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

15 pointsgabamnml11 comments

It's funny how the whole page doesn't say what I get for logging in.

From the video I guess it shows me a graph view of the people? Why would I want or need that? Why is it a big deal? I haven't thought about it in depth but it sounds like a weekend student project. I have seen such graphs of many things, github commits, keyword clouds, etc, and not once did I have the feeling it's giving me more than being a nice effect. It's not a good way to do real analysis or work on daily (simple, boring bar charts for amounts or tree views for relationships are much better in my experience).

So, stepping aside from expressing my disappointment: Did anybody log in? What does it do?

For what it's worth, you're not alone in that feeling. People love to make graph visualizations, but I rarely see the practical benefit.

Mind you, a good deal of my professional life has been spent as a data modeler. I would love better ways of visualizing complex relationships. But graphing everything doesn't seem to help.

There is a demo next to the sign-in options.

Really haven't seen that one. That helped a lot.

I did. What it says on the tin. It's very useful, because I like directed acyclic graphs.

Even with the assumption that this app is perfectly trustworthy, it takes some nerves of steel to hit "Allow" when asked if the app can:

View, manage, and permanently delete your mail in Gmail

Create, update, and delete labels

Compose and send new email

Agreed. Aren't there any finer grained permissions they could have used?

It's great how this sort of experimentation isn't really practical anymore. We really need a different model for allowing these sorts of enhancements without compromising security

I like this Mac email app which has a different thread for each email address you communicate with:

https://www.uniboxapp.com/

Can't see any relevance to the core graphing meme here at all.

It's a "people centric mailbox". instead of a email-subject centered mailbox like most.

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