Posts by alex

Image by Kansir via Flickr As we continue to develop Baydin, I have been very surprised at how many people complain about “missing features” in Windows Search and the Outlook 2007 search bar, like the ability to search for messages from a specific person or to find only attachments.  As it turns out, Windows Search and Outlook Search include those features (and a bunch more), but Microsoft borrowed a page from Google and hid them...

As I mentioned during my talk at Defrag 2009, the best corpus of sample email data we have is the email data dump that the federal government released after Enron’s collapse.  The corpus includes over 400,000 real email messages from Enron employees, and it’s ripe for analysis. The data is available on the web in a ton of different formats, but none of them are especially conducive to just picking them up and starting analysis,...

I presented the following slides at Defrag 2009 last week in Denver. I wanted to take a quick look at the different use cases for email vs. microblogging and make some predictions about how the email experience will be changing over the next handful of years.  To do this, I performed some analysis on the Enron email corpus and a half-a-million-message Twitter corpus to illustrate the differences in the way people use these services....

Sunday’s New York Times included a column under their Ping business technology section that made a pretty convincing argument that the web and mobile technology are stamping out serendipity.  Instead, they argued, the opportunity to discover new things are being replaced with the opportunity to engage in groupthink – to discover only the new things that a carefully selected group of people (Facebook friends, Twitter followees, or...