People Thinking about Managing Messages
There’s a lot of interesting thinking being done on managing messages
in different systems. First, here’s
(via this
post from Jon Udell):
One problem with moving from a single general purpose tool
like email to multiple special purpose tools is split focus. To
understand what I mean, think about RSS. RSS has reduced the number of
mailing lists I subscribe to and consequently reduced my email traffic.
Perfect application, except that now I have to remember to fire up my
feed reader in addition to my mail client. … What happens when there
are a dozen special purpose tools managing my workflow instead of just
a linear email list?
Phil is seeing the future here: messaging means more than just e-mail.
Weblogs, RSS, and web services are going to be first-rate citizens in
the world of messaging soon, if they’re not already. So how do you
manage your information now that it’s not all native to email? Running
“a dozen special purpose tools” is cumbersome to say the least.
This is exactly the problem
course, so it’s really exciting for me to see other people thinking
about these things.
Jon also quotes from his book ‘
Internet Groupware‘:
Messaging is at the center of all groupware activities. We
need to be
able to deeply customize our messaging environments. There are two ways
this can happen…
The two ways he gives are to add more power to web browsers, or make
messaging clients more programmable so they can be adapted by users.
I’d suggest there’s a third way (one that I think Jon would agree with
based on
allow for message routing and transformation at the server level, using
an intellegent proxy to help the user customize their message flow.
Note to self: Introduce Mr. Udell to Hep soon!
