Immersion: a people-centric view of your email life | Hacker News Reader

Immersion: a people-centric view of your email life

immersion.media.mit.edu

69 pointsmwc23 comments

This is really cool, and also kind of sad. It shows me who I've grown close with in recent times, but it also shows who I've lost to distance and changing circumstances. :'( I guess that's just life but it's poignant to see it so starkly lit in colored globes and slopes of graphs.

Hi, I'm one of the team members who has worked on this project. If you have any questions, I'd be happy to answer them.

There was another thread on HN about Immersion a few days ago [1]. Do check to see if any questions you have were already discussed there.

Thanks!

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5994203

I don't trust you with my emails. Can I run it locally or something like that?

Any chance of supporting Outlook/Exchange or Yahoo Mail?

We're looking into adding support for Exchange sometime soon.

Thats a very good concept. Is there a way of developing it into a localized client? These days (and no offense to you) users would rather know they have control over their own data.

Yes, such a client would be cool, useful and more trustworthy.

Is the source of this available? Not that I don't trust you to run a service without security holes, but I'd prefer to run this on my local machine.

I felt the same way; although, I did try out Immersion anyway and it was cool, but I prefer the NodeXL plugin for excel. It doesn't do Gmail yet, but you can do everything Immersion does and much much more on your local machine without having to hand over account access to a third party:

http://nodexl.codeplex.com/

Here's a write-up I did on it in 2011 analyzing the Science Online Conference tweets and my Facebook friends. You can see it's very robust and extensible:

http://ideonexus.com/2011/01/17/social-network-mapping-fun-w...

Currently, the server-side code is not public. But we might open-source parts of it in the future after adding some more features.

Neat stuff. I think I'll pass on running it on my own account, but it's really cool that it's possible.

This could be really neat with a 'play' button to run through e.g. a year's span through the entire data-set, to show how groups rise and fall in significance. Unfortunately it's far too slow to really support that :(

The 'Play' button is something we'd already implemented in a previous prototype, but it wasn't ready enough to be included in this release. It will show up in a future release though. :)

Also, by _slow_, were you referring to the actual rendering of the network when you adjusted the time-slider? Or the initial loading of the network itself? Because the former is actually pretty fast (if you are using Chrome), and the latter is something that we've tried to optimize as much as possible, but there are limitations.

The latter. Have you seen this tool? https://github.com/mbostock/d3/wiki/Force-Layout Try e.g. the 'build your own' demo, and add a few hundred nodes. There are quite a few demos out there using this layout and canvas, SVG, etc, that perform extremely well. Otherwise, further in the past I've seen some that offload calculation onto a webworker pool, some of them handling several thousand nodes (not all tightly connected, but still) without noticeably delaying the page. But I can't find those at the moment :/

Without profiling, I'd guess the biggest speedup is from the Barnes-Hut approximation [1], which is simple enough conceptually that you might even be able to implement it by hand (if you have control over your current layout algorithm).

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnes%E2%80%93Hut_simulation

edit: hm, and it's noticeably quicker in Chrome than Firefox. That's a little surprising, given that I'm running the nightly build, and it's usually competitive :/

edit2: ah, you are using that. strange... I wonder where the slowdown is.

It's not nearly as interesting, but if you're (understandably) reluctant to connect your Gmail account, the demo data sets out fairly plainly how much can be established just from the to: and from: fields[1].

[1] https://immersion.media.mit.edu/demo

As someone who TAs hundreds of students a semester and has thousands of emails to/from students, not to mention half a dozen mailing lists with thousands of emails and senders/recievers... I am terrified to see how this connectivity chart will turn out.

Also at 20 minutes and counting, I am actually I'm more curious to see if it will ever finish not when.

We've had professors who have over 350,000 emails and years of email history use the system, and it has handled that pretty ok. So, don't worry about the network being over-populated. We do limit the number of nodes that the network shows initially. You can adjust that later if you wish to do so.

As for your time counter of 20 mins, that is a bit odd. Has the first version of the network not loaded for you? If you are on the /viz page, just refresh it. If the server has fetched at least the first batch of metadata, then the corresponding network will load immediately, and the rest of the fetching will happen in the background. Please note that we are also having heavy traffic at the moment; so the fetching process could be a bit slow.

Cool visualization. I use exchange at work and gmail at home. I'd like to see both in a local macos app. I guess a the simplest alternative is a local client that can talk to my exchange server to get my headers and address book then package it all up for processing.

Nice tool, great insight about the people I am/was connected to.

Scary to see how my work and private connections and social groups can be reproduced just by my email headers..

Of all my browsers, IE rendered the font on the MIT page the best. Why is it so ugly?

Im always cautious about these systems which are labeled as secure but don't provide any details as to how they're secured. Id love to throw my account in and see what it has to show but im cautious.

Just FYI, in case you weren't aware of this:

When you log out you have the option of deleting all of your metadata, and we also provide you with the link to revoke Immersion's access to Gmail.

it seems to have some problems with my gmail account and just want to go five years ago and not further. Maybe i have to much emails for him ...

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