Lifehacker: Previewing Chandler, The PIM for the People

A month back, we were mentioned on the lifehacker blog as “the PIM for the People”.

What have we done to deserve such a title? Gina Trapani, the blog editor picked out this phrase from our vision statement:

“Our goal is to serve the way people actually work, independently and together, particularly in small groups, a market segment we believe is underserved. Our belief is that personal and collaborative information work is by nature iterative and that the existing binary Done/Not-Done, Read/Unread, Flagged/Unflagged paradigm in productivity software poorly accommodates the reality of how people work.”

I’m glad that this resonated with her. It’s something we should certainly build on and refine.

On the other hand, she also said: “As for the preview release, well, it has some ways to go” and “it’s not stable software ready for primetime”. She cited inability to sync completely with Gmail as her personal blocker. (She’s not the first to have this reaction.)

We’re certainly taking these kinds of concerns seriously. We’ve found that most people who show up on the users list and are using Chandler for tasks and calendaring find the desktop sufficiently stable to meet their needs. However, if you’re running on an older machine (e.g. PPC Mac) or if you’re hoping to get all your email into Chandler, the app might feel unstable.

But she did follow up with: “…the Chandler preview IS an exciting tease at a unified inbox/calendar/task list that keeps all your stuff in one place while offering decentralized sharing capabilities.”

She also sees us as potentially “delivering users from the evil of Microsoft Outlook and Exchange server”.

The lifehacker post illustrates both what’s best and worst about our efforts thus far to communicate to a wider audience about what we are and what we hope to become. Questions we need to answer in the coming months include:

1. Is it really a given that people won’t use Chandler until it replaces their email client? The response to What is Chandler supposed to be for, anyway? shows signs that with the right messaging and relatively lightweight feature improvements, we could convince people to use Chandler as an add-on to their existing email client.

2. There is something appealing about Chandler as an open source project and Chandler as an attempt to up-end existing information management paradigms. It would be interesting to better understand: What in the product itself gives people a sense that we’re living up to our promise? Or is it just our verbiage that’s convincing?

3. What about Chandler as Outlook/Exchange killer? Do we need to have that to keep people interested? We try to repudiate it wherever we can, but it’s a label that’s stuck. How do we set expectations correctly without presenting it as a lack, deficiency?