credit: Gates Foundation

I was using Outlook today, reviewing my mail, and was thinking about how painful it was to review my mail.  There must have been about 10 concurrent e-mail discussions, with plenty of back and forth.  Simple date sorting for these notes left much to be desired.  Gmail sorts by disussion, and I hadn’t thought about it since it rolled out back in May ’04 (check out my quote in this PCWorld article), but it’s quite convenient.  Even my iPhone organizes my e-mail this way, and it just makes sense.  Outlook kind of supports this, although I hadn’t realized.  In fact, I’ll try it tonight.

But this also made me think of Facebook, and relevance.  Facebook sorts their default view, and considers how recently an update to the discussion is made, among other things, to determine the order.  I used to hate it, but I’ve grown to like it; it’s gotten rid of plenty of clutter in my Facebook page.

Google has also been experimenting with another sorting system that considers “importance” of a discussion based on the sender (among other things).  While my trial didn’t go so well, I’d like to give it another shot, because I think the idea is spot on.  Unfortunately, it could cause us to miss important messages from seemingly unimportant strangers, so it is not a replacement for perusing all of your e-mail.

What this all boils down to, really, is that it’s all about the conversation.  Individual e-mails and comments can be interesting, but discussions are a lot more interesting.  And the social web has really hit a homerun in recognizing this.  I believe more businesses need to start taking advantage of these kinds of discussion-based tools to bring their employees closer together, and to help drive innovation.  The conversations could be seeds of innovation.

Do you see a problem here?  How does Google get away with this?  I’m pretty sure that if I made this mistake at work I would catch all bloody heck.  But then again, I’m not Google.

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