Gmail and content findability

Google Mail (or Gmail) is a great service. Enough storage to keep a hefty amount of email, and what you might call a cleverly developed fast user interface. But it has its shortcomings – shortcomings that annoy the hell out of me as a user, and that no one seems to care enough about to implement.

Email re-findability:

Storage is granted, so people tend to archive email (or just keep it for a very long time) in services like Gmail. This constitutes a problem when it comes to re-findability. Here’s a practical example:

I subscribe to the Ruby on Rails mailing list, which is pretty high traffic. Due to time constraints, I don’t read all the list’s emails – I archive them for reference. However, when I do search for something and find an email I know I’m going to be interested in the future, I can only “Star” it. That’s a start, but there’s no way for me to organize it in a way that conveys contextual meaning to me (in the middle of 20.000 other email messages).

So I’d like to be able to tag that email with keywords that mean something to me (e.g: rails, caching, bug) so that I can traverse a tree of tags and find that particular email fast if I need it. The usual search model for finding content just doesn’t cut it in this sort of situation.

The need for better solutions

Email solutions (like Gmail) aren’t the only products with content findability issues, but developers haven’t really woken up to that problem – even though they will have to sooner or later. We’re being overrun by increasing levels of information each day (in our email, in our RSS feeds, in our news), and haven’t found ways to properly deal with that.

There’s a larger version of the illustration in this story on our Flickr page.