I recently met Matt Brezina at the superfun SFBeta Bash a couple weeks ago. He is one of the (young) (hot) founders of Xobni, the add-on-app that extracts information about the most important data in your inbox - the people you’re writing to. Now I don’t know if Xobni has a business model or how they plan to make money or anything, but I liked this idea immediately. And also, Matt’s really cute. I guess that’s why they’re no female VC’s cuz honestly I’d be funding these guys based on looks alone.*
But back to email. Now that the cat is out of the bag, so to speak, I guess I can talk about something I’ve wanted to talk about for awhile…email as a social network. Tapping into the social network in email is a relatively old idea that’s recently being touted as a new strategy. When it dawned on me that email was totally where it’s at, which was like 6 months ago (because I’m just that smart) a lot of people had already realized it (which made me feel a lot less smart). My initial research turned up a paper from Danah Boyd called “Social Network Fragments” - an exploration of one’s social network as conveyed through email, written with Jeff Potter in 2002. Although it focused on a more abstract visualization of our social networks, rather than a tool or social networking space, it was still basically saying the same things we’re saying now about the meaningfulness of our actions and connections within email. (Anymails is a similarly interesting but kind of useless email visualization.)
So why was I so amped about email? Well, ultimately because I think it gets closer to real life than the MySpace’s of the internet. It does this in both the ways we use it to connect and the actual people we use it to connect to. I’ve cleverly distilled my thoughts on this into three main points, although I’m sure there are many more…
1. Facilitates one to one communication
I think anyone would agree that pair communication is a special thing. Adding just one more person to a pair completely changes the dynamic, in ways that adding one more person to a group of three or four doesn’t. Communication with your wife, or your mom, or your best friend, are all great examples. Each one of those threads are hyper-specific: each relationship is made unique by the things you choose to share with that one person, and how you choose to share them. Pair communication is also hugely popular. I like to think of one-to-one communication as a sort of least-common denominator type of communication - pretty much anyone who wants to share something can find one other person to share with, whereas not everyone wants to share more than 5 people, and very few people want to share with hundreds or thousands of people. There’s nothing out there right now that capitalizes on this more than the phone, email and IM. Buried in the thousands of calls, emails and IMs you have everyday are the 10 or so people that really matter to you most.
Xobni takes advantage of that by identifying and giving you access to your most important contacts. But email can go further than that, by becoming the repository for all the communication you share with that one other person - consolidating asynchronous and synchronous messages into one long conversation. Wouldn’t it be nice to not have to wonder if that phone number someone sent you was on Email or on IM or shared some other way? And going further than that - email should be tracking everything else you’d like to share, including links and photos and documents, as well. Gmail is already sort of doing this - when I search for communication shared with one person I see both the emails and IMs I’ve had with them - but its still displayed as distinct items in a list, and doesn’t give me enough control over how I’d like to view it - maybe there’s a specific topic, such as “baby names,” that email could somehow consolidate for me and my partner. It also doesn’t give me any other interesting information about this person - like what they’re doing on Facebook or Flickr.
I agree that pair communication isn’t a very sexy problem, but I think if email could do a good job of tackling it, it would corner the market on all the people who actually aren’t using the Internet as their own personal dating service.
2. Facilitates ad hoc groups
I’m all about ad hoc groups. Not my Neighborhood Association, where I go if I have a problem, which is a couple times a year. Or my Snowboarding Group, who I communicate a lot with during the season but not at all anytime else. I’m talking about the last-minute golfing excursion with your boss and a few co-workers, or the wedding planning group, consisting of your mom, your sister and your stylist. These groups come together sort of randomly, and they may dissipate just as quickly. And it’s my guess that this is really the most common type of group - they’re constantly being created and dissolved all the time. And how do they usually get created? Email threads. When I was planning a weekend in Hollywood with Danna and Maya, I started an email thread. By the time the trip actually took place, that thread was 15 nodes long - information about the hotel, restaurants we should go to, places to party, logistics of getting there and getting around. Sure, I guess I could have created a Yahoo! Group for this - but doing it through email was easier, less formal and just came naturally. A nifty front end that would let me quickly create a space for the three of us to share our ideas, plans and photos - all within email - would have been great. The information in that thread could be the basis for a mini-networking space, that would allow us to communicate more easily as well as keep a record of our interactions.
Email is also really cool because it’s open. Now, I’m not a mathematician so I’m not sure how all this is supposed to work, but as long as I have parents and siblings and cousins who aren’t on Facebook or MySpace, and never will be, there is no social network out there that will ever be able to represent what my network truly looks like. Email doesn’t seem to care that my mom uses BellSouth and my best friend uses GMail. And that’s pretty much how it should be.
3. Your view of your network is private
Some might argue that the whole point of a social networking site is to let other people see who all your connections are. I would tend to disagree. I know who my friends and family are, I know who my snowboarding buddies, my shopping buddies and my BFFs are. Is there any real need for me to describe this so that other people know too? Knowing who you’re friends know seems to be great for two things: dating or job hunting. (OK and maybe personal expression.) Other than that, it’s kind of a pain in the ass. I like the idea that, in email, you don’t add someone as a friend, you’ve either exchanged messages with them or you haven’t. And the amount of messages you’ve exchanged basically describes the closeness of your relationship. And if you’ve exchanged a thousand emails with someone, but that was like 8 years ago, then it’s obvious you were close once but now you’re not. There’s no need for the public friend add, the public break-up, or (gasp!) the dreaded delete-this-friend. Email could let you privately dictate who you want to hear about and who you don’t. Actually Facebook should already be doing this…if I really don’t want to read a certain person’s status updates, I shouldn’t have to delete them as a friend to get them out of my feed. But anyway, the point is, I know what my network looks like and that’s all that really matters. I should be able to describe it as much or as little as I want to, and let my actual interactions within it describe the rest.
* I don’t want to seem sexist so I’m sure there are some female VC’s out there. I guess they’re just too busy ogling young hot entrepreneurs to fund anything. I mean, that’s what I’d be doing anyway.