Personal Map: Automatically Modeling the User's Online Social Network

The Personal Map provides automated visual overviews of the user's online social network, which can be used in lieu of user-generated contact lists. We expected that past email behavior would provide a fairly accurate approximation of who users care about, and how users implicitly cluster or organize contacts in their minds. A user test of the Personal Map indicates that people found it both compelling and accurate. We further integrated our underlying model into the new email outlook form, and got mixed results from a user study.