I see your point about all the logins, Anna.

I guess I'm working with the tribe concept here because when I was at Clemson, I regularly got 200-400 emails a day, and this before the spam glut really hit.

So I'm harping on this thing about email being a dying hangover from command line interfaces. I'm even starting to suspect that email is more like "Push" than most things, and I'm an old listserv fan from way back. I hated Usenet. Some of my best experiences online have been on plain old majordomo listservs.

But I'm wanting to take email nonlinear and move it out of the realm of "push." I want to displace chronology from the center and find an interface that makes people the center.

The earthlink spam filter they want me to set on the highest level (and I refuse) is the same basic principle as tribe, but without people in the center. Basically you select the only people you are willing to receive email from.

As Emily Dickinson said, "A Soul Selects her Own Society..."

So I figure, leave email as the big catch all bucket. Let it run in the background and I'll clean the silt out every so often. Tribe notices show up in regular email boxes anyway.

But when I go into tribe, I know there will be NO spam. I know there will never be 200+ messages. And I know every message will be from people I have hand picked, people I would rather talk to, rather than whoever it was who sent me the email last, pushing the folks I want to talk to up off the screen.

It's a reverse filter. On email, it catches everything, and you filter the spam OUT. On tribe, the interface is the filter, and you chose who gets in in the first place. And you can set layers of attention, what they mean by trust networks. So your closest network, and messages from those folks, are the messages you check first, then a layer outward, and so on.

That puts valuable relationships where they belong, in the center.

You see a guy in here, Jeff Moreland? He is one of my very favorite people on the face of this earth. And he'd be the first to tell you I am a terribly absent-minded email correspondent. He knows better than most people. I was always overwhelmed, despite my best intentions. But on here, we are talking, discussing things, without all those distractions like before.

Soon I will make a personal, invisible and private tribe called "Family," and start bringing my relatives in. This will be a way to separate talking with them out from the spam circus as well.

I see blog updates and news feed readers as a way to monitor and keep up with official correspondence and group news (even, shhh, one-to-many), while trust networks and layers can put relationships in the center. These two things, hand in hand, could displace email, is what I'm thinking.

Chris