MIT Immersion – A new way to visualize and think about our emails
There are over 100 billion emails sent and received per day – and for a single individual, there is an interesting graph and story behind the emails. But to begin, let us talk about how an e-mail works. A network of emails is a directed graph, where each node of an email is sent to various recipients who cannot send it back to the original sender without sending another email (another directed edge connecting the users). To visualize this, lets draw a sample of a email network:
This is not any different than a web page network. Each mail node represents a email address which is sending an email to another email address (edge). But there is an interesting story behind the emails that we send and receive. What if there is power in a email network such that it is easy to find emails/email addresses much easier, similar to a PageRank algorithm? MIT’s Immersion gives us a glimpse into what possibly affects email search engines – similarly to a web page ranking algorithm.
Each node in this graph represents an email address which gets larger depending on the emails sent or received by the particular node. Based on how large the node is, the more search results and relevant search results appear. What makes this meta data interesting is it also exposes certain characteristics of a strongly connected network. There are clusters that form based on mass emails/list servers and other methods of fast emailing and based on that, an email search engine can then find information about people in those clusters no matter how obscure an information may be. But what about valuable emails? Would emails from larger nodes be placed to higher value than a equally as relevant email from a smaller node?
Qualities of a email search result:
- Email popularity
- Post relevance
There are quite a few things similar in email search results as there are in page ranking on the web. Search engine optimization features such as posting relevant content, quality links (rather than quantity), and etc all can still play a key role in which emails show up first.
http://www.networkworld.com/article/2225224/software/great-visualizations–1–immersion–shows-the-graph-of-who-you-email.html