This is not the Pony Express

On Tuesday I was tasked to track down information, and insure the appropriate procedure was followed for application change requests; unfortunately, the information was trapped in exchange server that I could only access through my Outlook 2002 client. There was this wealth of information exactly where I thought it was in one place - I had seen it, read it, noted it, replied to it, and talked about it just a few weeks early, but yet it was strewn about, unindexed, without a reg-ex search, and lost in the shuffle between every conversation I've had recently.

After a deep breath and a few random clicks on the menu bar I gave up; one by one I cycled through my mess of an inbox and other related folders. Outlook forces you to put your email into these silos of inbox, sent, drafts, etc...but really when it comes down to it each one is a message where planned, to me, from me, or about me. They are my messages, and they exist in this entangled web of response/receive protocol. This is one of the features I love about gmail - no folders just labels, and messages can have more than one label. They are easy to add and easy to see. Gmail enables me to see my mail in these chambers but I can knock them down, move them around at my will.

Outlook seems unwilling to change it's three panel view, and it has remained stale and bulking over the years; however, there is an interesting start up xobni (inbox backwards) that has a great Outlook plug-in. It has an index search, statistics about usage, and a intuitive sidebar with contacts and threaded conversations. Xobni is a great start, and has truly engaged a thoughtful discussion about the direction email is headed. I'm ready for the next step where email starts to shed its mail persona and take a more evolved collaboration approach.

My company has recently released an internal social network. Getting to the site is a pain - passwords are entered multiple times and pop-ups appear in every corner of the screen - and it doesn't have much beyond my basic info. The idea is to encourage networking - creating this online community; unfortunately, they have failed to realize the best social network they have is already well established in email. They already have my network - my contacts, their contacts, how often I reach out to them, and about what; they have my abilities - where I've been staffed, my role, and duration. Why can't I add a picture, interests, capabilities, or papers to my address card? Everything is there waiting to be used, waiting to be labeled, placed into threads, to-do's, reference...and it's just fading away when the email hits the 180 MB storage limit and it's not indexed. It's a sad day when  knowledge based company that depends on ideas let's them fall of the map into a personal archived oasis.

In its current iteration, Outlook is not the right client for this, but maybe one day. Gmail takes a great integrated approach, chat and email in one, and continues to set the pace. I'm tired of waiting for someone to do to the email client what flock did to the web-browsers. I want to see the weekly newsletters become an rss feeds, an integrated blog tool , document exchange, live search, group conversations, chat, and remove the silos. I want to organize my email vertically across conversations and horizontally across topics and projects. I don't have calendar events to be a group of emails sent out to the attends - I want it to be an event on the server that people are invited to, can see, and maybe update.

It's time to take control of my email.