Is it possible that I’m thinking about the same stuff this morning as Fred Wilson and Jeff Pulver? Fred just put up a post titled The Biggest Social Graphs and Jeff just posted Social Media is changing the Face of Communications. Well – ok – yeah. We’re getting together tomorrow, along with a couple of other friends including Matt Blumberg and Tom Evslin to talk about this stuff. Paraphrasing a recent email from Fred – “Email is Dead, Long Live Email.”
I’m completely baffled. Yesterday, Saul Hansell of the New York Times had an article titled Inbox 2.0: Yahoo and Google to Turn E-Mail Into a Social Network . Saul’s article is short and punchy, but excruciatingly obvious to anyone that has been playing with email for a while. The amount of “social network” information contained in a typical email user’s data store is enormous. Google and Yahoo are sitting on huge amounts of very interesting email data that to date they’ve done nothing with. According to Saul’s article, this is about to change (with the subtle insinuation that “Facebook should watch out.") ...