Turn Gmail into Your Social Brain
September 27th, 2007 (6:32am) Anne Zelenka 9 Comments
As social interactions and contact information get distributed across different services like Facebook and Twitter, it’s harder for you to keep track of all your contacts and what’s happening with them. Yesterday, Web Worker Daily’s Samuel Dean reviewed Fuser, a universal inbox that lets you get email from all your accounts and messages from your social networks in one place. That addresses part of the problem. But it doesn’t make it easy for you to update all those social networks or keep track of what other people are doing on them.
If you’re a Gmail user, you probably already know you can consolidate other email accounts into it, with Mail Fetcher or simply by having messages forwarded to your Gmail and adding “from” email addresses on the Settings page. Steve Rubel goes a step beyond that and turns Gmail (or any email client) into a social network hub — an outboard social brain.
Using mail gateways like Twittermail and an email to SMS gateway, Rubel can post status updates to his social networks and send messages to his friends there. He also imports status update feeds from selected friends so he can keep up to date on them without having to leave email.
Rubel says, “These are just a handful of tips and this concept is evolving but even before someone builds the big social graph in the sky, I am just getting along fine using Gmail, thanks to a bit of hackery.”
Gmail already worked reasonably well for tracking contact information and interactions over time, especially given its integration of GTalk and automatic creation of contact entries. But now that we’re branching out onto other platforms, maybe email can be the ultimate social environment, with capabilities far beyond email, including instant messaging (as GTalk provides), presence, Twitter-like status updates, and more.
9 Comments Post your own comment
Mike says: September 27th, 2007 6:47am
In other words, Google (employees) can read everything about you? Not a good idea IMHO.
Anne Zelenka says: September 27th, 2007 7:50am
The tips aren’t specific to Gmail, so if you worry that Google employees will read your social networking messages, you could always use a different email client.
S. Srinivasan says: September 27th, 2007 8:19am
Information overload started with basic email, and progressively increased with news updates from various newsgroups/blogs/subscriptions. Thankfully we moved the latter type of messages out of our Inbox and into news readers with RSS.
But now all these social graph messages are going to start piling in to my InBox. Similar to newsgroups/blogs, I dont think email is the right place for social graph messages. Can someone invent a Social Journal please?
The design problem is that this Social Journal needs to be cogniscent of the Importance of people in my life - and that is usually best established by analyzing a personal communications organizer - oops…like email!
aarondavidson says: September 27th, 2007 10:28am
I think that there is a need to break free of using an email client for everything. Information overload, as well as a gradual destruction of productivity if you are notified of RSS feeds, and incoming email constantly. Why do you need your email broken down into SMSs to you? No one needs to be connected 24/7
-Aaron
ebrown says: September 27th, 2007 11:44am
Yeah! I love the idea of taking every opportunity to make your networks work for you. Some Web Workers I know, need help with personal productivity. They have several communication apps open at once and do not do a very good job of multi-tasking. I am in that category as well. It is easy to get pulled off target and run down a rabbit trail only to find yourself backtracking 30-45 minutes later. I still like this idea, but I wonder if someone is working on something better.
S. Srinivasan says: September 27th, 2007 4:15pm
You are right - it’s about information overload and declining productivity. While syndicating news feeds from/into your broader social graph, why not tighten your locus and also distribute to-do feeds from/into your work graph? “Making your network work” to me is not just about getting relevant connections, but also about (small) work group productivity. The killer app will be able to syndicate both types of graphs. And that is most definitely not eMail, because eMail is fundamentally a personal tool, and lacks group intelligence available in a shared environment.
kosmetsas says: September 28th, 2007 6:54am
gmail for ever!
Productivity Zen - Today’s Top Blog Posts on Productivity - Powered by SocialRank says: October 1st, 2007 3:48am
[...] Turn Gmail into Your Social Brain [...]
Nora says: October 4th, 2007 8:33am
Don’t you hate getting social network notifications through email?! yuck! it messes my email account. i hate it.
It’s much better getting all social notifications to the desktop. With my 8hands, I can keep my email account organized and manage my social networks in a different platform.