Knowing what you dog knows

Caught in the gridlock in West London, part of the gloom that descended as I crawled along in the traffic mayhem caused by a burst water pipe, was the knowledge of the mounting unanswered emails that really needed dealing with before the weekend. Of course journalists are paranoid about information: we want as much of it as possible and when we’re not actually hacking out the words we spend a great deal of time reading whatever we can (online and offline) in a futile bid to ensure we don’t miss that vital story that will… well will make us what?

But whatever the reason, our ceaseless searching and reading has been made worse not better by the digital era. Alongside information professionals, I reckon journalists suffered information overload before any other segment of the working population. Of course, dedicated technologists out there would tell me that the thing to do about email traffic jams is to find a technological based solution. While I’m not that bothered about the government reading my emails (I object in principle of course but I can’t claim to be hiding anything anyone would really want to find out)  I don’t want to sub-contract the reading of emails to a machine. Hence my doubts over SNARF. SNARF, the Social Network and Relationship Finder, developed initially by Microsoft Research to deal with the post-vacation email deluge. “SNARF grew out of an exploration of how people triage their e-mail and whether social information would help,” says A.J. Brush, a researcher within Microsoft Research’s Community Technologies Group who was one of a small team who devised the project several summers ago. “We often say, ‘Your dog knows the difference between strangers and friends who visit your house; why shouldn’t your e-mail client?’ ” A.J. Brush clearly hasn’t met my dog but I get the point.The process on which SNARF is based is called social sorting. According to Microsoft, the concept has been around for a while and now it is meant to be simple. The tool, which has been deployed within Microsoft for a field study, simply counts e-mails, sorts them by sender, and draws conclusions about their relative importance from the intensity of the correspondence relationship.Microsoft says that when launched for the first time, SNARF indexes your e-mail. When indexing is complete, a window with three panes is displayed. The top pane includes a list of people who have sent recent, unread e-mail addressed or cc’d to you. The middle pane includes people who have sent recent, unread e-mail addressed to anyone. And the bottom pane includes all people mentioned in any e-mail you have received in the past week.A configuration panel enables you to change the types of messages displayed and to sort them in different ways. Once you have the tool configured as you prefer, you can double-click on a contact’s name within one of the panes, then view a list of all recent e-mail from that person. It works with mailing lists, too, and you can organise mail by threads and read the entire thread in chronological order, top to bottom.Sounds right up my street. In fact in the traffic snarl up I promised myself I would try it for myself. Now sat in front of the screen I’m just not so sure. Perhaps I’ll clear these near-on 500 unread messages while I think about it.