9cays: Embracing The Email Beast For Lightweight Collaboration

I am fond of quoting my dear friend, Doc Searls, who once said, "Email is where knowledge goes to die." But still, I spend a lot of time in email, and I seem to remain in that workspace fringe zone where I am working with a shifting crowd of collaborators, sometimes on very short-term or low-wattage projects, and we never seem to get around to setting up a Basecamp project (and Workstreamer is still in closed beta).

I have reverted back to using a lightweight (gasp!) email-based collaboration tool called 9cays. At least I plan to try it for a few weeks and see if it helps clear things up a bit for me, and others.

I reviewed 9cays in March 2006 (see First Look: 9Cays), and at the time I said,

9Cays looks like a simple way to manage discussion threads, and to put them up at a shared web page. While I may feel like threaded messages in Gmail are similar, they are not shared. Note that every conversation has an RSS feed too, so you can be notified through that mechanism if you'd like, or the RSS from a thread can be placed into some feed handler: for example, I could create a 9Cays conversation, then link that with a Typepad feed, and have it show up on a blog.

I haven't spent enough time with 9Cays to figure out exactly how useful it is, or what other tools it is likely to displace or support, but I am intrigued.

9cays has been around a while, and not getting much press these days. I checked with the nice folks at Alien Camel (don't ask) and they are supporting the product: it's open to new users, and they will provide support. It seems a sideline of other email solutions they are selling, but as result you don't have to worry that they will close up shop on you.

The model of use is simple: once you have set up an account at 9cays, just add go@9cays.com to the To: or Cc: line in an email, and 9cays will create a shared webpage for the email thread, like this example:

9cays: Re: Mockup of /Son of /Message, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

9cays takes over the email thread after the first go, and sends out the emails to those involved, so after the first message you only have to reply to the emails, without worrying about addresses. You can also start new threads with existing participants there, too.

The URLs are open, so there is basically no security involved. No login, etc. But for everyday coordination about the PTA meeting or poker night, no big deal. In my case, I am not tremendously concerned that someone might find out my plans for /Message's facelift (as Matt Balara and I are discussing in the thread above).

You can go to the webpage and directly add notes, as well, as I did in the example shown.

This model of email collaboration matches my current model of integrated email and tasks, which is based on Remember The Milk (see A Simple Way To Simplify Email at Unclutterer).

Whenever I create a new thread at 9cays -- by sending an email with 'go@9cays.com' in the To: line, for example -- I receive an email response back from 9cays. Using the Remember The Milk integration, I 'star' the email, which creates a new task in my RTM tasklist, and I copy and paste the URL of the discussion into the URL field of the RTM task. Sounds harder than it is, but has the result that the conversation is only a click away.

I like the idea of moving from an email conversation to something a bit more shared and permanent, so I am hopeful that this will work as a stopgap. I find that the only aspect of Basecamp that I am using these days is the blog-like messaging: I don't use their tasks, calendar, shared docs, or chat. Partly that is because I am embedded in gmail/Remember The Milk, partly because I am using Backpack as a personal information tool, and partly because I am the lead designer on Workstreamer.

But this notion of stepping from email to a lightweight collaboration space has merits, independent of my particular situation.

PS It would be nice to see an integration of 9cays and Remember The Milk functionality. RTM has the notion of blog-post like 'notes' associated with tasks, for example, but they are buried too deep in the UI to be truly usable. Consider a situation where an email thread could be managed a la 9cays automatically linked with a RTM task, the way that I am doing it manually at this point.

Comments

[John Tropea]

You are totally right Stowe

Sometimes doing a task is very minimal, and setting up a room is too much trouble, so you just use email. But I think 9cays sits inbetween this issue nicely.

In effect it allows you to publish a blog post by email and then others can reply to that blog post by email.

All this without setting up a blog or forum for your centralised two way conversation.

It's a blog post not a blog.

I too posted about this a while back
http://libraryclips.blogsome.com/2007/01/30/email-collaboration-re-visited-forum-add-on-9cays-and-grouptivity/

And posted my frustration on low effort tasks
http://libraryclips.blogsome.com/2008/05/16/when-re-purposing-email-is-difficult/

BTW-Wrike issues tasks by email, not sure how it's centralised
http://www.wrike.com/benefits-for-executives.jsp