Posted by David Towert on Tue, Jun 02, 2009 @ 10:32 AM
We've been heads-down in development working on Taglocity version 3 since late last year. After two beta updates, we're seeing a very positive response from our beta community (thanks for that!). One of the areas we've improved the most is the Conversation Reader. Recently we got a question from a new user asking about the strategy behind it. I thought it would be good to share the answer with everyone. Here goes:
The overall purpose of the conversation reader is to present a unified view of all messages belonging to a conversation or email thread. As you know, conversations can get quite messy with different people contributing to the topic at different times which means the latest email doesn't always contain all of the content. For example if two people reply to a message roughly at the same time, or pick an ‘earlier' message in a thread to reply to, then no single message will contain all the content in it.
What is nice about the Taglocity Conversation Reader is that it will find all messages of a conversation and present a preview of them in chronological order which allows you to scan who said what when. It will also fully render the current message and any of the preview messages you click on. This allows you to quickly jump around the different messages of a conversation to quickly locate what you're looking for, and therefore be better informed. If you click on the fully rendered message in the Conversation Reader, it will open Outlook's version of it for deleting, replying, forwarding, etc.
What makes the Taglocity Conversation Reader even more powerful is that it gathers all messages in a conversation from any folder, including your own replies from the Sent Items folder. The built-in Outlook conversation view, or conversation grouping, does a nice job of organizing messages by conversation, but it only shows the messages in the current folder. Naturally this would not include your replies and any messages that have been moved to different folders. People who rely on this feature may be missing important information leading to less than optimum decision making. Or they waste time, completely unnecessarily, trying to find related messages in other folders.
Another great benefit of the Taglocity Conversation Reader is that no matter where you stumble upon a message, whether it be in some obscure folder or deep in search results, then with one click you can automatically see the latest message in the conversation with the most up-to-date information about a topic.
But that's not all! You can tag all messages in a conversation in the Taglocity Conversation Reader; either append tags to each message, or replace all the different tags on the messages with new ones. In addition, with one click of a checkbox, you can tell Taglocity to assign a set of tags to all future messages in the conversation.
New features in the latest beta release includes the ability to embed the reader into a region in Outlook to suit your layout preferences. This builds the conversation view for any message you click on in Outlook. If you have a second monitor, you can set the Conversation Reader to 'float' mode which puts it a new window that you can position anywhere.
If you don't have a lot of space, you can keep the conversation view in condensed mode which works well in narrow or short spaces because only the preview bubbles are shown without the fully rendered view of the current message. Clicking on a bubble opens the message in an Outlook window for you to see more.
Hope you enjoy this awesome feature....I can't live without it now! I even use it place of the Outlook Reading Pane now.
Posted by David Towert on Fri, Jan 16, 2009 @ 04:42 PM
I love it when our customers share their Taglocity experiences with us. Mic Cullen, a sports journalist, recently wrote to us and kindly gave his permission to publish it. Thanks Mic!
Hopefully this will give others some good ideas on how to become more productive with email using Taglocity....
Taglocity makes my job a whole lot easier. Sounds like a big statement, but to give an example of how much I need it, I hung off buying a MacbookPro until I was sure that Taglocity would run with Outlook on it (under VMWare Fusion, if anyone cares).
I am a sports journalist (among other things), and email is my lifeblood. I use it from 5am to 11pm.
I have a pretty streamlined email process. I used to have a folder hierarchy for filing email in, but that gives issues, as you have to decide which folder an email belongs in, when it might need to be in several. Now, I have just three -folders - Inbox, @Holding, Archive.
However, I have any number of tags through Taglocity. As a result, I can tag one email with multiple tags - for example, the main organisation (AFL), team (Richmond or Western Bulldogs) and a tag like @Action. These can be automatically applied on arrival (ie AFL/Richmond) or manually, after arriving in the inbox (@Action). Tags can be set to perform actions as well as simple tagging, so my @Action tag not only applies the tag, but moves it to the @Holding folder.
As a result, the email is out of my Inbox, because I've looked at it and assigned a ‘next action' (if I can steal and slightly corrupt a GTD term), but it's available to me in my "@Action" search folder, as well as my "AFL", "AFL this week" and "Richmond" search folders.
My other primary tags are "@Visit/Read" and "@Waiting", which are for emails that have a site to visit or a document to read, or because I'm waiting on a response/arrival, respectively. (I'm also wanting to buy a house, so I also have more temporary categories such as "@Housing-new".)
However, Taglocity also does more than just passively tag and move emails, it can also do actions on them. For example, if I have an email that comes in that tells me about a media conference I need to go to, I simply click on the "Appointment" tag on the Taglocity toolbar, and it pops up an Outlook new appointment dialog, with the body of the email in the details section of the appointment, and the subject of the email in the subject of the appointment. Setup the time, and you're away, with all the relevant details there for checking from your calendar. I have it setup so that applying this tag also applies the "@Action" tag, which moves it to the "@Action" folder.
This keeps my Inbox empty once I've dealt with the email, either by responding or by assigning a tag, and allows me to see what I need to do immediately.
My other main tag is that of "Done" - once an item is dealt with, if I want to keep it (as I often do), I simply assign the "Done" tag. This strips off the "@Action", "@Waiting" or "@Visit/Read" tag, and moves the email out of the @holding or Inbox folders into the Archive folder. All the other tags are kept (ie "AFL/Richmond" or "Family/Simon") and so can be easily searched on under the various tags it still carries.
This is not all it does (Taglocity pane, conversation viewer) but that's how I use it.
Posted by David Towert on Thu, Oct 23, 2008 @ 03:58 PM
I'm following the very interesting Obama/McCain contest on cable news TV and I sometimes find myself wondering what it's like to be interviewed on a talk show. Well, last weekend I got a notion of it and I have to admit, I found it quite enjoyable. I was interviewed by Michael Kastler, host of TechTalk on Chicago WRLR 98.3FM radio about Taglocity - the past, present and future.
I guess it helps a lot when the host is a big fan - Michael called Taglocity a cool product that he uses everyday. He also said he was a huge follower of David Allen's GTD methodology and that Taglocity "synchronizes into it so well".
Michael shared with the listeners how it allowed him to go from around 90 folders to 3 or 4 folders and said "I can't stress enough for me how much of a life change, a game changer for the way that I interface with email just to have what sounds like a relatively simple thing, this tagging ability but combining it with search and conversation follow, and bang, all of sudden you see your flow and the amount of time you spend dealing with email drop significantly."
Yesterday the podcast was posted online so you can listen to it here if you're interested (our interview starts about 28 minutes into the show if you want to jump to the Taglocity segment).
I owe Michael a big thanks for having me on his most enlightening tech show - thanks Michael!
Dave
Posted by David Towert on Mon, Sep 22, 2008 @ 03:27 AM
A few years ago, David Ing, our CTO and co-founder, came to the same conclusion as many others at the time: email, the killer productivity application of the 90s, was breaking down.
Or as he put it, "Email is basically broken. Or rather it is at the stage where its bad habits are institutionalized and accepted as the norm." He predicted that productivity gains would be eroded to the point where people would want to throw it out.
Sure enough, wikis, blogs, and other intranet solutions popped up in attempts to solve the burgeoning email overload problem. These solutions built on the premise that people use email for purposes it wasn't designed for, so why not offload the work onto other purposefully designed systems?
Well as it turns out, people love email too much, or it's simply too convenient and easy to use for collaboration and information sharing. So after witnessing mixed results, David came up with a brilliant idea: instead of making people leave email, rather extend it to support the way people like to work!
Why not extend it to easily allow people to place information in a fixed location in context? Why not let people browse and subscribe to this information? Why should email be a ‘push' only system? Why not extend it to support ‘pull' like wikis and blogs?
In other words, give people the benefits of wikis and blogs but do it with their email program of choice in a non-disruptive way. Give people less email to process but access to more information on-demand, on their terms.
And so Taglocity 2.0 was conceived! Now two very busy years later, Taglocity is nearing the end of a very successful six month beta program. And we certainly owe a debt of gratitude to all of our beta users for their encouragement and feedback over the last 6 months - thank you very much!
We are very excited about how David's vision has been realized in terms of the solution. Stay tuned for our official launch where we look forward to helping solve email overload and improve knowledge sharing for as many individuals and businesses as we possibly can.
We hope to use this new blog to start a useful dialog about saving email and getting people to love it all over again. Please let us know your thoughts!
David Towert
President & CEO