As a sinner but devout follower of the Church of Tufte and general fan of information display and the like, I’ve been following the work of the Simile group at MIT for a while. Their Exhibit and Timeline projects are really interesting takes on complex visualization problems, well done.
Meet the latest work product from that group, Seek. Seek is a Thunderbird 2 extension (doesn’t work without modification on trunk nightlies yet) from David François Huynh to do faceted email browsing. It even includes a timeline visualization component. Check out the screencast, or just install the extension to give it a shot and play with it. This is experimental, early stage work, but I think it’s superb — it should I think spark all kinds of great discussions as to new ways of mining this incredibly rich data store we call email archives.
by ultimatum
06 Mar 2008 at 15:51
Doesn’t benefit me in any way but I still think its a great utility. Good job MIT’s Simile Group. Keep it up.
by bharuch
06 Mar 2008 at 17:54
That’s pretty sweet. going to give it a shot and see how it is over the next week!
by bharuch
06 Mar 2008 at 18:22
1st impression f/u: this would make tags a lot more useful; it would be VERY much more useful for me (several accounts + several folders in inbox) if it remembered the indexing it does, so when I click on a different folder, I don’t have to have it re-index.[i.e. index all folders once, and re-index on message change or new message received). But it makes the email sorting process much more useful.
by YvesL
07 Mar 2008 at 12:03
Nice finding. Tried it and it is very effective! It reminded of Zoe: http://zoe.sourceforge.net/ (main website is now down.) I hold great hope for the future of thunderbird, there is so much potential!