We Need More Tools to Play Nicely Together

I just finished installing Google Desktop 4.5. This is my second try with Google Desktop, I tried it last spring and was disappointed with the performance. However, the performance issues seem to be solved with the latest version.

One thing that it does very nicely is to index my conversations (emails and chats) from GMail and GTalk. This is brilliant. One of the corner stones of good collaboration is good communication, and this helps me work with my previous communications. But, why doesn't Google Desktop work with my on-line files? I have my bibliography at CiteULike, documents and spreadsheets over at Google Docs, bookmarks at del.icio.us, photos at Flickr, movies at YouTube. Shouldn't I be able to index these too?

I think there is an incredible integration of tools that could be done through Google Desktop. I should be able to search for a keyword in my research, something like "biomechanics" or "L-systems", and get back my relevant research notes (from Google Docs), bibliography (from CiteULike), and correspondences (from GMail), all of which exist on line, along side my simulation results on my hard drive.

Additionally, a social layer could be added. If I could index my items online, I could also index my friends' and colleagues' publicly available items too.

And if anyone out there knows of tools to start this integration, please, let me know!

Idea Notes

Here's an item for the wishlist.

What I need is a good way to put together notes on ideas and initial sources that I have regarding nascent research projects. It needs to be a notebook, whiteboard & citation manager, orgranised by topics.

This sort of tool would let me create everything from back-of-the-napkin sketches to literature reviews to full-blown research proposals. When a project moves into the real work and research, then other tools would be appropriate.

I havn't found a tool that lets me do this nicely yet, though I haven't done any real inquiries into this idea either.