ZOË: This looks very cool, but I don’t know if the world’s ready for it yet. It aggregates all sorts of…stuff on your machine and subjects it to a federated search. (Again reinforcing the point that even great taxonomies can get trumped by good search.)
The goal here is to do for email (starting with your personal mailbox) what Google did for the web… The Google principle: It doesn’t matter where information is because I can get to it with a keystroke. So what is Zoë? Think about it as a sort of librarian, tirelessly, continuously, processing, slicing, indexing, organizing, your messages.
I ran into something similar to this the other day with ScopeWare. I installed it, but I couldn’t figure out how to get it to do anything useful.
The taxonomy was always supposed to be the be-all and end-all of information architecture. A good, solid category structure was how all the information in an enterprise was supposed to fit together. But they're harder to build than you think. There are shades of gray and complications. You…