Google Priority Inbox - The Start of Something Fantastic?

Google has launched a new feature, Priority Inbox, that sorts your Gmail inbox according to what it deems your most important messages. The importance is based on things like how often you read messages with the same keywords, from the same senders, and whether you are the only recipient. You can teach it to refine the effectiveness by indicating if a message is important.

This is awesome. Thank you Google for a feature I have been wanting and thinking about for quite some time. Take my behaviors and turn them into something of use to me. Sift through the deluge of information that is coming my way to bubble up what I want to pay attention to. Beautiful.

According to TechCrunch's review, there is a problem.

My biggest gripe so far is the fact that there’s no way to tell why a given message has been deemed important.

The why. Well now, that is an issue, isn't it? Feedback to make the system smarter won't work without the context of why. Is the worry that exposing the why will expose the algorithm and make the system susecptible to spammers and competitors?

Behaviors need to be contextualized for them to be truly understood. And that understanding is what can make these types of systems smart and useful.

Trust Networks - the Next Frontier

Now to really, really make this sing, I'd like to see this evolve to use not just social networks and frequency of communciations, but true trust networks. There are some people I really trust and want to make sure I am communicating with. Then there are others in my social circle that are not as important, information-wise. Allow me to prioritize my contacts into different levels of trust and let me see the truly most important information. Not just what they send, but what else they view and tweet and blog.

Then I'd really get some time back.