Last night I dreamed I was GMail. OK, I realize that's probably not the most flattering thing to admit about yourself, but what can I say? the night was hot, and dreams came easy and strange. Actually, it wasn't GMail, but a more interesting and sophisticated system, one that unified all the message-like things that we send and receive these days.

The basic insight was that one of the root problems of e-mail is that it's still too much of a slave to its underlying protocols and the simplistic queuing metaphor. In e-mail, messages once composed are queued for sending, the transfer agent negotiates the connection with the destination computer, and the message ends up in a second queue via the delivery agent at the other end. In its simplest form, this queue is your inbox. But, I dreamed, with a set of nice, discrete, robust (after nearly 40 years, it's robust) mechanisms like this under the hood, why tie the user experience so closely to it? Why not allow the lower layers do their work—as they do in the larger Internet—and think of the upper layer instead as an adaptive organizational system.

Alan Kay advice to systems designers was to "start with the hardest thing first." Seems to me the hardest thing is dealing with spam—or, at a close second, dealing with deluge. So you start with a filtering system. The system should have both Bayesian, learn-as-you-go filters (that ones that are so effective in recognizing spam) as well as a set of easily created, configured, and edited rule-based filters. The trouble with these filters in existing systems is that they're just hard enough to work with that I end up with a great pile of them that were useful last year but no longer have much utility. The useless ones linger 'cause it's inconvenient to remove or recycle them. So the core of this new system would be an easy and elegant way of managing filters. GMail's "filter messages like these" is a start.

Next, as messages enter the system, they get converted into a flexible unified message object format. There's no advantage anymore in keeping messages as plain header+body text files. A message object would have a smarter representation of basic header info (who, when, what), but also know about its relationship to tagging and filtering systems, and maybe be able to keep track of its own history of engagement with these systems. The real advantage here is that you could start treating all kinds of messages—email, RSS, forums, IM, twitter, what have you—the same way. Note that the message objects themselves would largely keep track of themselves, as opposed to just being files in a queue.

Having all your messaging systems unified in a single representation means you could start treating them as a larger ecology, rather than just yet another queue of disparate things you need to be checking. So, having unified all sorts of messages coming into the system, you would notice that some of them land with a large bump and want to sit there until dealt with, while others are like streams that you stand in the middle of and watch what goes by. Conventionally, e-mail is the former and things like RSS and twitter are the latter. But I don't think this distinction actually works so cleanly in practice. By having all the messages in the same system, you could set it up to display some of them as tasks, others as streams to watch, some to archive, some to throw out—and this could be dynamic and adaptive, not pre-ordained. They could even begin to relate to each other, not just as slots in a queue, but in a higher-level way.

A system designed like this, as a collection of smart message objects interacting conversationally with a set of filtering processes, could be set up to look just like a conventional inbox and/or RSS feed. But I think it could be a whole lot more flexible. If you could slice it up based on who the sender is and/or what the content is, rather than just the technology, it might be much more adaptable to the way we actually get through our workday. As well, since the advent of mobile Internet devices probably means we'll never have a vacation without email ever again, you might be able to dial down the thresholds in response to what you're up to at a given time. Hanging out on a beach? Maybe let some of the streams through, but no e-mail attachments, please.

That's my dream. Actually, that's a lot more detail than there was in the dream. But he jist is the same, I think. And now, having spilled all that out, I can have breakfast.

I hereby release this idea to the universe. Anybody want to pick it up?

– JMax?, summer in Vancouver, July 2008

... --AndrewWilmot, Fri, 04 Jul 2008 21:22:27 -0700 reply

I feel the need to provide an intelligent comment to this after the idea has festered in my mind for a while, but for now I'll just say that the opening paragraph both scares and amazes me... I can't say I've ever dreamed of being gmail, but then I just haven't truly lived...