A lot of press is being written about Google and Yahoo’s re-interpretation of how email is the real social network and how they are going to bring Inbox 2.0 to their versions of web email clients. Well I hate to break it to you guys but I’ve had this so-called new email social network for years and I didn’t need some OpenSocial something or other to do it.

Unlike environments like Facebook, MySpace etc I can participate within a true social network of friends and business associates without fear of suddenly finding pictures or personal information appearing all over the place. This is because the people within my true social network have risen up the ranks of the network over time and as such have more of a trust factor associated with them that you will never find elsewhere. This is a true social network that is organic in its growth rather than so-called friending that has become the new norm of creating your social network.

For years I have had a hierarchy of email addresses and which email address a contact had access to in order to reach me was an indicator of my trust factor in the contact and as such where their place was within my social network. Even to this day I still practice this although the number of contacts has increased because of my need to widen my area of accessibility. I even do the same within my IM contact list but how I wish I had a way to individu8ally set my availability on a contact or a group of contacts.

Unlike Nick O’Neill who asks in Email Becomes Center of Social Networks whether one can be comfortable with the idea of your Inbox being your social network hub I actually prefer it over the current push to have us all resorting to ad driven friending circles. However the vision of this new Inbox 2.0 being pushed by Google and Yahoo worries folks like Michael Arrington who think it will be more driven by widgets and the such rather than any real improvements to our email handling.

The problem is; as pointed out by Mathew Ingram, that our email system is broken and even though Xobni and ClearContext; among a growing number of companies, are working hard to bring value to our Inboxes the fact is they are dealing with a system that can’t even put up a good fight against spam. Matt at Xobni might think that Inbox 2.0 is already here but I think that until the day comes where spam is truly controllable email will have a tough sell as a social network. This applies to any type of email client as well; whether it be GMail or Yahoo Mail or Outlook because spam doesn’t care where it is being delivered to just as long as it gets delivered.

For me using email as my social network hub doesn’t depend on integration with outside environments or the need to be widgetized in some fashion or other. Instead my Inbox needs tools like Xobni and some serious attention to dealing with spam. I can build my own trust factors - I don’t need some-one’s algorithm to tell me who I can trust. For me email and IM work as my social network but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t room for a lot of improvement especially if it is to live up to Dan Dodge’s idea of email as a social network.

There’s no need to re-invent something that already exists and slap it with fancy terms like social network or social graph. We already have been using the original social network for a very long time - it just needs some fixing up and new tools to make it better.

Listening to: Erasure - Light at The End of The World (Limited Edition) - Sunday Girl

[tags]social network, email, trust[tags]

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