In order to assist employees to wade through their jam packed inbox’s a company called Seriosity has come up with an interesting solution. Inspired by the monetary trading systems and digital currencies used in MMOG (massive multiplayer online games) such as World of Warcraft the creators of Seriosity decided to put a value on email. This new corporate email application is based on Serios (email dollars), which is the name of the digital currency that users assign to each email they send.

The theory being that the more value (Serios) that a user attaches to a message, the more important they feel it is that the recipient read the message. Employees can then easily prioritize messages based on the value senders attach to them. In addition when you are sending a message to someone you can see what the average value attached to the messages they receive are. So if someone has 4 Serios attached to a message and you have something you want them to read immediately you would attach 10 Serios. There is a great article on C-Net in which they go into more detail about the how the system works.

In principle, the idea of allowing others to help prioritize your inbox sounds great, but weather that works in an organization is yet to be seen. And for those with economics backgrounds you are correct to assume that this system is very similar to carbon trading programs. Rather then allowing the worst polluters to purchase credits from other companies Seriosity will force the worst office spammers to bribe peers with coffee and sweets if they want to keep their emails at the top of their fellow employees’ inbox’s.