In a dream last night, I had a scathingly brilliant idea. For real. Let’s see if I can remember it.

It’s called STAMP, and that stands for Standard Time, Alarm, and Map Protocol. Here’s my thinking: every gizmo, every application that schedules events or alarms could encode a bit a packet of metadata, the STAMP, that could be recognized and used by every other gizmo or application for its own purposes.

Essentially, every scheduling application does this now, but the STAMP would be the bedrock that would allow the communication between different flavors.

For example, if I sent out an invitation to gather in the labyrinth at 8:00 tonight, and the STAMP included data about travel time, I’d set that to 0. But when Kevin got it and sent it to iCal, it would use whatever GPS was available to it to reset that to 15 minutes. (Heaven knows what Mike would get.)

I can see how if I had a doctor’s appointment scheduled and forgot about it and decided to drive up to Atlanta instead, my iPhone would keep upping that drive time until finally my distance away from PAPP Clinic intersected with the necessary time to drive back, and the alert that would have gone off at 3:45 goes off at 3:15 instead, giving me enough time to get back.

Other kinds of things that STAMP might include would be due dates/times, alerts (multiple, perhaps), etc.

I have no clue why I dreamed such a thing. Does it make any sense? I’ll try to remember other advantages of it if I can.