Emergent Chaos

It has always annoyed me that programs try to make me treat email conersations as a graph, while I think of them as a DAG (directed acyclic graph). I am not just replying to a message, I am replying to several thoughts, possibly in different parts of the tree.

Josh: yes.

Actually, this is why I now think that such complex visualizations of threads are a red herring. Instead, the Gmail model of a "conversation" is more useful, if you ask me... it's all one conversation proceeding through time.

BTW I think one list-archival website uses a visualisation something like that...

This is from IBM labs - reinventing mail:
http://www.research.ibm.com/remail/
Worth reading some of their publications! Some of this kind of stuff has been implemented by GMAIL among others.

There are a ton of interesting email visualization projects created in the past 3-4 years:

Marumushi has many impressive applications (including Newsmap and a Carnivore PE frontend)
http://www.marumushi.com/apps/socialcircles/

Danah's work was recently featured on the TV show Numbers:
http://jheer.org/vizster/

Themail project:
http://alumni.media.mit.edu/%7Efviegas/projects/themail/study/index.htm

Just to name a few - there are so many others. Obviously there are implications for the security and privacy fields and no doubt national security folks are all over this stuff (they have a lot of our e-mail and other communications to process!).