Is Chandler for individuals or groups?
March 5th, 2008 at 9:31 am (2 months, 1 week ago) by Mimi Yin under Product DesignWe often get the question: Is Chandler first and foremost a personal information manager or a collaboration tool?
The latter has groupware connotations we don’t want.
The former makes some people think of Outlook and then begs the question: Why don’t you have Contacts? Why aren’t you an email client?
At the end of the day, Chandler is first and foremost a personal information manager. Not in the way the software industry understands the phrase (Email, Scheduling, Calendar, and Contacts Suite), but in the civilian English sense of the phrase; you put information that is personal in Chandler and it helps you manage it.
(We may yet shy away from using “Personal Information Manager” as a way to market the product, but I find it helpful to think about what Chandler is in terms of the “plain” English meaning of the phrase.)
However, today, no personal information management tool is effective unless it has collaboration baked into its core. For “traditional” PIMs, collaboration means email plus scheduling.
For Chandler, collaboration means full-on, read-write, equal-access sharing. Chandler is for full-time, high-bandwidth collaborators; people who are working so closely together that email and traditional scheduling with it’s formal, moderated process of accepting and declining invitations feels like too much overhead and not enough bandwidth for true collaboration on ideas, goals, open issues and decisions.
Takeaway: Chandler is for personal use and it is effective for personal use because it is an individual-centered way to collaborate intensively with others.
March 5th, 2008 at 11:39 am
Chandler had me so excited when it came out, I followed the process daily for years, contributed to email newsletters, and truly believe a space existed in the market for such an exciting and unique application. It’s weird, because now I just feel really lost and can’t seem to recall what I enjoyed about the original kool-aid and what I’m searching now in the whats-left-over. But hey, I’m still searching, right? I just wish I expected to find something I’d use.
March 6th, 2008 at 8:53 am
What?
This kind of rhetoric is crazy talk! “At the end of the day, Chandler is first and foremost a personal information manager. Not in the way the software industry understands the phrase…”
What?
So you’re making software that is so similar to a personal information management, but explain that there’s a subtle difference - that it isn’t actually a personal information manager.
Good idea, drop the references to Personal Information Manager - because clearly that’s not what this is about. Perhaps “Manager of Information that you would normally use other software to manage but better in a way that we can’t explain”
March 6th, 2008 at 10:52 am
Hi V,
I understand that you are unhappy with the project from your position as an outside observer. We’re certainly interested in constructive criticism, but in this post all you are offering is rude sarcasm.
If you don’t fully understand Mimi’s point, you could ask questions. If you disagree with it, you could offer a counter argument. If you think she doesn’t make her point clearly you could offer alternative phrasing.
Trollish behavior is unwelcome here.
March 6th, 2008 at 12:38 pm
Hi Aubrey,
There was certainly a lot of buzz when Chandler was announced in 2002. For many years, the project was abundant in vision and ideals and lacking in execution and usable code. As a result, while the project was derided by some for lacking focus and clarity in purpose, it also generated a lot of excitement because its open-ness to taking on new and oftentimes opposing goals meant it could be “All things to all people”.
That was then, this is now.
We tightened our focus and released Preview back in September. We’ve seen a small, but steadily growing community of users adopt both the Desktop application and sharing service. Many of these folks are enthusiastic about the ideas and are using it for their daily work, as you can see on the users list. We’ll have a 1.0 soon based on the feedback from these users.
It is inevitable that some people who were interested in the bigger space of all interesting ideas we considered won’t be as interested in the smaller, tighter product that we end up releasing. (It would have been impossible to ship a product that delivered on every idea we discussed!)
It’s hard to tell from your post if Chandler is just not the right tool for you, if you’re having a hard time understanding it’s purpose given the tighter focus, or if it is a matter of bugs getting in the way. I appreciate the energy that you have put into following Chandler, participating on the lists and trying it out, and will do my best to answer specific questions that may help you.