langreiter.com plain, simple: 2002-03-01-6dNews

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2002-03-01-6dNews

CREATED BY chris • LAST EDITED BY chris 8092 days AGO

Mark Lemmons erklärt, warum Six Degrees nicht nur Rauch, sondern durchaus auch solchen generierendes Feuer zu bieten hat:

"Having looked at both [Tinderbox and MindModel] [...], I initially saw Six Degrees in the ink blots, but having looked deeper I found common ground in terms of ideas, but no real product similarity. [...] [I]t's true - if you just look at the screen shots Six Degrees looks like, well, yet another window in your Explorer/Finder. But Six Degrees is not just another window on your desktop, and all this hype started at MacWorld when people could actually see Six Degrees in action. [...] It does, automatically, build a wonderful database packed full of relationships that you can leverage and navigate to save time, be more productive, and make sure you have the right information at your fingertips. It does this immediately upon installation, and looks back as far as your email takes it."

Of course, relationships (a.k.a. links) aren't only the thing that make the web not-quite-uncool, a visible and traversable link structure is what makes computer displays leap beyond your ordinary sheet of paper (and no, that's not meant as an attack on sheets of paper, they're rather useful, too).

Nowadays that I have a vast amount of information (a whole slew of internal company communication, project documentation, notes, todo lists, events — and last but not least this very site) stored in a variety of VanillaSpaces (Wikis like Vanilla make creating information "objects"/snips and actually linking them pure bliss and way more enjoyable than keeping your A HREF handy), the one thing that I am sorely missing in the otherwise so soothing picture is — my eMail communication.

(I don't use word processors any more [except to print the occasional customer's .doc attachment] — and since K, spreadsheets have lost quite a bit of the appeal they once had for quick what-if analyses).

One option would be to make Vanilla an eMail client (eMails actually map rather nicely to snips with snip attachments), but I'm not really fond of both a. the static HTML page as an interface to the millions of mails I need to manage — that's one area (of many) where high interaction bandwidth clients (well, good old Desktop Applications) are totally needed — and b. the idea of having to clutter the utter simplicty of Vanilla with sophisticated link ranking algorithms, which would be definitely needed to make a space equivalent in size to my mail box (with several hundred list mails coming in a day) even remotely usable.

But: As Six Degrees will (supposedly) be scriptable with my oh-so-loved XML-RPC, I envision a happy future having finally overcome that last obstacle to Link Heaven. Time will tell, and I'll tell you.

Now, will it work with The Bat? ;-)

As a sidenote, Tinderbox I still haven't tried (and there's absolutely no excuse), but I've heard word that it actually might need quite a bit of time to get used to.

And thanks, Creo, for the cool calendar ;-)