[ExI] META: Nice mailing list ideas

[Bryan Bishop]

On Wed, Mar 17, 2010 at 5:01 PM, Emlyn wrote:
> http://tieguy.org/blog/2010/03/17/lists-parties/

That was interesting. On a completely tangential, coincidental thread
of reasoning, I took the liberty of generating a tag cloud of what I
talk about with other people across all mediums- web, in person, over
the phone, yes even over smoke signal.

Here are the results:
http://designfiles.org/~bryan/meetlog/tags.html

With information extracted from carbon copy headers, and tag clouds
from each user based off of words used in their messages (etc.), we
could compute (1) their immediate social network at least when it
comes to emails, and (2) an extended social "tribe" that more or less
has people that "should probably be their friends". There would
probably be a weighted tag cloud somewhere in there, too.

Links in the footers of each email could allow a user to send out
"invitations" to their friends, or their friends could already be
subscribed to certain tags and get those threads anyway. To get a
resemblance of a normal mailing list, you could even have your
associates still pull in particular threads to your inbox based off of
"historical relation" (i.e. you tend to talk with x, y and z
frequently therefore their threads get pulled in, unless of course you
start downmarking tags you don't like, etc. etc.).

Anyway, this would be fun to experiment with, especially with the
volume of data I already have just for myself. Maybe I'll implement it
as a layer on top of current mailing lists?

Also! Look out for my iphone app that should be released on the 20th
of this month. It does all of this except for real parties. The app is
called "Hurricane Party". I'll probably youtube demo it soon.

- Bryan
http://heybryan.org/
1 512 203 0507