There have been a number of articles recently about a presentation by Microsoft researcher Eric Horvitz, who spoke at a technical conference about work he had done to prove or disprove the old "six degress of separation" saying: Supposedly, everyone is just six connections away from everyone else.

Horvitz and his colleagues at Microsoft Research studied billions of MS Messenger conversations from 2006 to 2007 to see if everyone really is connected to everyone else with just six "hops", and it turns out the number is actually around 6.6 - which is incredible! You're just six IMs away from Kevin Bacon!

Anyway, I was intrigued with Horvitz's work, so I did some digging and found a post about him at MSDN, and then THAT led me to an application Horvitz helped develop, Outlook Mobile Manager, which turns out to be a very cool little plug-in for desktop Outlook that uses adaptive learning to figure out when to forward messages directly to your mobile device:

"OMM reads each e-mail, identifies who sent it, considers numerous aspects of the content and structure of the message header and body, and determines if the user can wait until later to see it or would prefer having a time-critical message while away from a computer. Only the most urgent mail is sent to the user’s mobile device."

OMM requires Outlook, obviously, but it doesn't require Exchange Server; it can work with a POP3 account or Exchange. This seems really interesting to me, and when I gave it a quick try here at the office, it was easy to set up and start forwarding stuff directly to my phone.

Anyone going to try it out and report back?