Immersion, out from MIT Labs (so you know it’s gotta be legit), claims to provide a “people centric view of your e-mail life,” which, according to their website, provide “a detailed description of our personal and professional history” that’s “older than the web.”  

By logging in through a secure server through a GMail, MS Exchange or Yahoo! account, Immersion will sift through your e-mail history – it will take several minutes to sort through years and gigabytes of “metadata,” but the results are really cool.

I authenticated through GMail, which, unbelievably, I’ve been a member of for 8.9 years, which proves, like Immersion, you can get pretty good results while still beta testing.  After the numbers finished crunching (aka, “big data), here’s what my e-mail inbox looks like as a network:

This is the cluster that’s related to matt@recruitingblogs.com, which I map into my personal GMail, and obviously, that displays as a completely different network altogether.

It shows the way I’m connected and the people who matter most in my daily communications – and how they’re connected with each other.

It makes sense that Noel, Anna and Ryan (with apologies to my boy Tim, but we mostly use IM) are the biggest and most tightly clustered connections, since they are my coworkers and therefore, are responsible for a lot of closed loop, high volume communications.

But I can also see how my other connections know each other – which could come in handy for asking for introductions or establishing a connection for a candidate you’re already engaging with.

It also digs deeper, in this case, creating a visualization of my communication with Noel, my boss:

I can see the frequency of communications over time, the direction of that communications and the connections shared on every conversation, which, in aggregate, are a whole lot of e-mails.

Immersion is a pretty easy, pretty cool way to make those old e-mails meaningful and take a big data approach to an often overlooked, but most frequently utilized, of all social networks.

To try Immersion, click here. 

Tip of the hat to Kevin Wheeler for showing me this tool while in Helsinki for #HRTechTank.