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punkish has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:
For better or for worse, I have been very fascinated lately with the concept of intertwingularity.
Searching on Perlmonks reveals very little. One node Managing a Personal Email Archive, and leads to Pronto and Mail::Miner. In fact, searching on intertwingularity also reveals little more than the above, esp. as it relates to Perl.
There are three non-Perl products, and one Perl product -- Zoe, Emila, Six Degrees, and Twingle.com. Each is discussed below briefly --
- Zoe is an opensource, free, gorgeously conceptualized but very frustrating app written in Java, of which I know little unless it is in my morning cup. It is very slow, and particularly with my home-installed Postfix on my iBook, it creates all kinds of goofy links, most of them wrongly dated. Most impt., it doesn't synchronize with my mail store -- it merely imports it, and then you have to live with its import even if your mail store changes.
- Steven Frank's Emila is the same concept in a Cocoa program, also free and opensource, but it is very half-finished. Besides, it is not web based, so it can't be accessed from everywhere.
- Creo's Six Degrees is the best and most polished of them all, but it is not opensource, and it is $99 a seat. Even with their bulk discount, its cost won't be justified by my twinge for intertwingularity.
- Lastly, there is the tantalizingly named, Perl-based Twingle which was once mentioned in a Simon Cozen's article. Alas, I can't get into Twingle. Apparently it is by invite only, and I tried to get an invite, but I guess I was convincing enough. Queries to whether the source for Twingle was available went unanswered, so I guess it is not.
Which brings me here. This is a concept that would be best solved with Perl, with its power of regexp searching, and intergration with DBI. I read Robert Bernier's article Data Mining Email but it doesn't quite achieve Zoe's concept. Besides, it depends on Postgresql which gives me nervous attacks.
I envision a PerlTwingular app which simply reads the mail store thereby avoiding the problem of maintaining and synchronizing two separate stores, something like Plucene for searching it all (the search index might be re-built as a cron job). The app interface would be very much like Zoe's or Creo Six Degrees'. There might be an optional DBI integration with SQLite. Would be nice to have a built-in webserver, perhaps a pure Perl httpd, so everything standsalone. In any case, it would have to work out of the box with Apache and IIS at the very least.
Phew! Of course, I have the power to envision this, but not more than just a clue to where to start coding. Hence, this final question -- has this been done already? Is there stuff one can look at, study? |
Re: A Perl-app for twingling
by perrin (Chancellor) on May 18, 2004 at 19:51 UTC
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You might get more help if you explain what you are talking about. The encyclopedia entry is almost information-free, and you seem to be talking about searching e-mail, but I can't see why that would require development when there are already hundreds of apps written for it (not to mention IMAP and any old mail client). | [reply] |
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Well, I have written up as much as I could. It is hard to describe, but anyone who has tried out any of Zoe, Six Degrees, or Emila will know instantly what I talking about. They are all free, so those who are interested can download and try them out. I have provided links above. Nonetheless, I will try to describe it here.
Most apps that search email search for matches against user-provided text strings, or some email headers or some combo thereof. The search is initiated by the user. There is nothing serendipitous.
The above apps are different. Let me try to describe it. You click on a date in a calendar, and all the emails for that date show up. You click on an email, and the text of that email shows up with all the html links, all the email lists, attachments, and people mentioned in that email neatly categorized on the side. Click on any one of them and related info shows up. It is like wandering through a maze... every turn brings up a new view.
Here is one analogy... Netflix vs. Blockbuster. Without starting a religous war here, this is why I like BB over Netflix. With Netflix I have to know what I am looking for. I can search on genres and keywords and the app responds with films that match that. With BB I don't have to know anything. I simply wander the aisles and come across new films. The only controlling factor is the BB employee who placed them in the particular aisles. Its like comparing an online catalog with a library. They serve different functions. One can simply wander in a library and be delighted by different things that turn up with every turn one takes.
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Well, that sounds pretty straightforward actually. You need to index your mail based on various criteria, and then create a way to view them that links to other things related through those criteria. The obvious approach would be to use a database, build an indexer program that you can feed your mail to, and build a web application for displaying and cross-linking. The first step would be to decide which things you will cross-link on and work on creating a database schema and figuring out how to extract them from an e-mail.
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Re: A Perl-app for twingling
by mojotoad (Monsignor) on May 18, 2004 at 20:32 UTC
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Jamie Zawinski once described an Intertwingle project aimed at managing personal email repositories.
Some of this was discussed on perl monks: Managing a Personal Email Archive
I am personally interested in any results you come up with, so keep us informed!
Cheers,
Matt
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I am surprised though at the seeming lack of activity of interest in this area
I'm highly interested from a professional standpoint, it's a fascinating problem with lots of cool graph-theory type implications and room for all sorts of whiz-bang algorithmic voodoo. It's great. But as far as email goes, I'm *already* super organized, so I don't need the app at all. This is part of the problem, I guess, because someone who gets to the level where they can appreciate something like this probably doesn't need it, or could otherwise write similar software. But again, the theory is highly fascinating, and I'd love it if more things worked as an intelligent (emphasis on intelligent) database rather than a hierarchial file cabinet.
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Re: A Perl-app for twingling
by dimar (Curate) on May 20, 2004 at 06:54 UTC
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The Problem: Why "Twingling" has not caught on
It's not that people aren't interested in it, it's that people's perception has been 'atrophied' by the pervasive 'folders and files' metaphor. Consequently, there are two types of computer users, those who can benefit from this approach, and those who don't yet realize they can benefit from it.
See, for example, limits of folders and
more limits of folders.
and
Pivot tables and
faceted classification.
Just some links off the tippy top of my head ... this 'twingling' thing is not a new phenomenon, but another name for something that hasn't seem to catch on in the mainstream. Perhaps 'twingling' will catch some hype and get people's attention. Perhaps the *multitude* of other versions of the same thing (but by different names) will catch on ... (btw anyone know where the word 'twingling' even comes from???)
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btw anyone know where the word 'twingling' even comes from???
Look at the "intertwingularity" link in my first post above.
Btw, your observation is correct. Which is why I am surprised, because it is not only a useful concept, it is tres cool to boot.
Thanks for the links on "limts of folders," etc. Good reading.
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