Someone in the comments to this piece suggests putting an IMAP interface on top of GMail.

What a FANTASTIC idea. You won't get the full flavor of the interface in some other email client, but you gain the benefit of any filters and labels you may have already set up. It also provides an nice way of making sure your data isn't locked away.

One of the programming ideas I've always had in the back of my mind is sort of a melange of Xanadu, Agenda/ Chandler and now, of course, GMail. I've sort of been planning this project for my entire life, pondering designs, thinking about functionality, basically doing everything but actually create the thing. Yeah, that's a problem, I know.

It occurs to me, however, that it would be easy to leverage SMTP and IMAP as the basic message store. Nothing in the spec for either of those systems requires the payloads to actually be email, so why not use it as a repository and source for metadata tagged documents?

I'm gonna think about that some more. It certainly makes portability easier, and also gives obvious places to break up the code into bite-szed pieces.

1:01:39 PM    comments ()  trackback []  

GMail feels a bit like Lotus Agenda. I've talked about Agenda before -- it's a freeform information capturing system, and what makes it interesting is the way it works with you to automatically classify and organize your information. The feature that most people remember is that you could have text in an Agenda record that said something like "the day after tomorrow" and it could parse the date out of it. It would tag the record with any derived dates you could find, and you could then use the date elsewhere.

With Agenda you could create views, which did what it sounds like -- it allowed you to create a custom way of looking at your stuff. If it was a time oriented view, you could see the records lay themselves out like a calendaring program. You could create a record that said, in entirety:

See Dentist day after tomorrow

and the record would automatically show up in the right place in the time view.

You could also define labels, and those labels could be automatically assigned by queries or keywords. So you could create a Dentist label, and all the records that had Dentist in them would show up.

And surprise, that's what GMail is doing. You can define a label, which also naively creates a view. You can then create a filter, which defines how labels are applied (and a few other things, but for this bit I'm focusing on the labels), which allows you to dynamically control how your data is organized. Records (emails) can be labelled any number of ways, and filters can be defined to match anything of interest.

Google could easily expand GMail into a calendaring app by following the Agenda paradigm.

Google may just beat Chandler to the finish line.

1:07:46 PM    comments ()  trackback []