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My Thinkernet column on tools to help you forget things

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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3 Responses to “My Thinkernet column on tools to help you forget things”

1. Thane says:

   October 3, 2007 at 7:44 am

   I briefly considered the possibility of using Bayesian filtering early on to do that kind of filtering (an early package I was working with let you assign emails to multiple categories, not just "spam" and "ham") but my non-spam email load wasn't large enough to really make it worth it to expend that kind of effort.

   Might be worth another look.
2. MatGB says:

   October 3, 2007 at 7:50 am

   Which is of course why the Gmail 'mute' feature is such a godsend, why it's only publicised as a keyboard shortcut is beyond me, but Gmail has now become my client of choice for all my email addresses, simply because it works better than anything.
3. Bruce Williams says:

   October 4, 2007 at 1:30 am

   I don't know how software that decides what I am not interested in would be like, but I do have a reaction to software that suggests items I may be interested in, such as Amazon book suggestions or Google Sidebar.

   I buy a lot of books and do a lot of searching, so I provide both systems with a fair amount of data to work with. At first I was pleasantly surprised at the quality of the suggestions.

   But then I noticed that an intellectual laziness was starting to creep in and my world started to become more narrow as my interests became more centered on, well, my interests.

   I know I can move away from the canned suggestions of what interests me, but I wonder if the nature of the beast is different for a system that prevents me from seeing things that "do not interest me". My experience of briefly becoming trapped in "a world of my own making" gave me a glimpse of tbhe dangers of giving too much control to software that works all to well.

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