails from any new person, famous or not.

Second, I use webmail almost exclusively. If I used a desktop product, I’m sure you could deliver a product like this as a simple toolbar or plug-in. How will you make it work in a webmail environment (sorry, Greasemonkey scripts don’t count – that’s too high-end of a solution).

The only folks I’ve heard working on this problem recently are the guys at Xobni. I haven’t seen their product but I hope it moves the ball forward when it becomes available.