i202 Fall 2009 School of Information, UC Berkeley

I don't know much about Kwaga (http://kwaga.com/) except that it's a tool that performs semantic analysis on your Gmail in order to fill your calendar with dates, remind you to follow up when someone hasn't replied quickly enough, and warn you if there are passwords or other sensitive strings in a message.  None of this should disturb me--after all, mail is inherently insecure--and yet there is something unsettling to me here.  It runs your Inbox through its servers to do the semantic analysis, although it assures you that it would never share any of your email statistics.  T

(No, there's no need to verify Bob's ID at the next class.)

Having received a misaddressed email from a classmate recently, I was delighted to see this new Gmail feature from Google Labs.  It might be just the ticket for solving what they refer to as the "Got The Wrong Bob" problem: even a unique identifier like an email address doesn't help when misapplied.