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It's Merlin Mann's worst nightmare: a full inbox with hundreds of e-mail messages visualized as a bunch of hairy, swimming microbes.
When Carolin Horn set out to find a metaphor to visualize her e-mail she turned, naturally some would argue, to microbes. The result is a very nice Flash app that displays the status of each e-mail by the size, shape and velocity of microbes.
The project is part of Horn's MFA thesis "Natural Metaphor For Information Visuzalization." Here's how she explains the project:
>The emails are categorized in six person groups: family and friends, school, job, e-commerce, unclassified, and spam. For example, all emails I have received from my advisors and fellow students are in the category school. These categories are represented by six species, which are different in color and form. For instance, all received emails from school are blue and look a bit like croissants.
>How an animal looks and moves depends on the condition of the represented email. The age of an email (when it was received) is shown by the size and opacity of the animal. For instance, a new email is big and opaque, an old email small and transparent. The status of an email (unread, read, responded) is shown by two animal attributes: the number of hair/feet and velocity. An unread email is hairy and swims fast; a read email has less hair and does not swim so fast anymore; a responded email is hairless and barely moves.
"An unread email is hairy and swims fast." Indeed. Which is why we recommend you [get a handle on your e-mail][2] before you end up in bed with some nasty bug.
The project code was written by Florian Jenett and it's [available for download][4] if you'd like to play around with it.
[via Waxy][3]]
[3]: http://www.waxy.org/links/
[2]: http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/2007/07/tips-to-curb-yo.html
[1]: http://carohorn.de/anymails/
[4]: http://carohorn.de/anymails/Anymails_010_20070801.zip
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