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.