Productivity Markup Language

This may be wandering a little too far off of the ODI reservation, but it's interesting, so perhaps worth a mention...

I am wondering if it might cool to design an XML language for productivity. That is, a standard, machine-independant language for describing to-dos and appointments. Basically, this would allow you to capture your life in one machine-readable file.

Along with this could be deployed a simple briefcase server. You can send it a copy of your file and it stores it. You send it an update, it updates it. You request the latest version, it sends it.

Why is that latter part cool? Because then we can allow the full power of open source to attack the problem of making better and more targeted productivity applications. For example, anyone could then program their own web interface. I log on to cooltodolist.com and enter my username and this website grabs my XML file from our server then displays it in some cool way. When you logoff cooltodolist.com it synchs the changes back to our server. Maybe, I'm going through a day where I care more about my calender, so I log on to calendarninja.com, which is someone else's interface that grabs this same data, but now does cool things with displaying the calendar. Hundreds of other web interfaces might also be made available. Your data is not stuck with one application. It is open and available to anyone whom you give your password. So anyone can try their hand at writing a program to display it. And you can try anyone with ease. Competition breeds innovation. Let's take the examples farther. People could start writing different apps to run on PCS, and Macs, and Linux machines. Each different app synchs the same data with our open server, but each doing something different and cool with it. Are you an outlook user at work? No problem. Someone can write a simple script for Outlook such that the first thing in the morning you do is download your latest file, convert it to Outlook format, and import it into the program. The last thing you do is export it out of outlook, convert it back to our XML format, and upload it to the server. Then, perhaps, on the way home, you think up a todo. No problem, maybe someone wrote a cool SMS-based program for your cell-phone. Or maybe you are on a public computer checking your e-mail, when you remember an appointment. Again, no problem, maybe someone wrote a nice e-mail interface where you simple e-mail "add appointment 'doctors on 11/8'" to some address that will sync it up with your data.

Your data rests with no one program or company. Therefore, you can use any program any one wrote at any time and get at your same list of to-dos and appointments. This gives incentive for people to write cool applications. They don't have to convince you to switch to their service as the center of your productivity universe. They only have to convince you to try it. You can use it as much or as little as you want with no inconvience, as your data is open.

To summarize, the key idea here is to open source productivity. More and more companies are trying to offer sleek productivity interfaces to your information (i.e., backpackit.com). But the problem is that each holds on to the data. If, instead, we give you a place to store your data and have it be available to any program that anyone writes (requiring your password of course), then entrepreneurial hackers can write hundreds of their own backpackit.com's. And you can try and switch between all offerings with ease, because none own your data.