About

The goal of this project is to provide users with a light-weight and versatile contextualized information aggregator and contextualized power tools provider. More specifically, the goal is to continuously aggregate information from multiple sources and show it to the user within the implicit context of his current task, and use that very same display to allow the user to do more from the given context and/or using the contextualized information.

And given that most knowledge workers spend a large portion of their time in their email client application and that the pre-dominant desktop email client application is Microsoft Outlook, there's no better place to start doing such implicit contextualization than there. Hence, this first version is aimed at Microsoft Oulook and supports version 2003 and 2007.

Current state

In its current state, the echotracker does the following:

  • Display a frame on the right-handside of Outlook showing per-user info
  • Index all Outlook email
  • Find phone numbers in emails
  • Show all emails relating to a given sender when his email is clicked

Please be aware that we don't suggest rolling the echotracker to a mass of users at this stage. We think the code needs to be put in the hands of developers and possibly power users who will provide us precious feedback to make the codebase more mature and stable.

Roadmap

Here is a list of things we plan to add to the echotracker:

  • Twitter support
  • Facebook support
  • Skype support
  • API capability for 3rd party and proprietary plugins

History/Background

In 2003 I was attending the annual Linux Symposium in Ottawa and "accidentally" found myself in Nat Friedman's presentation about Dashboard. For one thing, the description in the programme was intriguing:

"The dashboard is a continuous automated association engine that searches your personal information space for relevant objects as you go about your regular daily activities: reading and writing email, browsing the web, talking to people on IM, writing code, etc. As you interact with a given object (an email, a web page, a person on IM), the dashboard automatically populates with a nice, visual representations of related objects in your little universe. ..."

Nat, in true Ximian tradition, was putting up a good show and the crowd itself was quite enthusiastic. There was something Nat was doing with Dashboard that caught peoples' imagination. That paradigm of a pane on the right-hand-side of the screen that showed contextualized info in real-time had legs. Later that year when asked what would be the coolest new Linux application in 2004, Chris DiBona (former Slashdot editor) would say: "Dashboard, ... It is beyond cool." Personally, I was sceptical leaving the presentation. I kept thinking to myself that that tool was attacking an intractable problem: too much information ... what's important, what's not?

Years later, and despite Dashboard itself fading from memories, many versions of Nat's vision have found their ways into users' hands in one way shape or form, sometimes with a different scope or render, but definitely within the same spirit: aggregate information and present it in a meaningful fashion to the user in the appropriate context. And while email, IM and web were the main ways to interact in the days Dashboard came to be, nowadays the number of ways to interact have multiplied to such a degree (count in Twitter, Facebook, Skype, etc.) that keeping track of each way through a different set of tools has become close to impossible. Hence the echotracker.

Taking the paradigm a step further, however, the echotracker's goals aren't limited to just aggregation. Because if there is going to be a way for a user to gather in one place all the information relevant to a given context, there's no reason that that gathering point isn't itself the best place to start doing more than what his current tools allow him to do separately. Which is why one of this project's goals is to provide an open API for providing value-added functionality to users of the echotracker. Essentially, therefore, opening a new chapter in user experience by using implicit context as a gateway to a new world of implicit capabilities.

Karim Yaghmour (@karimyaghmour)
echotracker team lead

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the following we are building on the shoulders of giants:

  • jQuery and jQuery UI. The echotracker relies heavily on the WebBrowser object for its UI and jQuery is what we use to drive most of the visual presentation and effects in that object. We're of course more than happy to piggy-back off of the many very cool jQuery plugins out there.
  • Lukas Neumann. His "Additional custom panel in Microsoft Outlook" project published at codeproject.com provided some interesting ideas for tying into Outlook as we set out to get going.
  • Tango Desktop Project. We've used the Tango icons quite liberally.
  • Drupal. This site is run on Drupal.
  • Microsoft. Some things Microsoft does good. That WebBrowser object, C# and .Net ... let's just say it beats programming Outlook plugins in C++ and we'll leave it at that :)