Courtesy of Philippe, this appeared on the Chandler Design mailing list a couple of weeks ago

Kids say e-mail is, like, soooo dead

Choice quotes:

“To hear the teen panelists tell it, that means e-mail will be strictly the domain of business dealings.”

“All of the panelists said that they’re constantly looking for the next, new thing to stay current with friends; and they often use different social networks and tools to keep up with different sets of people.”

“It’s a problem for teens–you’re like losing out on some of your friends if you choose just one,” he said.”

It’s fuddy-duddy email versus hip and cool Facebook / MySpace, or MyFace to be fair and brief.

The most common response to the latest pronouncements of email’s demise is that well, sure, IM and MyFace are great for hanging out, but teenagers don’t “actually need to do anything”, do they? Wait until the brutal multi-tasking reality of adulthood hits them, then they’ll be doing crazy things like emailing themselves to keep it together. Oh and by the way, My Space sure is ugly.

I’d like to take a moment and back away from the epic battle that is brewing between social networking and email and try to understand what we mean when we say email.

If you clicked on the link above, you’ll have noticed that the definitions are pretty generic. They essentially boil down to: Communicating text messages between people using computers.

But really when we talk about email we mean much more than that. Email is an experience, more specifically, email an experience mediated by the software we use Outlook, Apple Mail, Thunderbird. Gmail. Yahoo Mail. Hotmail…Pine.

What is unique about the email experience?

1. Email can be both point to point or broadcast and everything in between.
2. Email is asynchronous
3. Email is discrete, though we often wish it were more discreet.
4. However, individual email granules can link together and grow into discussion threads.
5. Most important, email comes to you, you don’t go to it. In other words, email is centralizing mechanism, a way to build a communication hub around yourself.

These 5 simple qualities of email combine and re-combine to explain our relatively recent explosion in productivity and the birth of the information worker.

In inexperienced or careless hands, email can be easily misused and abused to the point of becoming an impediment to productivity, a facilitator of misunderstanding resulting in all-around bad feeling and flame wars.

In malicious hands, email is a downright nuisance.

In skillful hands, email can be worked and manipulated to achieve symphonic heights of well-moderated discussion, informed decision-making, seamless collaboration and and parallel processing.

1. The ease with which you can move between point to point and broadcast communications means for any given conversation thread, private side conversations can be had, announcements can be made, new people can be looped in, existing participants can drop out.

2. Asynchronous communication de-couples dependencies between individuals, freeing us all to move forward on multiple fronts, on our own time.

3. Discrete messages means that email can be managed and processed as individual tasks, messages, appointments, etc. Discrete messages also means that email is easily archived and categorized for retrieval.

4. At the same time, email threads, organized around topics pave a natural pathway for follow-up, discussion and progression forward.

5. Centralization means that the Inbox has become the ’source of truth’ for people as far as what they need to know, what they need to keep on top of, what they need to follow up on, what they need to do.

Try that with IM or MyFace. For extra spellcheck fun, SMS it all the way.

If this is what we all understand as email, email is never going to die. Email has become a way of work and life for people. Email may die as a means of social interaction, please send all jokes, obscene pictures, youtube links and spontaneous outbursts via SMS or MyFace. I’m not so attached to existing email protocols or existing email information models. But the essential character of email as expressed above, as a way to “actually get things done…together” has only begun it’s trajectory towards predominance as the paradigm for how we make progress through work and life.

To spell it out, this is the vision of email we’ve been banking on for Chandler.

As enamored as I am with email, I am not making a Luddite’s case for rejecting newfangled modes of communication. My belief is that the text message and MyFace phenomenon serve different functions than email and are addenda to the ever-growing spectrum of internet-enabled social interactions. And I don’t believe that the divide between MyFace and email is teen / hangout, aka fun versus adult / business, aka boring.

There is a place for MyFace in the ‘business’ context, whatever that may mean and there is also a clear path for the web-facing side of Chandler Project to grow into an instantiation of MyFace in the ‘actually getting things done, together’ context. Follow-up blog post to come on that topic…

Mitchell Baker started a conversation about the future of email at Mozilla, looking for people to participate in “a new vision of mail”. OSAF should be engaging in this conversation, looking for ways to collaborate with Mozilla.

We’ve been looking at email as an important part of the Chandler project. Our approach has been to design applications around user problems and goals, in particular for informal groups working together. Our starting point was the observation that people use their Inbox as their task list. Another observation: calendaring is fundamental to task management; integration of messaging with calendaring makes a lot of sense with user workflows. We think that people will benefit from integrating email, tasks, calendar, contacts and other related information in one application, instead of having to do the work of patching together information across software tools, protocols and data formats. We’ve observed people collaborating on shared problems with email; we think there are huge gains to be made by converging personal communication and group collaboration. Email protocols are not the only route for communication; social networking and other messaging paradigms are other important areas to explore.

The Chandler team is currently working on a Preview release expected by the end of August: a usable version of the desktop application, rich web application, and server. We’ll also launch our free hosted service, Chandler Hub (an instance of Chandler Server).

Chandler Desktop will not be a full email client in the Preview release, but great email support is important to our full vision. Our research shows that many people sit in their email client all day as they try and manage their personal information and work on projects with others. Chandler uses email protocols for “sharing” items (calendar events, notes, tasks). It also has enough basic email functionality to allow users to get email into Chandler to manage a task list and calendar, but as a complement to an email client. Filling out Chandler to be a full email client is one of our options for a 1.0 release.

If you want more information about Chandler ideas, you can read the latest draft of our vision document or explore our wiki. A user guide and screencasts will be showing up as well. You can also experience Chandler in action by downloading the desktop, server, and/or creating a free account on Chandler Hub. Even though we haven’t released Preview yet, the recent desktop checkpoints are usable (modulo a few bugs) as is the previous release of the server (it doesn’t have the full Preview feature set). We use it internally to share group task lists and manage an office calendar.

The Chandler team is focused on getting our Preview release out, so we’re pretty busy through August. We anticipate getting interesting feedback from Preview and we’re going to let that guide our next steps.

I’m not yet sure where a collaboration with Mozilla would lead or what it would mean, but I think we’re looking at a similar problem space and it makes sense to see if we can forge a common path and combine resources. We offer a perspective on the problem, a server and a desktop application, and a team of people who are excited about doing creative things with personal information management (including email). Once we have Preview out, I intend for OSAF to participate actively in the conversation about email futures.

Well I just got back from EuroPython 2007 held in Vilnius, Lithuania.

EuroPython was definitely smaller than our American Pycon counterpart and the diversity
of talks more limited.

My favorite talk was on Streaming with Python, Twisted, and GStreamer.

I particularly enjoyed meeting developers on that side of the hemisphere
who don’t normal make it to the American conferences. Overall, EuroPython
had a very intimate feel.

On July 10th, I gave a lightening talk on Chandler which went very well.

I was trying to figure out how to capture all the functionality of Chandler in 5 minutes
or less of speech time. I decided to run our Functional Test Framework while
describing the different features Chandler has as the suite was creating new
collections, new items, stamping, configuring accounts, sending email, publishing
collections, and subscribing to collections. All in all I was able to show a large
amount of Chandler functionality this way in under 3 minutes.

I then quit the tests and switch to a running version of Chandler
spending the last two minutes demonstrating how internationalization and the plug-in
framework work in Chandler. Specifically, I did an Amazon search for
Scott Rosenberg and showed the collection results as well as an EVDB search
for Opera in San Francisco.

I got a very good reception from the audience. As many people had not
been following Chandler in a while they were surprised at how
much recent progress had been made.

On July 11th, I gave my Internationalizing in Python: Chandler a case study presentation.
It went very well also. There was strong turn out and I think may people were
surprised out how hard it is to actually Internationalize / localize an application in Python.

In addition to showing slides I gave code examples of EggTranslations,
PyICU, and how to create localization eggs using the Chandler tools.

You can view photos from the conference as well as access my presentation slides at:

http://people.osafoundation.org/bkirsch/europython/

On July 12th and 13th I hosted two days of Sprints on localizing Chandler.

I must say I learned a great deal. One thing that I had not considered is
that localizers also make a very good focus group on Chandler usability. Since none of
the translators had worked in depth with Chandler before, it was not only an exercise in how
easy is the application to localize but also how easy is it for someone to start Chandler and
grasp the concepts the application offers.

There were many issued raised at the Sprint including bugs in the Chandler code that are hindering a
complete localization, better tools that need to be provided for localization, and ways that we need to
better organize our strings in code to create a usable Chandler.pot for translators to work with.

I would classify those two days as providing the last few missing pieces regarding Chandler’s localization
strategy.

I am excited to get started on providing the user community with the ability to localize Chandler in
our 0.7.1 release which will follow Preview.

I have summarized the entire experience of the Sprints and next steps for Chandler i18n / l10n
as well as included a link to the Swedish translation egg created during the Sprints here:

http://people.osafoundation.org/bkirsch/postsprint/

-Brian Kirsch

We’re closing in on our Preview release, currently on target for launch in late August.

Hub (hub.chandlerproject.org)

The service is running the 0.6.1.1 version of the server, and works well with desktop checkpoints. We maintain our OSAF office calendar on the hub; several OSAF’ers are now using desktop checkpoints with the service to manage shared task lists.

Desktop
The desktop team has hit the code complete deadline for 0.7, and is closing in on Zero Bug Release.

You can download the latest checkpoint now and and give it a spin. It is more stable than the last alpha release or than the 0.6 release, and contains data migration features for upgrades.

Server
The server team hit feature complete for its 0.7 release, and is busy testing and fixing bugs. Upgrading the hub to use the 0.7 version of the server will determine the launch date.

Website and Wiki
We’ve improved our web presence and cleaned up our wiki (though we still have a little work to do before launch). We’re also working on end user documentation.

• http://www.osafoundation.org/
• http://chandlerproject.org/
• http://chandlerproject.org/wikihome

OSCON is next week in Portland and a number of folks from the Chandler project will be there.

Wednesday morning, Ted Leung and Mimi Yin will be giving a presentation “Open Design, Not by Committee”, about our experiences incorporating designers into an open source development process.

Katie Parlante will be giving a Chandler project update during the “State of Lightning Talks” on Thursday morning

Also on Thursday morning, Mikeal Rogers and Adam Christian will be talking about Windmill, the tool that we use to test the AJAX based user interface for Chandler Server (Cosmo).

There will also be a Chandler BOF on Thursday night, so please come by and say “Hi”. Since the Preview release is just around the corner, now would be a great time to check in and find out what’s been happening.

OSAF is pleased to announce the 0.6.1.1 update of Chandler Server (Cosmo)!

Chandler Server is a database, server, and web UI for storing and managing personal information such as events and tasks. It implements standards such as CalDAV, WebDAV, Atom, and Atom Publishing Protocol.

Chandler Server 0.6.1.1 is currently available for download at:

http://downloads.osafoundation.org/cosmo/releases/0.6.1.1/

and in subversion from:

http://svn.osafoundation.org/server/cosmo/tags/rel_0.6.1.1/

This release fixes two specific issues found in Cosmo 0.6.1 and is otherwise 100% backwards compatible with that version.

The first issue fixed is “Exceeding EIM field size on EXDATE”, <URL:https://bugzilla.osafoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9537>. This bug affected users trying to import a calendar which had a very large number of modifications to a single recurring event.

The second issue fixed is “Sharing error - “SyntaxError: unclosed token”, <URL:https://bugzilla.osafoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9606>. This problem could keep a user from syncing their collections if an incomplete alarm record was uploaded.

The free instance of Chandler Service provided at http://hub.chandlerproject.org/ has been upgraded with 0.6.1.1 and you are welcome to use that installation.

Send us feedback at: ‘chandler-users at osafoundation.org’. We look forward to hearing from you!