Search to Activity

This is the idea that instead of URLS one could just type something like Mark, and a bunch of potions would pop up. These options would include things like, contact methods (email, im, phone), sites, feeds, projects etc.. I think this is most interesting because right now there are a lot of good solutions that seem to stay independent. For instance, if I type something into Google I will find a lot of things. If I type something into Address Book I may find some things, come things I want but perhaps some of the things I want will not yet be back in Address book. Similarly, if I wanted to email someone rather fast I would essentially first have to create a new email. If I wanted to instead of emailing them look at their LinkedIn page I would have to either know their LinkedIn URL or first search or go to my contacts list in LinkedIn. 

My argument is that all this data, like the URLs of a bunch of my friends LinkedIn pages, and their email addresses and their websites and their blogs are all stored in places that are accessible already (many are stored simply in the browsers URL auto complete. So, there should be a thing that checks who a page or account is about and then associates them with it. So if i start typing there name in or a service in I get either a semantically useful list of their sites or a list of people I know using that service respectively. Just to give a completely obvious example, when I type Will (someone I studied with) in the right place I should see an option to instantly email him, I should see his online presence, and I should see some contact or info like any data that is on his openID. 

I know that things like Quicksilver and Launchy do this a little but in terms of process optimisation they are still off the mark. They are also not integrated into many systems that people do not really realise they use, especially online services. 

This sort of tool could greatly increase the effectiveness of things like GTD by providing a really 1 to 1 connection with the information that is known by a user and the tasks they want to perform. 

The web is the world and seemingly a large part of the future of computer platforms. If we want this to be the case we should make good tools to interact with it. All the current browsers and most of the browser extensions that exist today do not take good consideration of this fact. I think this feature is one of many that could be used to improve the human interface with the web and the world. 

More on why I think browsers suck later.