Scoble Interviews Chandler Team
The Chandler Project has been a long term interest of mine, and it seems the same is true for Robert Scoble. He publishes a long interview “Collaborative Chandler Revealed,” covering the recent preview release of the application and the development process that has brought it to this point.
It’s a 51-minute video, so I haven’t watched it yet… but the text gives a decent overview and also links to Ted Leung’s detailed post on Scoble’s OSAF visit.
I particularly like the section where they discuss “turning email into a wiki,” since this is an idea I also had a few years ago. Basically, I use saved email messages as a database of information, so using the wiki interface to manage and modify that would work very well for me. Chandler developers and Scoble see it in about the same way.
Leung writes,
“In the interview, Robert latched onto the edit/update features of Chandler. These are still in a primitive state, but you can see the value of them already. He had a great summary of how it works – “you turn e-mail into a wiki.” Exactly. You can create and share a collection with any number of people, and they can all edit/update items in that collection and see each other’s changes, without groveling through endless e-mail reply chains. At one point in the interview, Mimi said something about e-mail being the hub of people’s usage. Truth of the matter is that e-mail is more like the glue that holds batches of information together. Collections of items with edit/update is a different kind of glue.”
I’ve been using Chandler on the desktop and via the hub service, and it is useful and very polished for a “preview”-level release. Reading about the capabilities and ideas that will emerge in its future has further reinforced my perception from regular use: this program is a new paradigm that will vastly improve my workflow and reshape the landscape around it.