Indicating Messages' Urgencies and Importances

Social Web Incubator Community Group,


Hello. I have some ideas that I would like to share and discuss with respect to indicating messages' urgencies and importances.

With email, authors can indicate their messages to be of low, normal, and high importances. Similarly, with modern productivity collaboration software, authors can indicate delivery options indicating a message to be of high importance or urgency.

With means of manually differentiating mentions and public and private messages with respect to their urgencies or importances, users' applications could better determine whether, when, and how to notify and to potentially interrupt recipients (and when not to) upon receiving messages – in accordance with users' settings and configurations.

Providing users the means to differentiate their messages with respect to urgency and importance may involve extending schemas and vocabularies.

Any thoughts on enabling users to be able to manually indicate urgency or importance with respect to their public and private messages? Thank you.


Best regards,
Adam Sobieski

P.S.: A related syntax idea involves appending an exclamation mark to signal a matter of urgency or importance to a mentioned user:

@alice@example.com, @bob@example.com, and @charles@example.com! the meeting is rescheduled to Thursday.

Above, the author utilized an "!" to indicate that they felt that the message was particularly urgent or important for "@charles@example.com" who might have been preparing to present a slideshow at that meeting.