A More Social Gmail

With little hoopla, Google just added a social feature to Gmail.

Launching Google+ in June, 2011 was a bold move for Google. Among the less obvious reasons: Circles, a central Google+ component, competes with components of other contact management systems Google maintains (Gmail Contacts and Google Contacts).

My product manager self was wondering what’s the plan for the three Google contact management systems. It’s a tough one. Mandatory upgrades, voluntary migration and re-integration, all pose technical, product and corporate challenges. Migrating millions of Gmail users is a project from hell. It might hurt Gmail users and dilute the value of Google+.

My bet is that because the social wave is here to stay, redesigning older email platforms around innovative social interaction concepts is inevitable. On Dec. 2009, I wrote “Hopefully, Google’s strategy considers meshing Wave and Gmail“. Google Wave’s team leader, Lars Rasmussen, has since joined Facebook, but others led Google into the so-called Emerald Sea. Now, on December 2011, Google takes another step in the social direction by making Circles appear as a sort of “smart labels” in Gmail (see Google blog).

Using social circles as email filters is more than an enhancement – it’s a path to correcting a traditional weakness of email in general. The weakness being that originally and inherently, email is a one-to-one thing, detached from social groups.

This statement often meets with puzzlement. But surely, engineers say, you can email a group of people? This is true, but hardly relevant. Precisely because we can email several people at once, we read more emails than we write. Email is primarily a reading activity, so it’s more important to read those emails we need. We decide which emails to read first based on social context. We need to read those emails we have made an obligation to read. This is why we need to read them in the order of obligation. This is the stuff that actual social relations are made of.

Try this: I, a consultant, need to daily view email messages from my clients. The main Gmail tool that helps me do that is search. I can type and search for each of my clients’ email addresses, one by one – not too practical for a daily task. Another option is to use an advanced “filter”. I can group my clients into a “Clients” label, then view the label. Not a biggie – if you’re comfortable with regular expressions; and if you’re willing to modify an OR [...] OR [...] OR [...] statement each time you win a client, or lose one.

(I actually do all that, on a regular basis. For me, it’s worth the trouble. But I wouldn’t bet on my system to be embraced by consumers and beat Facebook.)

This is where the new Gmail integration breathes new meaning into both Circles and Gmail. Using Circles as dynamic labels, one can make sure one sees first things first. Arranging your Circles by the relation of contacts to your life segments, you naturally create Circles for projects or life areas. You’ll never again miss an important email, and it’ll work much more predictably that the so-Google “Important” filter.

Using Circles as Gmail labels is still far from perfect, but it illustrates the idea that email messages* are primarily made of social interactions. The social relations producing them and emanating from them are their most important aspects.

(*The same goes for calendar events and todo tasks, and that’s material for another post. )

You Call This Extended?

Facebook just extended the list of family relation types – actually, doubled it. Users can now select any of 32 relations to other users.

When attributing family relations first became possible on Dec 5, 2010 (see post), it was limited to 16 direct blood relations. We now have 32 relation types, or 33 if you count the double inclusion of a “partner” (bug or feature?).

The newly added relations are those that are created by marriage, but are not “relaciones de sangre” – e.g.  husband, wife, and various in-laws.

Why is Facebook expanding the available types? This might give a clue.

The Case of the Man with Two Mothers

A mother I know was recently surprised to discover her son’s Facebook profile had two mothers listed. One was herself, the other – the mother of her son’s wife. It appears that her daughter-in-law’s mother wanted to express inclusion towards the profile owner, but didn’t have an appropriate option. The closest to son-in-law was son – and what son-in-law in his right mind would refuse a request from one’s mother-in-law?

That a woman in her 50′s, who is not a Facebook power user, would insist on naming in-law relations, illustrates the variety and urgency of needs Facebook has on its plate since it brought the “Family” cat out of the bag.

The Case of the Distant Relative

But relations can be more distant than son-in-law. How distant is distant? I was recently invited to a girl’s Bar Mitzva (the female form is actually Bat Mitzva, celebrated at 12, often cutified by the almost-nearly-teens to Bat Mitzvush). My connection to the Bat Mitzva girl: she is daughter of sister of husband of daughter of my sister.

That’s a five-step, non-blood relation. Pretty distant, you say? Well, it might be distant for you, but perhaps one treasures five-degrees-apart relations more if one’s family, like mine, was cut in half by a holocaust.

The kid’s mother now wants to designate our relation in Facebook – but she can’t.  Too distant to indicate as family as per the current version.

To me, this isn’t a trivial technicality. Although her family lives abroad, in Europe, the Bat Mitzva event took place in Israel at significant effort and cost. It was worth it, because there’s a “roots”  sense to celebrating a Jewish rite of passage in Israel, among family. So, you can see why seeing a distant uncle from Israel, who went to your Bar Mitzva, on your mom’s wall, can mean a thing or two. it can help you recall your own roots that are partly in the Old Country. This is how many call their homelands, and the emotional charge is nothing like “my Mom lives in Idaho”.

Coming from the Middle East, I wonder whether my brethen (in the extended sense)  are happy with the Facebook family relationship types. Are 32 types enough to describe a family? a tribe? a hamula – a clan that “often extends beyond lineage“? an ahl? What about other world kinship systems and “all our relations“?

And what would Dunbar do?

PS – My latest Facebook friend calls me in RL “uncle” – but it’s the wider, African tribe sense. In fact, he’s but the son of brother of an ex-girlfriend, to whose wedding I went last week. And this December, I’m looking forward to a visit from a friend, the first wife of the deceased (second) partner of my ex-wife. We live on different continents, yet we’re both members of a closed Facebook group we call The Tribe, a reflection of a real-world group spanning three continents and including 30 people who date back many years. But don’t get me wrong – we’re just friends.

Curb Your Utopias

“Social networking ‘utopia’ isn’t coming” is the title of a post by Chris Taylor, Mashable San Francisco bureau chief, written especially for CNN.

Taylor doubts the visibly glowing future represented in Facebook’s global spread map, and suggests that regardless of the light fantastic rushing across network lines, there are hardwired limitations to social networks:

Turns out we’re hardwired to get along best in tight groups of no more than 150, and have been since we were living on the African savannah. Armies take advantage of this hardwiring, as do the smartest corporations, not to mention wedding planners.

The Dunbar number is certainly going places. It’s just 6 months since Dunbar’s NYC op-ed. Exactly a year ago, in May 2010, I wrote about the significance of the Dunbar number for social networks in The Product Guy blog:

Is Facebook stretching the cognitive boundaries of friend management?

Perhaps the current decline in social mood has opened us to thoughts about smaller, more closed gardens. Perhaps, after MySpace is sold for about 5% of its 2005 valuation, we’ll let go of utopias based on the wisdom of crowds, and as Taylor notes, concentrate on the wisdom of our smaller, chosen tribes, our stronger connections:

Instead of being lumped with the village we happened to be born in, as happened for most of history, we each get to construct a virtual village that suits us — cobbled together from family, old friends, our best co-workers and mentors, and that like-minded spirit you met on vacation one time.

Maybe. One lesson I would like to take from the demise of the “crowd wisdom” utopia is that the point is in following, supporting, not replacing, what we happened to be born into for the most of our neurological history. Great work could be done – when we learn more about our social nature and accept our limitations.