Comments on: Seriosity - What The Hell?

by: Matt

Tue, 10 Feb 2009 17:58:42 +0000

If Google has 800 emails per day for the average developer the problem should be solved by simply restricting who can send mass email within the company. Seriosity certainly doesn’t solve things. When your boss emails you, he should not need to attach a currency to it to get you to pay attention.

It’s possible that a Fortune 500 company has installed this and used it, but then, there are outliers for everything. I think the near-universally bad reaction to Ted’s attempt to force people to use Seriosity does not bode well for it.

by: Erik Bethke

Tue, 10 Feb 2009 08:21:52 +0000

There was a great Harvad Business Review article about applying lessons from guild leaders to business… the gist of the article was that they were surprised to learn leadership didn’t matter - but it was the game systems that mattered.

They discussed this email system there and that some Fortune 500 company paid for this system to be installed and loves it…

Google I hear has about 800 emails per day for the average developer…

-Erik

by: Batman

Fri, 23 Jan 2009 14:52:43 +0000

sorry buddy, you’ve dropped to 5th on the google search

by: John

Thu, 15 Jan 2009 23:45:24 +0000

I cannot wait to eat a big bowl of multi-grain Serios!

Who is with me?

by: F. Randall Farmer

Thu, 15 Jan 2009 01:44:16 +0000

Ted has rescinded his position and apologized.

by: Tim

Wed, 14 Jan 2009 07:41:04 +0000

To kind of summarize and/or rephrase my post above, I think the root cause of the heated responce is a) the sender of the email’s reputation, and b) how the email was phrased.

For example one might have chosen a group, say a linkedin group and asked them to participate in an experiment with Serios as a group. Or simply propose the idea and asked, “What do YOU think of this?”

by: Tim

Tue, 13 Jan 2009 18:42:52 +0000

I got this email too, and sort of laughed in a, “WTF?” way at it. I was glad to see this post and the Terra Nova thread come up and open it for discussion.

What struck me really is the almost arrogance of it at a personal level. I’ve very briefly met Ted a few times, and honestly he’s always struck me as aloof and even egotistical. I definitely got the, “I am a busy guy and too busy to chat with you because I don’t know you” brushoff a few times. I suppose I should have wrapped a 20 dollar bill around a note saying, “Hey I’m working on a Multiverse based educational MMO with a student team as well - maybe we should chat!” Then we could have conversed on this shared topic.

And as a side note, references to Oprah made me think that if Ted married Oprah she’d be Oprah Castronova. What a name! Ted Winfrey just sounds like a New Age music composer’s name.

by: Mike Sellers

Tue, 13 Jan 2009 13:52:51 +0000

Any purely algorithmic approach to this is destined to fail, because how people value email is a social issue — even in the corporate context– not a technical one. Similarly no solution where the sender determines value will work, because the importance of an email is much more dependent on the recipient’s view of it (and clearly this will vary from receiver to receiver — someone may be *dying* for sushi, to use Katherine’s example, in which case the status of the sushi lady is pretty important, even though it’s noise to most everyone else).

I have to admit I’m boggled by the idea that no one on the Seriosity team thought through these issues and questions, and that they apparently don’t have ready answers for them in their implementation or on their site.

Personally though I’d love to see a case study of a large high-tech company using serios with all their email, just to see them begin to understand how quickly people will game and otherwise subvert the system. This is the kind of issue that’s commonplace in MMO economic design, and shows how, even without swords or lasers, such issues are popping up in contexts that we wouldn’t normally think of as mainly social, let alone game-related.

(BTW Matt, as of this morning, your blog is the #3 result when you google Seriosity. Congratulations.)

by: dave mcclure

Tue, 13 Jan 2009 11:09:59 +0000

matt: late to the party, but i think the solution is to make the point assessment more passive based on other heuristics & cues than active. not exactly sure at first glance how to do this, but message frequency, directionality, # of recipients / cc’s, and/or perhaps information from other social networks could provide enough information.

basically, the idea is to let some algorithm score an “importance factor” to any email (based on the recipient’s perspective), and correspondingly increase / decrease priority via some UX highlights.

i don’t think it’s impossible, altho sounds like they’ve chosen a non-optimal solution (initially, anyway).

by: Katherine

Tue, 13 Jan 2009 00:39:11 +0000

I don’t think it’s that bad, in principle, for intra-office stuff only. The person who forwards on FW:FW:FW: Lololololol this is sO FUNNY you gUyS would have very few serios to go between messages, so you could set a filter to auto delete messages from them with below a certain number of serios attached, and only get the work-related ones. The amount to divide would vary according to each person you received email from, however. It clearly needs work.

The main person I see using the “High Importance” setting in outlook at my workplace is the receptionist. Who uses it for everything. The main email she sends? THE SUSHI LADY IS HERE FOR THE NEXT 10 MINS (this message is ranked as high importance.) Needless to say I soon set those to auto-delete.