Mapmail: restructuring an email client for use in distributed teams

In this paper we examine a solution for coping with information sharing across location, time zone, and organizational boundaries. Email, a principal tool for such collaboration, relies on textual and/or numeric sorting, filtering and presentation by subject, data, sender addresses and/or time. Typically, spatial properties of presentation are limited to filtering incoming messages into folders. We have been designing for a different form of social expressiveness. mapping email by geographic region. We describe an example of how an email client was extended, preserving its original familiarity and functions, but augmented with new features expressed in a spatial map arrangement. We describe how this approach exemplifies a general technique we call.application surrogates.. We discuss application surrogates in terms of emerging.mashup. approaches to application development.