Pattern Recognition

One of the most common mechanisms of communication we have today is email, and yet I don't think we're taking advantage of it as much as we could. But judging by the development of improved mail clients from MIT (Haystack) and IBM (Remail), that's about to change.

A feature in Remail called Thread Arcs deserves some attention. The experts are using a new type of visualization to give the user more information about his email without even reading it.

By taking a quick look to this small graphic, it is possible to determine if an incoming message is a reply to an existing conversation in which we're really interested, a new thread of discussion

To quote some of my comments when Slashdot ran this story:

"Eventually the email client could determine how to filter or sort an entire thread based on your previous actions. Say for example you always archive "broadcast" emails that are sent by a given sender, the visualization of this thread would look "bushy" (to use the authors notation) and combined with the sender it would provide a clear trigger for the archive operation, leaving direct emails from the same person untouched by the operation."

"The beauty of this approach is the possibility of people realizing the multitude of repetitive patterns existing within their emails and taking advantage of this knowledge."