February 10, 2010

Is E-mail Social?

Feb. 10, 2010 at 01:27 PM | By Kate Malone | Comment Count

A few months ago I noticed that Facebook suggested I should friend the property manager for the house I was living in at the time. I was surprised to see his name show up on my Facebook account because I couldn’t think of anything in my profile to connect me to him. I mentioned this to a friend of mine who pays much closer attention to the ins and outs of Facebook than I do. She told me that it was probably because Facebook got his contact information from my email account since we email frequently.

Then, this morning I logged into my GMail account to see a new feature called “Buzz,” which seems to be similar to a Facebook news feed/Twitter hybrid in that it aggregates all of your friend’s latest activities on Google Reader, Flickr, Twitter and GChat statuses. Google Reader has had a similar feature for a while, where you can see which links your friends have “liked.”

I understand why Google would create this tool and I think, for the most part, I’ll enjoy reading my friend’s posts. However, just like seeing my property manager’s name on my Facebook account, seeing this Buzz feature on my email has thrown me a bit. I have a very organized and labeled email inbox and it seems distracting to have Buzz constantly alerting me of every move friends make. One of my friends just changed her GChat status to “lunchtime,” which is something I wouldn’t mind seeing on my GChat friend list, but absolutely not something I needed to open my Buzz inbox to see. I would expect this type of thing in something like Google Reader which is based on blogging and sharing, but in my email inbox? To me, my email inbox is much more personal than my Facebook or Google Reader.

While most of my email contacts are indeed my close friends, there are definitely people like my property manager who I have an active but distant relationship with. I need to be in contact with my landlord at least a few times a month, but I don’t care what he thinks about the latest New York Times op-ed. So will we see email and social media start to come together? Will the two eventually be seamless? From its latest move, it seems that Google sees email as an extension of social media and that email contacts constitute a social network.