Mail-only repositories
26 June, 2008 at 11.43 am 2 comments
Les Carr covers an interesting angle in his post, ‘Repositories should be more like email (apparently)‘.
Personally, I have always used email as a kind of personal repository, sending myself a copy of any document I’m working on as a backup or ‘work in progress’, while also being useful if I’m ever working at home. Now, I know that really what I’m talking about is just a bunch of messages with documents as attachments, but a Firefox extension called Xoopit changes that somewhat. Xoopit sucks all the multimedia content (including links to YouTube videos, etc) from your Google Mail account and displays each item as a collective sideshow within your mail window. Alternatively, users can login to the Xoopit site and see the items in a list, categorised by type (images, videos and files).
With a recent Australian school’s move to Gmail considered “the largest private deployment of Gmail [known as Google Mail in the UK] in the world” (thanks, Andy), commonplace features like this would enable pupils and students to better locate documents, presentations, PDFs, etc.
Still in a private beta (check this article for an in-depth look and sign-up code), the application’s massive drawback is the need for it to take your password to access your inbox. Hardly security-conscious, I still think it’s worth a look, as you can always contact Xoopit to delete your account (and change your mail password) after having a peek. Will this kind of multimedia idea become a mainstream part of mail in future?
Entry filed under: email, google, repositories. Tags: .
1.
rowin | 27 June, 2008 at 9.33 am
Thanks for such an interesting post, Neil. It’s very interesting what you say about using email as a sort of ‘personal repository’, I do exactly the same thing of sending drafts of documents to myself – despite having a googledocs account and storage space provided by my institution which I can access from home as well as on campus. I’ve also lost more pen drives than I care to think about
Before I started using Delicious I’d email links to myself too, still do occasionally if it’s something I want to follow up that’s not ‘worth’ saving. If that’s what people are actually doing then it certainly seems to make sense to build on that rather than creating shiny exciting things that they don’t use 
2.
neil | 3 July, 2008 at 9.49 am
Mmm, it’s a bit reliant on Google (in my case) but it’s a lot easier than carrying a pen drive around. I’m sure that I would still do the same to backup my pen drive so might as well just cut it out of the loop altogether (unless, of course, I wasn’t guaranteed internet access somewhere).