The BBC is reporting on the dark side of digital utopia, revealing the underground behavior that has emerged in SIMS Online. Alphaville has generated child prostitutes, sadomasochists, mafia thieves and shadow governments. Lesson in life: give people freedom and everything will not be all cheery, no matter how hard you try to configure it that way.

More from Microsoft Research…. Gina Venolia (brilliant & awesome designer) is working on people-centric threading for conversations in mail. I can’t wait to see what this looks like.

Publication on the topic: Understanding Sequence and Reply Relationships within Email Conversations: A Mixed-Model Visualization