Ashish Kumar from Tekriti Software

SNARF is an interesting application from Microsoft Research. From Slashdot:

Microsoft Research recently released SNARF, the Social Network and Relationship Finder. It works in the Outlook email client to prioritize and sort emails based on the relationship to the sender and other characteristics of incoming email messages

Now, I don’t really think that it will be useful at all other than having its research value. I will, probably, never use such a software for my emails - which are probably the most important thing in my business - and will rather rely on other non-automated or semi-automated filters like Rules, Follow-up flags. We all go through all our emails (at least the subject and sender) anyways and then either reply to the emails immediately or flag it for reply later - depending upon the context, importance and whether we need to do some reserach before replying to that. I will rather rely on the ‘date filter’ rather than any other filter but, then, may be it’s just me.

Another example of some cool prototype coming from Microsoft Research with the ‘WOW’ factor but never useful enough to be converted to a full-blown product.

Having said that, makes me say again that all email providers have such a solid data of the users that a wonderul social network can be built using that - on doing a little analysis of the emailing patterns of the user. It can give rise to a lot of interesting applications around that - the implementation of such a network is going to be key and quite fun too. My guess is that, sooner or later, some small company will come up with something very cool in this space - if Google doesn’t come up with yet another product and keep it in perpetual Beta.