Web Worker Daily

This is either a ridiculously silly idea, or it will revolutionize how we deal with business email.

SecondLife and similar virtual reality worlds have taken our work lives and turned it into a game. But can we take a game and turn it into a new way of managing our email overload? Seriosity says yes. The company maintains that the time that we spend attending to our email costs us our attention, and that attention has value that can be considered currency to spend, trade, collect and measure worth. They are launching an enterprise Outlook plug-in, Attent, which will turn your email client into your communication hub and your bank account to manage this new unit of currency, which they call Serios. They fully admit that they’ve taken the concept from the virtual economies of games like World of Warcraft.

Seriously?

As described on the product’s website:

Attent™ with Serios™ is an enterprise productivity application inspired by multiplayer online games. It tackles the problem of information overload in corporate email using psychological and economic principles from successful games. Attent creates a synthetic economy with a currency (Serios) that enables users to attach value to an outgoing email to signal importance. It gives recipients the ability to prioritize messages and a reserve of currency that they can use to signal importance of their messages to others. Attent also provides a variety of tools that enable everyone to track and analyze communication patterns and information exchanges in the enterprise.

Here’s the way it appears to work. Each user is allotted a set number of Serios. Everyone gets the same amount, and everyone is bidding with Serios for their emails to get attention. You attach Serios based on a self-assessment of the importance of your communication. If the receiving party agrees on the email’s value, you’ve spent those Serios and the recipient is now able to use the currency to get attention from others. Don’t waste your time attaching Serios to trivial email, or you’ll blow your budget before you get your answer on that big proposal. If that wasn’t enough, you can even earn “badges” based on how much and how well you use the system.

Oookay. Who said that employees playing multi-player games on company time was a waste of productivity, anyway? Not these guys!

According to a C’Net article, Seriosity believes they can help the attention problems caused by e-mail overload:

And while Seriosity doesn’t believe it can solve that entire [email] problem, it is hopeful that businesses that purchase Attent and have significant numbers of employees using Serios can see substantial decreases in time and money wasted by e-mail and attention mismanagement.

“Let’s pretend that we can solve 10 percent” of the problem, said Seriosity CEO Ken Ross of his company’s major client with the $1 billion e-mail management problem. “That’s still a huge savings.”

The company is backed by $6 million in venture funding. Like any social network, it will only be successful if people using the system actively use it and take it, well, seriously. Time will tell if we’re going to be building our bank of Serios so our messages to corporations will rise above the din. My Serios is not on this gaining widespread acceptance anytime soon, but an interesting concept nonetheless.