That's exactly what I'm planning to build! I'm not sure if I should go hybrid or all-in.
By hybrid I mean that people could receive regular human-readable emails, but senders could include a small url or tag that links to the semantic information (it could be an event invitation, receipt, valid email confirmation, password changing, task proposal, marketing offer, flight information, etc.).
The "smart" email client could then automatically interpret semantic emails, and act accordingly. It would also hide those emails, and only show you the relevant notification.
Unless you plan to discover new ideas by mistake, you absolutely need a vision, and then find the way to get there.
If you start from the bottom (bottom-up), you'll constantly compromise technically, as lots of things are not yet possible to do.
If you start from the top (top-down), you'll "know" that it's possible to accomplish, and you'll only have to find out how to do it.
You have far more chance to solve an enigma if you know there is an answer than if you don't. Visionary ideas make you believe the answer exists, which makes it much more easier to accomplish.
Clearly, you have to "know" that it's possible to accomplish and then find out how to do it. I don't think even PG was disagreeing with that.
When he says "don't have a blueprint", he is saying don't presuppose you know how to get from where you are to replacing Google as the de facto search tool. Instead, just make progress. It seems you agree with that.
I don't know what your product is or does, but from what I just read, it doesn't seem to be very innovative.
You're building a faster horse instead of a car.
The solution lays in semantic communication. As long as you mainly communicate with text that someone has to read, analyze and understand, you're doing it wrong.
The problem as we see it isn't so much email's fault. The problem is that the number of contacts we have is growing exponentially due to the introduction of "white pages" (linkedin, facebook and the internet fall under this) - you no longer have to meet someone to find out their email address and email them.
Chat / IM is text and yet that isn't a problematic communication medium because there is a small set of people you chat to. The problem isn't the number of emails, sentences or words, its the number of people we are connected with, its relationship management.
Sure some magical AI to read emails and books for you, summarize them and even reply for you may be great. Or organize your mail into folders for you based on clustering or some ontology. The problem is these solutions never work.
Our focus is on organizing mail around people, and in turn organizing people into groups, which is not some magical silver bullet, but still a radical improvement over an unorganized mailbox.
The problem with emails is not the spam or the sorting, it's that they're not actionable. Tasks in a to-do list are almost directly actionable, and that's what most emails aim for.
To be honest, I think I prefer your app to my app :P Just move the about section somewhere else (and link to it from the application bar menu). You should also sync the details animations.
Where do you get your data from? Do you use data scraping?
For the moment, you can read posts using iHackerNews (that's the quick solution I came out with). I'm working on native comments but it will take some time (don't expect it this month, I'm too busy).
It just looks awful.