I’ve been traveling for the past couple of weeks, so missed the announcement of Tasks as a new feature in GMail Labs. Given my own interests in tasks in email, this seems to be the most useful Labs feature to surface so far. Also of interest are the nearly 500 threads discussing ideas for future enhancements to the Tasks plugin.

The focus seems to be on lightweight interaction, which is definitely the right approach. To add a new task, for example, you just click in an empty part of the task list and start typing. This seems pretty similar to the style of task interaction pioneered by Remember the Milk, and I’d be interested to know how it compares with RTM’s GMail services, particularly their recently announced RTM GMail gadget that can be added via GMail Labs. Are there any users out there who have experimented with RTM’s tools and can offer insight on the comparative strengths and weaknesses of the new Labs task addition?

There doesn’t seem to be much in the way of tight interaction between email and tasks (yet), but I’m sure this will be in the pipeline for future enhancements.

On the topic of tasks in email, if you’re interested in learning more about how people phrase tasks in email messages, have a look at my recent paper, Requests and Commitments in Email are Complex: Eight Reasons to be Cautious, which I presented at the Australasian Language Technology conference in Hobart earlier this week.

A series of email messages from the controversial Yahoo! Mail account of US Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin were leaked onto the Internet today.

As with the recently announced Venezuelan government email leak, Wikileaks was again in the scrum, issuing the following press release:

The internet activist group ‘anonymous’, famed for its exposure of unethical behavior by the Scientology cult, has now gone after the Alaskan governor and republican Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin.

At around midnight last night the group gained access to governor Palin’s email account … and handed over the contents to the government sunshine site Wikileaks.org.

Governor Palin has come under media criticism in the past week for using pseudo-private email accounts to avoid Alaskan freedom of information laws.

The zip archive made available by Wikileaks contains screen shots of Palin’s inbox, two example emails, governor Palin’s address box and a couple of family photos. While the emails released so far reveal little, the list of correspondence appears to re-enforce the criticism that Palin is mixing governmental and personal affairs.

The emails quoted in press articles to date seem to show that Palin has improperly used her private email account to conduct government business, thereby avoiding archiving requirements and shielding herself and her government from public scrutiny. It is unclear what if any action will be taken in response. According to the Sydney Morning Herald, the Secret Service contacted The Associated Press and asked for copies of the leaked emails on her Yahoo! account, but AP did not comply.

The Palin email leak is the latest in a string of unauthorised email disclosures. Ironically, it comes almost a year to the day after the MediaDefender email leak. Clearly, our recent discussion about the ethics of email corpora on the email research mailing list is a timely one!

I’ve previously noted my disappointment with the array of trivial trinkets that have so far defined Gmail Labs. One of the most recent additions, however, finally adds something of use.

Quote selected text allows you to selectively quote and reply to one small part of a message. Like other email clients with this feature (Apple Mail springs to mind), you just highlight the text you want to include in your reply, hit the keyboard shortcut “r” to reply, and the compose template will be just what you selected. This is a simple but useful feature. Note that it only works in Firefox and IE right now. Safari and Chrome support is still in progress.

As many in the email community will know, Gabor Cselle, VP of Engineering at Email startup Xobni, announced a month or so ago that he was leaving Xobni to start his own email company.

Luckily for us, Gabor is fitting in some travel between finishing up at Xobni and starting his new company, and Sydney is one of the stops on his itinerary. Gabor is an excellent presenter, so if you’re in Sydney, I highly recommend coming along to the seminar that he will be giving on The Future of Email at CSIRO / Macquarie University, starting 11am on Wednesday 15th October. (Here’s details of our location and how to get here if you’re planning to come along).

Of course, given Gabor’s experience as an entrepreneur, I’m sure he’ll also be happy to talk about life in a Silicon Valley startup and the lessons he’s learned along the way. So, come along for the seminar, and stick around for what’s sure to be some interesting discussion.

Whistleblower website Wikileaks.org, which famously made its debut revealing secret documents about Guantanamo Bay, has announced that they have acquired a corpus of over 8000 diplomatic emails from the government of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. Controversially, WikiLeaks is offering to auction off the corpus to the highest bidder.

The winning bidder will get exclusivity and embargoed access to the documents. However, there is hope for cash-poor email researchers, as Wikileaks claims that they will eventually publish all of the email, after the embargo expires.

The corpus allegedly includes email messages and attachments from 2005 to July 2008 that provide insight into the management of Chavez’s “inner circle”, along with “sentiments about CIA activities in Venezuela, Columbian incursions, the visit of the Pope”, and the Bolivarian revolution. Based on the Wikileaks press release below, the email messages appear to be from a single diplomat’s mailbox.

From: Wikileaks Press Office

Date: Wed, 27 Aug 2008 20:38:47 +0100

Inside Venezuela – over 8, 000 diplomatic emails 2005-2008

Wikileaks has prepared for publication over 8,000 internal and
external emails to and from a senior Venezuelan diplomat and former
speech writer for Hugo Chavez. The emails are dated 2005 to July
2008, and include several thousand attachments. The preparation
includes a “one touch” translation system to over a dozen different
languages.

The material provides a unqiue insight into the Bolivarian revolution,
President Chavez’s manamgement of his inner circle, and affairs
ranging from Cuban and Venezuelan contacts, sentiments about CIA
activites in Venezuela, Columbian incursions, the visit of the
Pope and Venezuelan views on many other countries and events.

Organizations wishing to bid for exclusivity (proceeds to our source
defense fund) and embargoed access contact usa@wikileaks.org for
additional information.

Thanks to Rob McArthur for alerting me to the Wired News article about the auction. If anyone out there knows more about this potential corpus, please comment!

Update (3/8/08): Of course, I assume the email messages are likely to be in Spanish, the official language of Venezuela.

Gabor Cselle and Greg Duffy from Xobni gave an excellent keynote at the AAAI Email Workshop. Amongst other insights and Xobni anecdotes, their combined presentation gave an overview of just how difficult and painful it is to integrate new ideas into existing email clients like Microsoft Outlook. Such pain is, unfortunately, unavoidable if you’d like your ideas to reach any of the 400 million Outlook email users out there in the world.

The exciting news I took away from the Xobni presentation was the plan to open up external access to developer APIs to access and extend Xobni’s sidebar. This is what LinkedIn has had access to in order to achieve the recent integration with Xobni, and might be a less painful path to Outlook integration for other developers in the future.

Mark Dredze, Vitor Carvalho and Tessa Lau did an excellent job bringing together a great bunch of people working on a variety of email-related research at the recent EMAIL-08 workshop at AAAI in Chicago. There was a huge amount of energy and enthusiasm amongst the participants, which is a great thing for the future of email research.

Following on from the workshop, we have created a series of new resources to help keep the community connected. The first of these is a new mailing list for those interested in email research. Our intention is for this list to be a central place for people in the email research community to discuss ideas and projects and to announce resources of interest. More information about the list (including subscription information) can be found at http://groups.google.com/group/email-research.

In addition to the list, we have also created a community maintained email research website that we hope will keep a current list of email datasets, published papers and related information. Please get in touch if you have relevant content for the site.

If you are at all involved in email-related research, I strongly encourage you to join the new Email Research mailing list and to take part in the ongoing discussion of the wider email research community. I’m looking forward to hearing your ideas!

I haven’t seen many others in the email community comment on the recent announcement of GMail Labs yet.

Given the buzz of activity around email in recent years (Xobni, Xoopit, ClearContext, Seriosity etc.) I was expecting that GMail Labs might actually offer some genuinely interesting enhancements to the email experience. Instead, what’s on offer is a mish-mash of tiny incremental gadgets to tweak very specific aspects of GMail. Nothing in the way of more fundamental or experimental features. (And nothing that even attempts to fix any of the long-standing problems with GMail like the automatic adding of all email correspondents to the address book, or the inability to add inline images).

Lifehacker has a run-down of the 13 features available at the launch of GMail Labs. These range from tweaks for including random signatures to the ability to view emails in fixed-width fonts – hardly innovative given such features have been available in unix email clients for, oh, a decade or two. Other features are actually more focused on chat than email (e.g., muzzle for hiding status lines, and ‘pictures in chat’).

I can only hope that things will get more interesting over time, but based on the scale of launch features which apparently warranted a media event around the launch of GMail Labs, I’m not holding my breath.

Perhaps the one bright spot is the creation of a Google Group for discussing existing Lab features and proposals for new features. At least this gives a focus for users to make their suggestions heard (though LifeHacker has been gathering such suggestions for some time now).

While speculation continues about whether Microsoft will acquire the company, Xobni is pressing on with its development work.

According to Erik Schonfeld over at TechCrunch, Yahoo has a working prototype (not yet in beta) built in to Internet Explorer that integrates email from Yahoo Mail and Outlook into the Xobni sidebar for both applications. Reportedly, emails from Yahoo Mail are visible and searchable as conversations in the Outlook plugin and vice-versa.

No word on when the Yahoo Mail work may actually be available to Xobni users, but it’s nice to hear evidence of Xobni’s oft-repeated claim to be working on platforms other than Outlook. I just wish that Xobni for PINE was more than an April Fool’s Joke …

Michael Arrington has provided independent confirmation of Laurent Féral-Pierssens’ earlier speculation about Microsoft acquiring Xobni. Looks like your comments may have been right on the money, Laurent (pardon the pun!).

Arrington claims that two independent sources have noted that the deal has legs (presumably one of these being Féral-Pierssens?), although he also notes that “yet another source says the LOI hasn’t been signed by Xobni yet”.

Regarding acquisition price, no-one seems to have any idea yet; Arrington notes that:

I have not yet been able to track down the price, but a previous offer of sub-$20 million was supposedly rejected by Xobni.

It’ll be interesting to see whether this is all just a storm in a tea-cup, or whether MS is really going to bring the Xobni technology in-house. If so, let’s just hope the innovation shown by Xobni so far isn’t swamped by the inertia of such a large company.