Most people are more dependent upon a handwritten shortlist of the key people they work with and talk to than they are to their electronic address books, according to Lili Cheng, group manager of the social-computing group within Microsoft Research.
To translate this idea into digital terms, Cheng and her team have come up with a concept called Inner Circle, which automatically maintains and updates a list of about 20 people with whom one is emailing and instant messaging the most. Inner Circle is not really a breakthrough in computer science as much as it is an exercise in cultural anthropology. Many people have folders today for their most important contacts, but they often drag emails in one by one. "That's just kind of silly for a human to constantly be managing," Cheng said.
[Source: CNET]
Here is a map of a months worth of email interactions for a very large project team... everyone that touches the project is included if they sent/received 5 emails that month to someone else in the project.
http://www.orgnet.com/email.html
Posted by: Valdis | April 10, 2005 at 05:01 PM