To Do List Aggregation
For a while now I've been thinking about the need for a To Do List Aggregator.
While some "next actions" can be manually put on a list, some are time-based (either coming from a calendar or from something like Sciral Consistency). Others come from yet other applications: flagged emails or blog entries, unread email, etc.
Having multiple "inboxes" is a bad thing. So what would be nice would be an application that simply aggregated action items from multiple electronic inboxes, or what I'll call "Action Feeds".
By separating aggregation from the feeds themselves, it would be possible for people to develop all sorts of clever action feed generators that ranged from simple manual lists to integrations with calendars, email, etc.
The list aggregator would be similar to a regular blog aggregator but with a few important differences:
- priority and not time would be the key ordering criterion
- 'done' and not 'read' would be the key annotation
- the items wouldn't necessarily have meaningful content
- it would be nice if marking items done and adding certain new kinds of items could be done from the aggregator and communicated back to the feed generator.
However, I still think Atom could be the basis for the protocol between aggregator and action feed generators. The comments I make in the UPDATE to Google Reader about IMAP are relevant here too.
Comments (3)
James Tauber on Oct. 11, 2005:
I'm thinking primarily private too: aggregation between different private systems.
Of course, the beauty of using a standard http-based protocol is you can share where it makes sense. A team could have a task list; delegated tasks could appear in a feed. These would then be aggregated with the entries from the private systems.
Lars.Englund on Oct. 26, 2005:
Hi James,
I am currently building a server-side tiddlywiki with ajax functionality, hopefully to commercialize as an application in sweden.
I am looking to turn the backend into a rdf-based storage so several information sources could be integrated via tiddler tags or other mechanisms.
Please feel free to write,
lars dot englund at opensourcesupport.se
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Last Modified: Oct. 9, 2005
Author: James Tauber
Anthony B. Coates on Oct. 11, 2005:
I have my own hand-written "personal weblog" that I find useful for TO-DO lists. By "personal", what I mean is that it isn't published, nor intended to be, it's intended to be more like a PIM with rich hyperlinking between items. What I don't have, though, is a way to link to my calendar & e-mail, which would make the whole thing work.
The key point here is that TO-DOs strike me as a private thing, unless you are doing them for a group or team or some such.
My current implementation uses XSLT & NetKernel (which does a neat job of intelligently caching intermediate XML calculations in an XSLT workflow). It's very rough, though, but just sufficient for my own needs.
Cheers, Tony.