On Thu, 13 Oct 2011, Luk Vervenne wrote:
Introducing the individual as ‘a genuine stakeholder in his own processes’ (note: in my opinion a precondition for BOTH user-centric and user-driven processes, but that's for another discussion), means we – in addition – now also need a personal server / infrastructure to talk to organisations as the client. (by the way, the meshing with 4th parties is where trust becomes interesting).
Personal sovereignty is a huge issue for us at Mozilla, which this article captured better than most others have recently:
https://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/241661/which_browser_has_your_back_that_would_be_firefox.html
This came up most recently for us in discussions about the future of Thunderbird. If everyone's using @gmail.com-ish webmail or their corporate webmail, what's the value of an open source, independent desktop mail client? After all, great mail clients are actually hard work, people's expectations are constantly being raised by the webmail offerings, and many users are using SMTP email less and less. Revisioning Thunderbird as a messaging tool for all sorts of protocols, to be even more directly built on top of the Firefox toolchain, and to be a more sophisticated manager of people's personal data and preferences, seemed to have enough value to continue pursuing. Going forward, could the lowly mail client, the original social networking tool, be the front-end to an aggregated experience over FB, G+, the corporate intranet, etc? Could it help us bridge users to a decentralized social networking future? Those are questions without clear answers yet, but closing off those possibilities before knowing the answers seemed like an opportunity lost, so we've continued to invest in Thunderbird.
Does thinking about the mail client in this way create some ideas for wireframes for demos? I once mused with Doc that what would be awesome is a client-side tool that does for emailed purchase receipts what TripIt does with flight confirmation emails - parses them and adds them to your calendar and makes them understandable in ways that separate individual emails aren't. If we did this with receipts, we could help people visualize their spending, keep track of their inventory of purchased media or consumer electronics (where did I buy this computer from again?) and maybe even analyze the data and make recommendations based on others' purchasing habits. All client-side, all on behalf of the user, Managing their Vendor Relations.
Brian
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