

Immersion: a people-centric view of your email life - mwc
https://immersion.media.mit.edu/viz

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jamesaguilar
This is really cool, and also kind of sad. It shows me who I've grown close
with in recent times, but it also shows who I've lost to distance and changing
circumstances. :'( I guess that's just life but it's poignant to see it so
starkly lit in colored globes and slopes of graphs.

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pumainmotion
Hi, I'm one of the team members who has worked on this project. If you have
any questions, I'd be happy to answer them.

There was another thread on HN about Immersion a few days ago [1]. Do check to
see if any questions you have were already discussed there.

Thanks!

[1]:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5994203](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5994203)

~~~
HarshaThota
Any chance of supporting Outlook/Exchange or Yahoo Mail?

~~~
pumainmotion
We're looking into adding support for Exchange sometime soon.

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Sealy
Thats a very good concept. Is there a way of developing it into a localized
client? These days (and no offense to you) users would rather know they have
control over their own data.

~~~
rajatkhanduja
Yes, such a client would be cool, useful and more trustworthy.

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chrisballinger
Is the source of this available? Not that I don't trust you to run a service
without security holes, but I'd prefer to run this on my local machine.

~~~
ideonexus
I felt the same way; although, I did try out Immersion anyway and it was cool,
but I prefer the NodeXL plugin for excel. It doesn't do Gmail yet, but you can
do everything Immersion does and much much more on your local machine without
having to hand over account access to a third party:

[http://nodexl.codeplex.com/](http://nodexl.codeplex.com/)

Here's a write-up I did on it in 2011 analyzing the Science Online Conference
tweets and my Facebook friends. You can see it's very robust and extensible:

[http://ideonexus.com/2011/01/17/social-network-mapping-
fun-w...](http://ideonexus.com/2011/01/17/social-network-mapping-fun-with-
nodexl-and-science-online-2011/)

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Groxx
Neat stuff. I think I'll pass on running it on my own account, but it's really
cool that it's possible.

This could be really neat with a 'play' button to run through e.g. a year's
span through the entire data-set, to show how groups rise and fall in
significance. Unfortunately it's _far_ too slow to really support that :(

~~~
pumainmotion
The 'Play' button is something we'd already implemented in a previous
prototype, but it wasn't ready enough to be included in this release. It will
show up in a future release though. :)

Also, by _slow_, were you referring to the actual rendering of the network
when you adjusted the time-slider? Or the initial loading of the network
itself? Because the former is actually pretty fast (if you are using Chrome),
and the latter is something that we've tried to optimize as much as possible,
but there are limitations.

~~~
Groxx
The latter. Have you seen this tool?
[https://github.com/mbostock/d3/wiki/Force-
Layout](https://github.com/mbostock/d3/wiki/Force-Layout) Try e.g. the 'build
your own' demo, and add a few hundred nodes. There are quite a few demos out
there using this layout and canvas, SVG, etc, that perform extremely well.
Otherwise, further in the past I've seen some that offload calculation onto a
webworker pool, some of them handling several thousand nodes (not all tightly
connected, but still) without noticeably delaying the page. But I can't find
those at the moment :/

Without profiling, I'd guess the biggest speedup is from the Barnes-Hut
approximation [1], which is simple enough conceptually that you might even be
able to implement it by hand (if you have control over your current layout
algorithm).

[1]:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnes%E2%80%93Hut_simulation](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnes%E2%80%93Hut_simulation)

edit: hm, and it's noticeably quicker in Chrome than Firefox. That's a little
surprising, given that I'm running the nightly build, and it's usually
competitive :/

edit2: ah, you are using that. strange... I wonder where the slowdown is.

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mwc
It's not nearly as interesting, but if you're (understandably) reluctant to
connect your Gmail account, the demo data sets out fairly plainly how much can
be established just from the to: and from: fields[1].

[1]
[https://immersion.media.mit.edu/demo](https://immersion.media.mit.edu/demo)

~~~
acadien
As someone who TAs hundreds of students a semester and has thousands of emails
to/from students, not to mention half a dozen mailing lists with thousands of
emails and senders/recievers... I am terrified to see how this connectivity
chart will turn out.

Also at 20 minutes and counting, I am actually I'm more curious to see _if_ it
will ever finish not when.

~~~
pumainmotion
We've had professors who have over 350,000 emails and years of email history
use the system, and it has handled that pretty ok. So, don't worry about the
network being over-populated. We do limit the number of nodes that the network
shows initially. You can adjust that later if you wish to do so.

As for your time counter of 20 mins, that is a bit odd. Has the first version
of the network not loaded for you? If you are on the /viz page, just refresh
it. If the server has fetched at least the first batch of metadata, then the
corresponding network will load immediately, and the rest of the fetching will
happen in the background. Please note that we are also having heavy traffic at
the moment; so the fetching process could be a bit slow.

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MikeTLive
Cool visualization. I use exchange at work and gmail at home. I'd like to see
both in a local macos app. I guess a the simplest alternative is a local
client that can talk to my exchange server to get my headers and address book
then package it all up for processing.

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iamkhush
Nice tool, great insight about the people I am/was connected to.

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foofoobar
Scary to see how my work and private connections and social groups can be
reproduced just by my email headers..

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kruul
Of all my browsers, IE rendered the font on the MIT page the best. Why is it
so ugly?

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cup
Im always cautious about these systems which are labeled as secure but don't
provide any details as to how they're secured. Id love to throw my account in
and see what it has to show but im cautious.

~~~
pumainmotion
Just FYI, in case you weren't aware of this:

When you log out you have the option of deleting all of your metadata, and we
also provide you with the link to revoke Immersion's access to Gmail.

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bussiere
it seems to have some problems with my gmail account and just want to go five
years ago and not further. Maybe i have to much emails for him ...

