Social Bookmarking is cool, but what about email?

I'm intrigued by the fact that none of the big email providers (cough, cough...gmail) have realized that they are sitting on a gold mine. Well, a copper mine anyway. I would guess that some of the coolest internet content is passed through private channels. Some of it should stay private, but all of it?

Let's think about links being sent around via email.

I don't know about you, but I 'find' a lot of sites by getting email. Who hasn't sent a cool link to a friend? Why can't I tag people in my contact list as 'trusted' so that when they send me a link it automatically populates to some sort of personal linkpool where I have a bunch of links categorized by who sent them to me and some nifty ajax that allows me to drag them into other categories. (I'm not a fan of saving bookmarks locally.)

Furthermore, why couldn't I then (on a one-by-one basis) set those links as 'public' so that other contacts could come in and view what has been sent to me.

Add one more component and you have a sort of social networking scheme going. Allow the sender to choose some setting that allows people to find her through my link page. For instance, one of my contacts sends me a link to an an image of an Anselm Kiefer painting, I then set that as public on my page. Now suppose there is another contact of mine who (unbeknown to me) has a keen interest in Kiefer.

As far as I can tell, you now have two fairly important indicators for an actual real-world friendship--common interest (Kiefer/fine art) and common friend (me). Does that automatically make a friendship? Of course not. But it does hint at the possibility of one.

So allow some way for a person viewing my links to contact the person who sent me links they found interesting.

I think social bookmarking and social networking sites have a place in this world. But I think many people are still email centric. If I find a link that will be of interest to a friend, I'm going to send it to him via email. With a little bit of extension from an email provider, the non-sensitive portions of a person's email account could be selectively exposed in blog/bookmark form and serve as the foundation for larger social vehicles.