Inspired by Shrikant Joshi’s comment at TechCrunch I decided to put some thought to how email can be “more contextual”.
When I think of “contextual”, I imagine a local, distributed, on-the-spot sort of thing. I imagine embedded.
So my idea of “more contextual”, on these few minutes I put myself thinking about it, is a web application that would allow me to centralize all my text communication into one place.
To date, we have Gmail + Gtalk. You bind together two forms of textual communication into one place, go through your chat history as you would through your regular email, that sort of thing (plus google/yahoo groups).
Now throw into that your blog comments, your flickr comments and mostly any kind of text stuff you drop around on the web everyday. Imagine those being entered through an embedded “drop box” that, besides leaving your text on the website you are, direct it back to your email, saving information about the website, allowing replies to come in and go back as if you were responding to a normal email (coComment generalized and integrated to email).
This idea of a embedded drop box for entering text throughout the web allows for an extension of the Gmail+Gtalk concept in which, instead of centralizing the applications into one place before integrating them, centralizes the incoming and responding, while pulverizing the outgoing.
That would be “contextual” to me.
February 22, 2006 at 2:18 am
;) Totally agree with you, Helder.
The web yesterday was about content. The web today is about communication. But we tend to forget that communications is not merely about incoming and outgoing messages. It is also about context.
The centralized incoming and the responding, that you have mentioned, can be connected by only one element. Context.
I think you will agree with me if I say that we need is a centralized repository which maintains context and not simply a mash-up connecting one application to the other.
Interesting post. But you still haven’t answered my question. Why do we think that eMail is the be-all and the end-all of communication? Have we really become THAT addicted to eMail, that we don’t see an alternative? That to me is the biggest failure we can ever face.
February 23, 2006 at 1:56 am
I don’t quite understand precisely what you mean by “context”. Would you care to explain that a bit please?
And on the alternative part. Well, I don’t think email (as we have it today) is the be-all and the end-all of communication, but I think any alternative to it must extend from it, broadening the concept, which just by use will keep the same name.
I sure think there must be something that will eventually come up that is revolutionary and all, but as it must involve some sort of incoming and outgoing text, and as it will be a *substitute* for email, it might as well just keep the same name.
This same thing I described in the post is definetely, by today’s standards, “email”. It is not then, a matter of “not seeing an alternative”, but calling it the same name.
July 13, 2009 at 4:19 pm
[...] A more contextual alternative to email « Helder’s Tech Stuff [...]