I need a Google Apps Mashup

Google Docs is nice. Calendar is really nice. Gmail is ok, too. The notion that you can more or less use any of the tools without going too far is pretty nice, and they’ve opened things up with the API just enough to get some useful plugin capabilities, *and* there’s a Python client available for the Google Data API, which is nice (my experience with Google Spreadsheets notwithstanding). The problem now is that I would like something that goes beyond a simple plugin.

Outside of my day job doing infrastructure architecture and sysadmin work (with some development thrown in for good measure), I run Python Magazine. I have a ton of communication and deadlines to track in working for the magazine; I get several article proposals per week (sometimes per day), I’m working with contract people, other editors, technical folks on the back end of things, layout folks, the people writing the checks and managing invoices, and whoever I need to talk to for business development tasks. I send emails to a great number of people every day, just for the magazine.

I use Gmail for my Python Magazine mail (my pythonmagazine.com addy is forwarded to gmail. GMail also lets me send mail using my pythonmagazine.com email address (otherwise, this would not be a usable solution for me).

I use Google Calendar to track deadlines. Each article deadline is a full day event in Google Calendar. I’d also *like* to use Google Calendar as something of a logging tool to track out-of-band conversations I have with people on IRC or (gasp!) in person.

The reason I haven’t gone this route yet is because there’s no interface where I can, say, search for a person’s name, and get a nice list of the things related to that person, grabbed from GMail *and* Google Calendar (not that you’d need to stop integration efforts at those two services – they’re just the two most useful to *me* right now).

For my purposes, it would even be OK if Google just added an “include calendar results” in the GMail search interface.  That would give me a list, ordered by date, of conversations via email, perhaps GTalk, out-of-band events logged with Calendar, and deadlines, also tracked via Google Calendar. It could essentially be a time line of my working relationship with a person, which can be very useful.

It might even be useful to get a time line of events and conversations related to a specific topic, rather than a specific person. If I could do a search for “contract request”, this hypothetical interface would actually spit out a time line showing all of the interactions between me and our contract person specifically in relation to commissioning articles, because I use the term “contract request” in the subject of all contract requests, and would naturally carry that consistency into notes I might take about contract requests in Google Calendar or other apps.

Well, that’s my latest idea. I’m not sure what form the app would take. Ideally it would be a web page I can get to from anywhere, but I have yet to do anything significant with Python as a web scripting language (though I’ve rewritten a whole lot of old Perl code in Python for sysadmin-ish stuff). A fat client application would inevitably *not* be useful to a whole lot of folks… I dunno. Thoughts hereby solicited on that.

Let me know if something already exists that does this, or if I just wrote this whole post for nothing because Google already does this somehow. I don’t think it does. It seems to treat applications as separate entities, and the same account using different apps are different entities as well. There needs to be a higher level vision of the user as a single object across all of the applications in order to get at the kinds of interesting uses of data that are possible and would add a lot of value to the individual services. My $.02.