On Twitter, and the Bigger Picture of Next Generation Mail Clients

The other day, a colleague, Orkun, from the office posted a blog entry in which he claims that I cannot be linked to. I guess he didn’t make his research thoroughly because here it is, a place on the Web that I call home. Granted, I have not posted anything for ages, and yes, the content leaves a lot to be desired for, but, nevertheless, it exists.

Anyways, the reason why my name came up in that blog post was me likening the Twitter system to basically no more than an IRC system on the Web. I have to confess that this is not my personal observation. Very recently, Scott Hanselman posted RFC: OpenTweets – Why is Microblogging centralized? and in that article, and in the following comments, the same analogy was made, and I picked it up from there.

In essence, the post by Scott, discusses an even more open and distributed framework as an alternative to the centralized service supplied by Twitter today. While the whole Twitter concept has not really made a very large impression on me, I am all for creating open, distributed systems that increase people’s communication and productivity.

My approach, however, is a little bit more old styled. For example, I read my RSS feeds using Thunderbird, but I am not using the built-in RSS feed support or the Forumzilla extension, because I like the manage my feeds the same way I manage my emails. Thus, I have developed a short PHP script which parses an XML list of feeds, fetches them, and pushes them to an IMAP server/folder of my choice. This way:

1. I have a single place where all my RSS feeds entries are stored
2. The body of the emails in those IMAP folders load the actual page in the message pane
3. I can track read/unread status from all my clients (at work, at home, on my laptop, etc.)
4. I can tag any feed entry using the tagging support of my mail client (and server, of course.)
5. I can move any feed entry around

Similarly, my approach to other services like Facebook mini-feeds/status-updates or Twitter tweets is one that is very client oriented. If I can manage these services using my mail client, like if posting a tweet is as simple as sending an email, or responding to someone’s tweet was as simple as replying to it, I will be much happier.

Of course, all this leads to what the next generation of mail clients are going to be. I would like them to be things that manage email perfectly (without that it is a definite no-go) and also manage all the other torrent of news, snippets, status updates, feeds, blog posts, requests, invitations, notes, todo items, etc, etc. Of course, by then it won’t be called a mail client anymore. And, of course, it is unimaginable (for me at least) that all this data will be stored on the client, thus we similarly need newer unified protocols and servers that support them to achieve this. Right now, we have IMAP (love it) for email, WebDAV/CalDAV for calendaring, SyncML (too disconnected) for contacts/calender/todo/notes, and nothing else for the remaining bits. I say we need a single protocol to handle all this. I know that there already is some software out there that tries to do something along the lines of what I have said above, eg Chandler, but I think we need to think bigger than that. We need to build a future proof client/server system that can handle all the things we have now and whatever might be thought of by the next generation of Web applications/programmers.

Implementing such a thing would be an Exchange Killer -Squared (Exzillasq anyone?).

Anyone interested?