David writes:

I plugged a Kens­ing­ton Opti­cal Mouse into my power­book and remapped the but­tons to be gmail actions. Right click is “archive” and the bot­tom left and right clicks use the vi/gmail map­pings for up and down. Click­ing the left and right but­tons simul­ta­ne­ously launches gmail in your default browser. Now that I have mapped mouse but­tons to vi nav­i­ga­tion keys, I feel like the cycle of UI design is com­plete once and for all.

Mouse and other I/O appli­ca­tions usu­ally offer appli­ca­tion level cus­tomiza­tion. In the brave new world of thin clients and web-centric appli­ca­tions, users will want to cus­tomize these but­tons at a web-server or even page level.

Pretty cool. The ulti­mate step in online brand­ing is hav­ing users incor­po­rate your func­tions into their mouse … or mobile phone. This is a marketer’s dream and a step closer to Seth Godin’s con­cept of intra­venous mar­ket­ing.