messaging as the ultimate abstraction of information

mike sippey blogs about how he wants to receive/use/share information:

yet the more I think about this problem of information discovery, sharing, routing and group forming, the more it seems that we're headed to a deeper merger of the mail client, the browser and various and sundry publishing and content archiving systems.

I remain unconvinced that there would be anything better suited to this task than an email-like application that's well integrated with the browser. What we're talking about here is messaging: reading incoming messages (whether via email, RSS or whatever comes next), and writing outgoing messages: some to individual contacts, some to public spaces (like sippey.com or delicious), some to semi-private group spaces (on orkut or flickr or mailing lists), some to a personal archive, and some to one or more of those destinations (cc, anyone?).

a pretty interesting post, especially his categorization of information along the two axes of privacy and context (which i didn't snip). i think the information appliance he describes is almost here. between haystack, gush, hello, and bloglines (via their email functionality), i think we have the components of such a system, but nothing completely integrated.

btw, haystack has a new tool, a semantic web browser. now if only we had a semantic web to browse.