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        riddles >> general problem-solving / chatting / whatever >> How much impact do your emails have?
        
(Message started by: amichail on Nov 16^th, 2006, 2:33pm)

Title: How much impact do your emails have?
Post by amichail on Nov 16^th, 2006, 2:33pm

Suppose you have found an interesting link that you would like to tell others about. So you might send an email to a few friends with the link along with some commentary.

But what happens after that would be a mystery. In particular, you would not know the extent to which they will forward your email, and whether others receiving forwarded messages would forward it further, and so on. In other words, you would have little clue as to how much word of mouth has resulted from your email.

Consequently, I believe it would be useful to have a web service that would allow you to measure the impact of your email, to see just how much word of mouth occurs.

Such a web service could work like this:

* You would send the initial message through the web service to your friends. They would receive your email along with instructions explaining how to use the service to forward the email further to others.

* The service would show you the transmission tree of your message in real-time as it grows. If the tree does not seem to grow quickly enough, you might send your message to some more people whom you suspect will propagate it further.

And of course, such a service could allow you to examine all propagation trees in progress in real-time, whether or not you have any involvement in those propagations.

Title: Re: How much impact do your emails have?
Post by towr on Nov 16^th, 2006, 3:06pm

I can name three reasons I wouldn't use such a service.
First of all, I hardly ever send or forward people stuff.
Second of all, I'm not vain enough to care about my impact on the web.
Third of all, I like my friends enough not to give their email adresses to god knows who running a webservice.

Also, it sounds a bit of a bother the way you describe it. The service could simply include a "click here to forward" link in the mail; which would bring the recipient to the webservice ready to forward the message. Rather than give all sorts of instruction. Just keep it simple. I could program it in a few hours, if our sysadmin would only have fixed my database somewhere in the last few months (I'm gonna have to bother him about again one of these days).

Title: Re: How much impact do your emails have?
Post by amichail on Nov 16^th, 2006, 7:57pm

on 11/16/06 at 15:06:26, towr wrote:

Yes, it might be hard to get people to enter their friends' emails into the system. A well respected company such as Google would have an easier time with a service such as this.

Title: Re: How much impact do your emails have?
Post by amichail on Nov 16^th, 2006, 9:11pm

on 11/16/06 at 19:57:06, amichail wrote:

Yes, it might be hard to get people to enter their friends' emails into the system. A well respected company such as Google would have an easier time with a service such as this.

Actually, you could do this without entering emails into the system. All you have to do is request a link to include in your email. When someone receives an email that he/she would like to forward, he/she would enter the link received to get a new link to enter into the forwarded email.

Title: Re: How much impact do your emails have?
Post by towr on Nov 17^th, 2006, 1:06am

on 11/16/06 at 21:11:58, amichail wrote:

That makes things complicated again. Many people won't be interested in getting counted, so most of your forwarding-tree will be lost. It's just so much easier to only press "forward" in your mailprogram rather than first get a new link, and then forward.
There's possibly a few things you can do with html/images/cookies, however some mailprograms do their best to stop all automatic tracking.

Title: Re: How much impact do your emails have?
Post by amichail on Nov 17^th, 2006, 1:35pm

on 11/17/06 at 01:06:25, towr wrote:

The link could show you something interesting, such as where you are in the forwarding tree. Also, you have an incentive to follow this protocol to get feedback on your forwarding impact.

Title: Re: How much impact do your emails have?
Post by Sameer on Nov 17^th, 2006, 1:42pm

I want my forwarding impact to be as low as possible, cos I don't want to forward anything. I even delete forwarded mails without opening them even if they came from my family!!! I think you can say I am saturated from chain mails...

Title: Re: How much impact do your emails have?
Post by amichail on Nov 17^th, 2006, 2:02pm

on 11/17/06 at 13:42:22, Sameer wrote:

How is forwarding an email any worse than telling people something through other ways?

Title: Re: How much impact do your emails have?
Post by Sameer on Nov 17^th, 2006, 3:23pm

on 11/17/06 at 14:02:04, amichail wrote:

How is forwarding an email any worse than telling people something through other ways?

I don't know what kind of forwards you get, but most of the time I have stupid chain letters like "get 500 dollars by forwaring this mail , tracked my msn" and what not... I think I get about 1 in about 1000 forwarded mail that has at least some useful information.

On the other hand if I am forwarding stuff, I would do some information I found interesting and I think my friends would think it to be interesting. As for e.g. if I run into an article on carbon nanotubes that is interesting and innovative, I won't forward it to anyone except two people who I know are interested in them.

My point was that the signal to noise ratio has deteriorated drastically in mails that are forwards...

Title: Re: How much impact do your emails have?
Post by amichail on Nov 17^th, 2006, 4:19pm

on 11/17/06 at 15:23:24, Sameer wrote:

This sounds like spam to me. Use a spam filter.

Title: Re: How much impact do your emails have?
Post by Sameer on Nov 17^th, 2006, 4:39pm

Haha yes, I do use spam filter, but what if your friends and relatives started sending spam... ;)

Title: Re: How much impact do your emails have?
Post by amichail on Nov 18^th, 2006, 12:53am

on 11/17/06 at 01:06:25, towr wrote:

How about initiating a forwarding tree by sending an email with a link like this:

http://forwardthislink.com/?url=somecoollink.com

When someone clicks on this link in the email, he/she sees a web page with two frames. The bottom frame shows the web page somecoollink.com. The top frame contains a hyperlink with a mailto:. Clicking on this link opens up the user's email program with the subject and body filled in. The link in the body is modified to include the new node:

http://forwardthislink.com/?url=somecoollink.com&node=..

The user just needs to enter his/her friends' emails before forwarding the message.

The top frame could also show the forwarding tree growing in real-time.

Title: Re: How much impact do your emails have?
Post by towr on Nov 18^th, 2006, 4:40am

on 11/17/06 at 13:35:22, amichail wrote:

The link could show you something interesting, such as where you are in the forwarding tree. Also, you have an incentive to follow this protocol to get feedback on your forwarding impact.

I think a lot of people don't care about either. So you'd loose them in the statistics unless you make the threshold low enough, preferably automatic.

Title: Re: How much impact do your emails have?
Post by towr on Nov 18^th, 2006, 4:44am

on 11/18/06 at 00:53:30, amichail wrote:

How about initiating a forwarding tree by sending an email with a link like this:

http://forwardthislink.com/?url=somecoollink.com

When someone clicks on this link in the email, he/she sees a web page with two frames. The bottom frame shows the web page somecoollink.com. The top frame contains a hyperlink with a mailto:. Clicking on this link opens up the user's email program with the subject and body filled in. The link in the body is modified to include the new node:

http://forwardthislink.com/?url=somecoollink.com?node=..

The user just needs to enter his/her friends' emails before forwarding the message.

The top frame could also show the forwarding tree growing in real-time.

That might work. Although, being tracking-averse, I'd just pick out the "somecoollink.com" part, and wouldn't touch the "http://forwardthislink.com/" part. Not to mention I hate frames.

Title: Re: How much impact do your emails have?
Post by amichail on Nov 25^th, 2006, 5:01pm

Taking this idea further, you can use it to create a discussion forum on-the-fly to discuss that link.

The discussion could occur in the web service.

To post to the discussion, you would use a number given to you by the service that designates your position in the forwarding tree.

To filter (i.e., moderate) the discussion with respect to yourself, you can prune out posts from people in various subtrees of the forwarding tree (not just your descendants but also ancestors or unrelated nodes of the tree).

You can also control who sees your posts to this discussion by referring to various nodes/subtrees in the forwarding tree.

So, basically, this isn't just about tracking forwarding of a link. It's also about bringing together people for discussion on that link and allowing them to post comments anonymously but yet in a way so that moderation could be done easily.

Title: Re: How much impact do your emails have?
Post by Sjoerd Job Postmus on Nov 28^th, 2006, 12:29am

My opinions on forward-email in general.

if ( subject ~= /^fwd/i )
{
spam.
}
(not sure if the regex is proper)

Yes, I know this can be evaded using an extra character at the start. But, then they're going into enough trouble to forward it, so I don't mind seeing it in my inbox. Still, I rate it before I open it.

And, seriously, I don't care about the "looky what I found!"-emails either. Forward or not, it's spam that's trying to control what I like.

But I do think that the forward-stuff might be fun for all the folks who DO forward. A lot of people I know do. But, there's a rule I have that keeps most people from doing it: You forward, I block. Yes, it's cruel, but who cares :)

Title: Re: How much impact do your emails have?
Post by Sameer on Nov 28^th, 2006, 10:37am

Hmmm that might not necessarily work. I used Outlook, yes you heard me right. Along with spam filter I have extensive complicated rules set up to direct mails into individual folders. Looking just a FW: may not be enough, 'cos you need to forward things that are important too.
E.g. in work email if somebody sends me "this is broken"and I know it will affect 10 more people I will forward that mail to all those 10 people. In your case, you will miss the important mail!!

Title: Re: How much impact do your emails have?
Post by amichail on Jan 10^th, 2007, 3:08pm

I've done some work on this link forwarding idea.

See:

http://forwardingtree.com:8180/ForwardingTree/ForwardingTree.html#valis.cs.uiuc.edu%2F2
http://forwardingtree.com/