There is a new breed of InformationClients emerging that I'm very excited about. They are all addressing, in different ways, that fact that email clients have been unspeakable abominations for the last few years. The email client paradigm was okay when it was the primary method of "net communication" and you got 10's of messages a day. In the current world of InstantMessages, 100's of emails and adhoc group forming .... they just don't cut it. We need better IntelligentAgents.
See also: http://gary.burd.info/space/entry-72.html, BlogSoftware, WikiSoftware
Information Clients
So here's my collection of all the emerging apps that I'm keepign track of and a brief blurb about each of them.
- Chandler
Especially interesting because it's OpenSource and backed by MitchKapor's money it's also technically interesting because it's using the Zope Object Database (ZODB) as the backend and is written in WxPython.
- Clever Cactus (was "Spaces")
Written by Diego Doval in Java this isn't as radical a departure from traditional apps as some of the other applications but you can download it and run it now, and Diego is using it as his primary client. It's going to be partially OpenSource and partially commercial.
- Emila
Written by StevenFrank from PanicSoftware Emila is an attempt at an AppleOsx clone of ZOE. It looks pretty cool but is in very early stages of developement.
- Feed on Feeds
Written by SteveMinutillo in PhpLanguage, it is a server side RSS/ATOM aggregator which has the capability to repost interesting items into a meta-feed. Cool.
- Haystack
- Written by a team at MIT this looks like the beginnings of the "personal semantic web". Potentially really exciting but no source yet.
- IdeaGraph
Written by DannyAyers in Java (?), IdeaGraph is easy-to-use software for creating visual maps of ideas, that can work with web pages, documents and images. You can also incorporate information from news channels, and blog, and lots of other fun things. It is a cutting-edge tool that uses Semantic Web technologies.
- Tinderbox
- Written by Eastgate Systems is less of an email, RSS, news aggregator and more of a personal content management tool.
- Quotient
- Written in Python and on top of Twisted it seems to be a mixture of ZOË and HEP. It'll be very interesting to see where this goes.
- ZOË
- Written by
Partial Information Clients or Converters
- AgentFrank
Written by LesOrchard in Java it's an implementation of a universal personal proxy. Its goal is to proxy everything you do online and be your memory and association engine.
- Dashboard
Written by NatFriedman (?) in Mono, dashboard is a piece of software which performs a continous, automatic search of your personal information space to show you things in your life that are related to whatever you happen to be doing with your computer at the time.
- HEP
- Hep Message Server ...
- nntp//rss
- Written by Jason Brome in Jave it, like HEP, is primarily a personal RSS aggregator. HEP is supposed to support NNTP soon as well, I'm holding out for IMAP though.
- Spring
- A universal canvas appliation.
Information Client Services
Perhaps these would be better called InformationConverters?
- ERA
- The Email RSS Aggregator. Scrapes RSS feeds and emails you the diffs, formatted for easy-ish reading.
- Info Aggregator
- An RSS to IMAP service. Software would be useful as a service NNTP would be more useful.
- Mail Bucket
MailBucket is an experiment in alternative methods of email management. For now its only feature is a public email-to-RSS gateway: forward your email to slurp@mailbucket.org and have your news reader pick it up at mailbucket.org/slurp.xml (where you choose slurp, having checked that it's not already in use).