Full Circle Associates

Ryan Singer got me thinking with his post about EmoteMail , as did his commenters about this piece:

EmoteMail is an augmented email client that inserts webcam snapshots of the author beside each text block as it’s entered and, perhaps more interestingly, shades each block to show how much time was spent typing it.

Is it valuable to see how much time the author spent on paragraph one versus paragraph three? Or to see that the message was banged out in a flash?

Those questions aside, this Media Lab baby neatly demonstrates how visual design in next-generation apps can go beyond “presentation” and contribute to the semantics of the interface.

Forget email for a second. What would be the impact of this sort of interface in any web text environment: blogs, wikis, forums, etc.? The image of the writer is familiar in some web forum environments and elicits everything from deep praise to horror from users. Would we read more carefully if we noticed how much time someone put into writing something? Would we scorn them? Are our writing pace/styles too diverse for such a metric to count?

How do we build in more indicators of attention and intention in text based communication?