My Thinkernet column on tools to help you ignore stuff

InformationWeek's new department is called "Thinkernet," and it consists of short essays about the future of the Internet's evolution. I wrote a piece for it about the coming suite of tools that make it easier to ignore stuff:

Take email: Endless engineer-hours are poured into stopping spam, but virtually no attention is paid to our interaction with our non-spam messages. Our mailer may strive to learn from our ratings what is and is not spam, but it expends practically no effort on figuring out which of the non-spam emails are important and which ones can be safely ignored, dropped into archival folders, or deleted unread.

For example, I'm forever getting cc'd on busy threads by well-meaning colleagues who want to loop me in on some discussion in which I have little interest. Maybe the initial group invitation to a dinner (that I'll be out of town for) was something I needed to see, but now that I've declined, I really don't need to read the 300+ messages that follow debating the best place to eat.

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[#1 posted by Mark Hurst , October 3, 2007 8:39 AM]

It's a very important idea that I hope software developers will pick up on soon. "Letting the bits go" is the only way to survive in what will become an even *more* saturated environment in coming years.

[#2 posted by knodi , October 3, 2007 10:11 AM]

Haha, well, I bet I can guess why nobody has figured it out yet- It's really, really hard!

Spam is not quite a "solved problem" yet, and it's waaaay easier than trying to decide whether you intend to go to dinner with some friends based on other emails that include travel plans....

They're probably just trying to nail the most achievable goal first, before they move on to that blue-sky AI stuff.

[#3 posted by SAE Miller , October 3, 2007 10:34 AM]

If someone has a 300 email thread on where to have dinner, then there might be bigger problems in your social circle than where to eat.

[#4 posted by Tuke , October 3, 2007 1:18 PM]

Haha, I agree with the 300 people lunch conversation, but at the same time, there are a lot of... 'time-dependant' emails that accumulate--things like where Laura and I want to eat on Thursday or where Wednesday's meeting will be (etc, etc). Gmail does a beautiful job creating the message 'threads' (i think they call it) where the 7 emails that Laura and I pass back and forth Thurs morning will be tied together, and when you delete (or open/etc) one, they all delete (or etc).
But I still have to delete every email about where Wed night's meeting will be... it would be cool if there was a way to have it delete itself (say, on day after the event). (..."this message will self-destruct in 30 seconds"...) The person creating the email will have to remember to set a delete date/time, and that time would have to be encoded with all the non-message-content-data (whatever that's called), and the email-program will have to be able to read that peice of data... but it should be possible. (I would consider to be a great feature, and if someone like google started using it, it would have the needed user-base.)