What if you got a short alert message (email, Twitter, SMS) from the library when your book was in, or when your laundry was done, or even when your car needs service?  One of these was already hacked together, but what if this was mainstream technology?  Imagine having Growl-like alerts on your laptop for all your “offline” tasks.  Add archiving and the ability to push alerts to other applications using standard formats and I think you have a pretty interesting concept.

Sound futuristic?  Okay, then let’s start with software.  What if all applications published events in the same way, perhaps to a central server on a network?  What if an enterprise application aggregated all these events and presented them in useful ways depending on the context and the request?  I jot down a note in Outlook, it gets recorded.  I submit my timesheet hours, and it, too, gets recorded.  Soon we’d have a personal “work stream” of everything we did during the day, providing insight into how we work and what we can do to become more efficient.