Okay, let’s go all the way back to the Anti-Mac interface. It’s been, believe it or not, five years since you first read it. And, of all the good points, the points that seemed obvious even then, and the points that seem obvious now, the one that sticks in my head is this quote:

“Notify me if there is a new message from Emily.”

I want to type that into my URL address bar and have it work correctly. But I have confidence Microsoft will make that work reasonably well by about 4 years from now. The bigger concern is that I don’t have any bots on my buddy list (even with the recent additions that I got from Konstantinos) that I can just type to and say “Remind me to check my messages in an hour.”

Thinking… I don’t care about whether it’s IM or a Command Line interface or an Address Bar, I care more about getting some simplified sentence-like commands that are forgiving of syntax. Whether I say “remind me” or “tell me” or “jog my memory” (well, no, I’d never actually say that one) I want it to understand and to perform that simple task. Outlook already does that, if I tell it “next Thursday” for an appointment. But I think it’s easier to implement as a bot interacting via AIM than to write some behemoth desktop app.