The way things "should be done" is the way people want them to be done and are used to them being done.

All this "intuitive" BS is nonsense. What is "intuitive" about seeing a bunch of conversations in your GMail inbox over a bunch of individual emails? There's nothing in human instinctual behavior that would guide that. We know to do something like that because we have learned how to do it.

And there is just no reason to have to learn a new email system like GMail when we have all already learned how to use mail clients that show individual emails. I still can't get anything done beyond the most basic tasks in GMail because of the stupid conversations and labels, and I've basically given up on the whole service because of it. I used to use email for everything, now I use it as a last resort - I use Outlook Express for most other things that I can't use Outlook for. (My version of Outlook Express still shows individual emails; I didn't realize there was a version with conversational view. Now I know to avoid it.)

You know what I wish people would stop doing? Assuming I'm too dumb to read individual emails, but smart enough to learn a whole new system of GMail conversations that I've never seen before. And I'm sure a lot of other people feel the same way.

I've been doing some thinking about tinyurl-like services lately, and I've since implemented WhenGuard, one such service with a time twist. WhenGuard is a content timing service that automatically publishes and unpublishes any Internet content using a time-sensitive URL alias. This alias is known as a just-in-time link, or a jitlink.

Bloggers, music bands, educators and anyone who wants to hold time-sensitive information until a certain time, or to invalidate it after a certain time has passed, can create jitlinks to alias that content and distribute the jitlinks ahead of time to anyone who might be interested. Jitlinks can be used for RSS content as well. If you create a jitlink that publishes and unpublishes around an RSS feed, such as a Twitter feed, you've essentially spliced a 'show' out of an RSS 'channel'. If you combine this with a perpetually caching RSS reader like Google Reader, you've in effect created TiVo for RSS.

Please check out WhenGuard and send some feedback my way from here. I'd be very grateful indeed!