Why I should go to Gnomedex

Last night I received a tweet from Chris Pirillo. In the tweet, he offered a contest. Send him an email and tell him why you should get the free ticket to Gnomedex. So I wrote an email. Here’s an explanation about the contest from Chris. I’ve posted the email in it’s entirety below. If I win, I won’t be able to tell you until they say it’s ok.

Chris, Last week I was a regular seattleite – living in the city, working on the eastside doing php development, and with a healthy interest in social networking sites and microblogging. Then I learned about Gnomedex and my world changed. I suddenly wanted to be great. I needed to surround myself with the thought leaders of new media. I wanted to do great things. Gnomedex can enable me to do them. I know all things are possible. However, desire is not enough, and I’m going to need to take drastic measures to pay my bills _and_ go to Gnomedex. I may need to solicit myself on the streets. I fear this could lead to my imprisonment by a Jabba the Hut like entity and be forced to wear the gold bikini. I’m not in the best of shape, so trust when i tell you that no one needs to see that! Save me from the gold bikini! So in my best holographic voice “Please Chris Pirillo – you’re my only hope” -Andrew

Update: I’m going to Gnomedex!

Email Standards

I came across a site promoting “Email Standards”. It sounded like a good idea so I checked it out. What they are actually talking about is applying Web Standards to email, which is something entirely different. Web standards is about making web content available to everyone in a consistent way. This is partially achieved by writing well-formed valid (x)html documents to deliver the content, and keeping presentation separate by using CSS. So this group wants to bring this methodology that has rendered benefits to developers and users alike to the email experience. If the web development community is interested in using the existing email standards, they would see their work is already done. “Really? Tell me more!“, you say. Think about the word document you sent to your boss, or the photos you sent your friends. That was made possible by a technology called MIME, that every email client understands. Now imagine that file is an HTML document that you’ve designed using web standards, complete with unobstrusive javascript and CSS. Your customer clicks on it, and it opens in their favorite web browser. It displays perfectly. But what about displaying my HTML page in the message of the email? The fact that it works at all is amazing, and not in a good way. The incompatibility issue is not a small one. Lets say its 2017 (10 years from now), and the email vendors got on board with the whole “email standards” campaign of injecting HTML into email messages, and its been completed successfully. What does that get you? Not much. Because to move forward, all the email vendors standardized on xhtml 1.1 (the current standard of 2007), but in 2017 the standard is xhtml 5.3. If MIME is used to deliver the HTML content, this becomes a non-issue. So instead of campaigning to inject web standards into email, lets push for keeping the web standards on the web.

Forging Ahead with Thunderbird

The Chief Executive Officer of the Mozilla Corporation, Mitchell Baker wrote in her blog about the Thunderbird Email clients. To sum it up, Mozilla has realized that they haven’t been giving all the support Thunderbird needs, because it’s big brother Firefox has been getting all the limelight, and correspondingly, all the resources. So to give Thunderbird a fighting chance, a couple of alternatives were presented. However, I’d like to focus on the smaller, more visionary aspect of her posting titled “Broader Mail Initiative”. In essence, what do you think mail should be like in the near future? This is interesting. One of the obvious features is tagging. I’m a heavy Gmail user. I like the tag idea. Admittedly, it took a few days to get used to it, but it now seems much more intuitive. The folder paradigm breaks down when you want to put the message into more than one folder. While I like the Gmail client, I think their simple tagging implementation has something to be desired. The best implementation I’ve seen of tagging is done by the folks at del.icio.us, particularly the Bookmarks sidebar. When clicking upon a tag, it opens a sublisting of other tags. Now that’s cool. Now what if you could overlay your tags with your contacts? so while your message content tags have a blue tag, your contacts would be labeled with a green tag. Good contact management is hard to come by. Outlook is considered the standard, so people write their apps to have parity with it. This is the wrong approach. No one ever got noticed by being like everyone else. Gmail, once again, is a good example. They allow you to add and remove sections to a single contact dynamically, let you name these sections anything. That’s nice. It’s particularly useful when someone works for more than one company, and correspondingly they have separate contact for each company they work for. Another feature I’ve always felt was missing was centralized company information. For example, I used to work at GotVoice. I have several people from GotVoice in my contacts list. Currently, if I want to have the address information in each contact, I have to copy/paste it. I’d rather just link to it. So if I update the corporate address, they all get it. The beauty of web-based email is that its accessible from everywhere, and it’s always in synch. With a client like Thunderbird, as soon as it’s downloaded, you have to access it from that computer. This is the typical consumer case where POP3 is the default. Yes I know there’s IMAP, but it’s not typical. I’d be curious to know what percentage of non-technical email users are even aware of it. So given this scenario, how can you know how much mail you have on your desktop machine. Well, this is where a good publisher extention would come in. At its simplest, you could just auto-publish a report to a URL you specify, so you can read it via RSS from another computer, or even a handheld device. Like Firefox, a key component to success is extendability. So you’re gonna want things like anti-virus, digital identification and certification, and contact management. Integrating with web-services is another key. Some these are already implemented like Plaxo’s toolbar. Integration with Firefox is an advantage that thunderbird can exploit. Let’s say you had a friend who sent you a URL to look at. If you wanted to keep it, you have a “Send to Firefox Bookmarks” menu item, which would also a tag in thunderbird automatically. What about something that lets you tag part of a message, like a quote. This would be particularly useful in a long email. Just to be able to skip down to it, would be a great time saver. Maybe it’s the idea of mail that prevents it from growing? If we thought it differently like as communication, then we can use thunderbird to manage audio voicemail, webcasts, video chats, IM, SMS, and text email. Then we just search through our content that way? It’s too big for just me. What are your thoughts?