Thank you Daniel for pointing us to Joyent, has anyone had a chance to check it out? http://joyent.com/product/

I only glanced at the demos briefly, but one feature jumped out at me in particular. They have a notion of sharing, sharing of all kinds of items: emails, events, contacts, documents, anything you can find to put in the Joyent system.

In the upper right hand corner of the detail view of all Joyent items are 3 tabs.

1. One for adding tags to the item.
2. One for granting access privileges to people to share/view/edit the item
3. And finally, one for pinging particular people to go check out the item.

No. 3 is essentially something we've discussed for a long time that we've referred to as sending "capital N" notifications on shared items. I sent out a link to a description of it in the context of Email design a week ago? (http://wiki.osafoundation.org/bin/view/Projects/CommunicationsDesignNew)

However, this got me thinking more about the specific situations in which sending capital N notifications might be useful and "collaborative management of mailing lists" or more generally, "group discussions via email" came up.

Some scenarios to consider:

You don't have time to keep up with the copious amount of information zipping by on the design list. What if:

1. Other people could help you and ping you when they think something is especially relevant to you. (Because the item is shared, you wouldn't just end up with a duplicate copy of it in an email forward, it would simply put a "Jeremy thinks you should read this flag on the item you already have in your Chandler.)
2. When looking at the list, you could see which emails were getting read or flagged to be read as a way to prioritize how you start to sift through this enormous pile of information.
3. What if Chandler could learn over time who's flags you responded to the most and prioritized your reading for you based on the reading and flagging patterns of other users "you trust". (ie. I always want to read what Karen's reading.)

This kind of "aggregated" prioritization is not new, it largely doesn't exist in the PIM space, but web services have had it forever. The most useful reviews float to the top in Amazon. Who are the most trusted sellers on Ebay? What are the most emailed articles on New York Times dotcome?