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December 30, 2006

The Affinity Between You and Your Gmail Contacts

Affinity could be defined as "a close connection marked by community of interests or similarity in nature or character" (WordNet). I've always complained that Gmail doesn't show statistics about your messages, your contacts, but I've just discovered a cool way to find out something more about your Gmail contacts.

If you open this XML file (you should be logged in), you'll discover a list of Gmail contacts sorted by affinity and a value for each contact. The value could be calculated by taking into account how often you write to each other or maybe even deeper knowledge of personal interests.

12 comments:

  1. That's a good news, but I do not see any room to alter the affinity levels, thus it is not useful.

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  2. That's quite an interesting find......
    One thing - it's under the video domain.....
    another thing - it has someone that just is sending out a newsletter that i have never written to as the highest affinity.

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  3. Well, it's a read-only value. The file is on video.google.com because it's used when you email a video.

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  4. Damned! My boss & co-workers on Zorgloob comes first, before my (girl)friends!
    ... I should change that in 2007.

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  5. This is an excellent piece of information !

    I dont understand why this isnt listed under the gmail domain though.

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  6. great! Interesting stats it shows... The 2 most active mailing lists I am subscribed to (but rarely post to myself) show up first. How do you get to all this, if i can say, "hidden" stuff?!? this blog is worth every word in diamonds!

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  7. That's really interesting! It seems to be pretty much spot on for me.

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  8. Somebody should create a Greasemonkey script (and an Opera Userscript) that uses that to make it easier to choose contacts while sending emails on Gmail.com .. At the moment, we only have autocomplete, but i would like to see a list infront of my eyes.

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  9. Google is the master at consolidating all data from their services via Google Account, which crosses over to all the services. I wonder if other factors are taken into account also like calendar, docs & spreadsheets, etc.

    It would be nice to be able to adjust or rank my contacts manually. so those show up first. "contact rank" heh.

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  10. Seems that it add up 1 point for each mail received or sent to a contact.

    I wonder how gtalk chatting is evaluated and how decay is calculated

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  11. hi was nice information.
    can you give me any sort of information/code that describes how did you successfully pulled the data as in XML format in the same post(If you open this XML file (you should be logged in)?I actually want to use the same technique in my application where when the user submits his/her username and password i should be able to generate the same as you did(in the XML).Waiting for your reply.Thanks in advance.

    Email:nambiar13@gmail.com

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