381961 - Create a Tag Cloud for E-mail

Status: NEW

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, enhancement)

Description

[Scott MacGregor]

This could start off as an extension or something we add to the product. 

We've invested a lot of time into building our tagging feature and a we've gotten a lot of great feedback on it. We should start exploring ways to expose and make it more useful.

One possibility is to enhance our tagging support with a tag cloud to make it easier to see how you are using tags and to quickly search on popular tags. 

Some criteria for this feature:

1)The # of times a tag has been applied to a message is used as the size of the tag in the cloud.
2) Tags in the cloud should be clickable, clicking on a tag inside the cloud should trigger a search in the 3-pane window showing all the messages with that tag. 
3) The tag cloud could be contained in a separate xul window or maybe as a xul popup in the 3-pane itself. Where in the UI we show the tag cloud can be easily adjusted once we have a working implementation.

For reference here's some PHP for building a tag cloud:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tag_cloud
http://www.lotsofcode.com/php/tutorials/tag-cloud

Comment 1

[Scott MacGregor]

Some implementation notes if someone wants to work on this:

1) nsIMsgTagService should support registering tag listeners to make it easy to keep track of how often a tag is applied (or removed) from a message.

Comment 2

[Scott MacGregor]

I just found this HTML / JS driven tag cloud online:

http://quotes.burntelectrons.org/tags

David suggested several other applications for this that would probably be even more useful than tags:

tag clouds for msg senders to see who you get mail from. Tag clouds for message subjects, etc. 

Comment 3

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

The following related bugs also want to make applying tags easier:
Bug 363473 - Implement (dockable) tags pane with list of tags
Bug 370076 - create/apply tags using the keyboard