Pete Warden has a good post up titled Google, Yahoo and MSN Mail APIs.  In it, he points at the various “sort of APIs” that are “sort of public.”  Later that day, in response to Pete’s post (not really) Google released the Google Apps Email Migration API.  Progress.  Deva Hazarika – who runs ClearContext – followed with a post titled The three I’s of “Inbox 2.0” where he suggests the issue isn’t the inbox, but the address book. Finally Matt Blumberg, who attended the top secret email meeting that was at Fred Wilson’s office last week, finished us off with In Search of Automated Relevance where he talks about “the channel of communication.”

While a universal set of APIs isn’t the solution, I find the need for an API in the context of the ubiquitousness of SMTP to be entertaining.  Most of the “sort of APIs” are limited in some way (one directional, not secure, not all inclusive, limited to a finite amount of traffic, available only to premium accounts, broken.)  As far as I can tell, none of these APIs really address the core issues in Deva or Matt’s posts.

I shudder to think that we need another abstraction (integration?) layer.  But maybe we do, especially when you broaden “email” to “messaging.” 

If you don’t have a vice, I recommend it. 

My good friend and fellow VC blogger Fred Wilson has a music vice.  His blog mixes his passion (ok – kind word for vice) for music with all the other stuff he thinks about, works on, cares about and loves.  When he first started writing about music I tended to skim the posts – now I read every one of them and learn more about music from them than I do any other way.

For some people it is music, for some people it is wine, and for some people it is – well never mind.  My vice is art.  I grew up with art all around me.  My mom (Cecelia Feld) is an artist and as a kid I was dragged from gallery to museum to gallery.  I acted like you’d expect an 11 year boy to act (mom – where is the soccer ball – I don’t want to go to the stupid gallery) but by the time I got to MIT it had sunk in.  MIT doesn’t really have “minors” (they call them “concentrations” just to be different) – one of my concentrations was in Art History.  I now even enjoy going to Santa Fe for the weekend.

Amy and I love to wander around galleries and museums.  Our pace is the same – we are skimmers (people that move briskly through the museum absorbing everything) rather than people than stand and stare at the art.  We learned a long time ago (from a wise art collector) that you should “buy what you love to look at.”  It’s a simple strategy that has served us well over the past 15 years of evolving from beginning art collectors (I remember the agony we went through when we bought our first $1,000 piece since it was a meaningful percentage of my net worth at the time) to what we are today.

On Saturday, we bought our first Julien Stanczak piece while hanging out with our friends at the Danese Gallery in Chelsea.  It’s called Continuum (1995).

It’s a big boy – 70 inches by 70 inches.  Stanczak is an early practitioner of Op Art and is less well known than artists like Bridget Riley (and therefore much more affordable.)  Op Art is short for “optical art” and is typically a painting that takes advantage of optical illusions.  Standing in front of a piece like Continuum is mind blowing (and can quickly turn you into a zombie.)

In a couple of weeks, I’ll have Continuum hanging in our office in Boulder. Please feel free to stare at it.  If you enjoy the art posts, or want to learn more, follow the Wikipedia links above.  I’ve been pleasantly amazed with the quality and depth of information on Wikipedia around art and art history.  It’s a great (and safe) way to satisfy a vice.

I’ve started telling people that when we look back 20 years from now, the way we use computers today will look quaint, sort of like punch cards and room sized computers do today.

The "book" is also on my list of quaint things.  I don’t think the book is fundamentally going anywhere – yet.  While the promise of the electronic book has been a promise for a long time, Amazon’s Kindle might finally deliver on it.  Steven Levy has a great article on it in Newsweek titled The Future of Reading (which I – ahem – read online.) 

I’ve had a Sony eReader for a year and I "like" it, but don’t love it.  The selection of books is weak (I still buy 10 physical books for everyone 1 ebook), it sucks at handling non-Sony eReader format (e.g. PDF’s), it’s not connected to the Internet (so I have to buy books on the computer and connect my eReader to sync them), and it has a bunch of little quirks that add up over time.

I don’t know if Kindle will nail everything, but the description of it sounds awesome.  Once I get one and use it for a little while I’ll tell you more.  Regardless, I expect I’ll still be lugging my books around with me for a while.

In the past month, I’ve had two situations where I came within three seconds of grabbing my Lenovo x60 (running Vista) and smashing it on the ground, stomping up and down on it, and then lighting it on fire.  The only thing that kept me from doing this was that I didn’t have a video camera handy and didn’t want to waste a Youtube content creation moment (e.g. "VC accidentally burns down office building after being driven crazy by laptop – full story at 6 o’clock.")

Last week, after my Lenovo x60 rebooted three times (and ate 30 minutes of my life) in the middle of my day, I decided that it was time to try something different.  So – I’ve ordered a MacBook Pro which arrived on Friday.

2.4GHz 7200rpm Intel Core 2 Duo Processor, 4GB RAM, 160GB Hard Drive,  SuperDrive 8x (DVD±R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW), 10/100/1000 Ethernet, WiFi 802.11b/g, Bluetooth 2.0 EDR, 15" Widescreen

I’m looking for software help.  What should I get?  I’m loading it up will all the obvious stuff (Office, VMWare, Parallels, EVDO) but looking for friendly hints and tips, especially for a guy who has spent the last 10 years living in Windows.

Please comment freely.

I’m sitting at the W Hotel in Union Square as Amy packs up.  We are finally heading home to Boulder after being on the road for 10 days.  We had an awesome time this week in Manhattan – one of our favorite cities away from home.  But – we are both fried from full days and awesome dinners / late nights.  Plus, our pants are tight.

Earlier this week I had a fascinating couple of hours with some smart friends talking about email.  Two hours later, we had a lot more questions and things to think about.  Some of the thoughts are up on the blogs of Fred Wilson, Tom Evslin, and Jeff Pulver.  Fred’s insight that we are really taking about "messaging", not "email" is an important one.

I just heard them say the word "delicious" on TV and my brain parsed it as del.icio.us.  I just went out in the hallway of the fifth floor and told the three kids running around yelling at each other to chill out a little.  Time to go home.

If you are following along at home, a gang of us are getting together in NY today to discuss email.  Tom Evslin – one of the gang – has a blog post on his pre-meeting thoughts titled Thinking Aloud.  I just read a pile of stuff about email in Slate including The Death of E-Mail.  Don Dodge (who I should have invited to this meeting) and I have had a fascinating exchange (pun intended) about this over the past few days.  This will undoubtedly be a interesting meeting.

CIO Magazine, that paragon of business wisdom, has a a list of five Five Favorite Facebook Widgets for Business Users.  My TechStars friends J-Squared weigh in on the list with Sticky Notes.   Entertaining.

Hedge fund Pardus Capital Management which owns 2.6% of Delta and 4.82% of United is urging them to merge.  While this might be good for Pardus, as a frequent traveler on United out of DIA, this sounds like a really bad idea to me.  Probably 50% of the flights that I’ve been on since United came out of bankruptcy have had some sort of problem (mechanical, routing, crew delay, undermined) and I have several situations where the plane simply didn’t show up. 

I’m actually starting to be impressed with the TSA folks – in comparison to United.  At least my experience with them is more random and entertaining – I never really know what to expect.  With United, I’ve become conditioned to just expect that things aren’t going to go as planned.

At BlogWorld last week, there was a lot of chatter about ClosedPrivate.  Several of the key members of the initiative are blogging up a storm about it and there have been invitations to conferences to discuss ClosedPrivate vs. OpenSocial.

Lijit has even managed to turn me into a search wijit.  My favorite search term – ClosedPrivate.

Yes – we had a lot of fun at BlogWorld, even though we ate way too much sushi at Nobu on Thursday night.  Ok – it was the sake that did us in, not the sushi.