The ether is abuzz with talk of Zoe:
"The goal here is to do for email (starting with your personal mailbox) what Google did for the web... The Google principle: It doesn't matter where information is because I can get to it with a keystroke.
So what is Zoe? Think about it as a sort of librarian, tirelessly, continuously, processing, slicing, indexing, organizing, your messages. The end result is this intertwingled web of information. Messages put in context. Your very own knowledge base accessible at your fingertip. No more "attending to" your messages. The messages organization is done automatically for you so as to not have the need to "manage" your email. Because once information is available at a keystroke, it doesn't matter in which folder you happened to file it two years ago. There is no folder. The information is always there. Accessible when you need it. In context.
Zoe is a email client. It's also a email server. And a long term archive. And a search engine. And an application server. All that at once on your desktop....
It allows you to keep your messages. Over time. For a long period of time. As long as there is some disk space somewhere. It's your personal archive. Always accessible. Always up. Always ready to migrate somewhere else if you choose to (see the email server part). It's your messages after all. Now you can sleep soundly without having to worry about how you will keep -over years, over jobs, over relocations- those hard won messages. They will go where ever you want them to go.
However, by now, it's more than just a big pile of random texts (aka emails). It has been fully indexed to the last significant bit. Information have been extracted. Relationships have been made. Links have been discovered. Information was put in context. Normalized. A knowledge base has been build. For you. Automatically. Accessible at a key stroke. When you need it. Without you moving any single one of your busy fingers to write some arcane filtering rules to some soon to be unmanageable folder structure (see "Intertwingularity") in some cumbersome proprietary email system. No. Instead you get universal accessibility to your very own knowledge base. Automatically. Just for you....
The main point is: you have your own personal "data center server" accessible from all over the planet. Instead of typing www.hotmail.com to check your email, you could very well instead connect directly to your own PC sitting in your very own living room from some internet cafe in the Australian outback...."
It's unclear to me whether this is going to run on my WinME PC at home, but I'll probably be trying it to find out because I'm so intrigued by this software. If nothing else, I'll definitely be installing it at work when my machine gets upgraded to Win2000 next month in order to test it. Did I mention this software is free for personal use?
Last year I bought Powermarks to manage my browser bookmarks because after six years, they were just too out of hand. The nice thing about PM is that you don't have to worry about filing bookmarks anymore. Instead, you can assign keywords to a site, and then when you go to search for something, you type a word in a box and it starts narrowing down the entire list of bookmarks to those that match your query. Type "g" and anything that doesn't start with that letter disappears from the list. Then type in "p" and it narrows down to everything that includes a word that starts with "gp." Add an "s" and then you've narrowed the thousands down to the few that contain "gps" in the site title or in the keywords.
It's a pretty powerful program and it's made life much easier. Many a time have I wished for this same capability in my email, considering that I've got 4,000 messages in my inbox at work alone. Maybe this is the answer! [The Shifted Librarian]
10:25:06 AM 
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