Mitch Kapor's plans for innovative email/PIM
I just read about Mitch Kapor's plan to develop an "Outlook Killer" and got excited.
I am interested in this project as someone who's been involved with wireless email projects for the past few years (though it is difficult to be innovative due to the walled-garden nature of mobile operators - I'm with Kevin Werbach's views on open spectrum, though his paper oversimplifies the licensed versus non-licensed debate). I saw that Mitch mentioned synchronisation with PDAs, but I hope he has a more holistic view to the whole email synchronisation (multi-device) problem that has been railroaded by RIM's absurd patent (which is basically a re-statement of how Exchange/MAPI already works). I hope to participate in this project - at least by offering ideas, though it seems like that's what they've been dreaming up for the past year.
The use of RDF in the project looks encouraging. I can well imagine where it will lead. I wonder what thoughts have gone into filtering. This was a key idea we put down in the Zingo portal for Lucent - using intelligent means to filter emails so that the user can hide information, especially in the mobile context. To perform intelligent agent-based filtering, we need to have information to hand that tells us something about the significance of the incoming email. I am not sure if this has been researched, but it is worth looking into the semantics of email messaging. I have often heard directly from different people that mobile email is not a particularly appealing prospect without the means to control what might amount to a very intrusive bombardment of disruptions. Like many things in wireless, users may be very intolerant of having to handle relatively complex situations - like reading, filtering and processing email - in a confined manner, be that a small device or a non-conducive environment. The people who think these issues through may well lead the way in successful mobile messaging.
9:19:39 PM 
|
