E-mail will get the functionality of social networks

Saul Hansell of the New York Times wrote an interesting article on his personal technology blog about his conversation with Yahoo and Google executives about how they are going to turn their email and personalized page services into social networks.



Web-based mail services already contain what Facebook calls a social graph, what binds people together - to put it simply, the backbone of a social network. Actually for this reason, many social networks offer new users to import address books from mail services, it will easily allow you to find your friends. Yahoo and Google understand that they can use this information to create their own services that integrate people with their contacts.



Yahoo is already working on creating a letter sorter called Inbox 2.0, which will primarily show messages that were sent from people important to you; The “importance of relationships” will be determined by the intensity of correspondence and chatting. Yahoo's vice president of telecommunications Brad Garlinghouse (Brad Garlinghouse) said that the “current inbox” shows what you are sent, not what you want to see. We can inform users that this message came from an important or dear person. ”



Some kind of profile system will be tied to “Inbox 2.0”, where each user will have a personal page from which it will be possible to draw information about him (something like a stripped-down version of the same “Habracenter”). Garlinghouse adds that "(Yahoo) already has most of this information, but is not used yet."

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via Slashdot