ISO50

I know Anand personally, he’s a nice guy.

lol @ “the same old crap we’ve had for years”. brace yourself for Windows 7, Scott!

Well, it’s almost finished, but fully operational. I’m using the beta 17 right now, with a few little bugs. It’s easy to use (no readmes or tutorials), and its walls and floor are customizable.
The folders open showing a quick spinning animation, that’s all.
And helps productivity: my desktop was almost covered of icons, and now it looks like that:

http://elradia.blogspot.com/2008/12/bump-top-estilo-portal.html

Peace

Visceral, but inherently limited

It’s intriguing and virtual physicality is visceral. It has a even higher visual correlation to a physical space we are familiar with. However, as much as you gain by the linking more closely to the physical, I believe it actually creates a lower and harder ceiling on the potential benefits of the concept.

The problem with reality is that a single object can only be in one place at one time. If you are very good at organizing yourself and are good at planning to organize yourself in the future, then this may not be a barrier. But for most people, as we learn new things, we either force the new ideas into the existing organization or we start branching off and creating new sections. Think of someone who has kept all the paper statements, receipts letters, brochures, books and any kind of paper for any length of time. For the short term, it’s pretty easy to spend time assessing once and organizing. But for any length of time — think a few years — it breaks down unless you stop, reassess and reorganize. We generally have a hard time planning for things that we don’t know.

The nature of digital information is that it doesn’t have the limitation to be in once place at time. Imagine an information space like the Internet. Imagine that you had to understand how the entire Internet is organized to be able to store and retrieve information. In the beginning, you might create a static directory — think Yahoo! circa 1996. That would work for awhile until people started adding whole new classes of information that you didn’t plan for. You can add new sections and add reference links and probably go on for a bit more. But the longer the information set grows, the more information is in the system, the more compromises you make, the harder it is to keep jamming stuff into the same organization. At some point, you need a new way to figure out what information means and how to retrieve it.

Enter Google search. Google does not try to present an organization or use any physical analog, it is merely a extremely recursive cataloger of information (how many meanings does a page have and what is it linked to?) and a really, really simple retriever. Give it a query and it dynamically creates a collection that matches it. It’s not a stack or pile or folder, it’s whatever you asked for presented in a prioritized collection of matching documents.

This dynamic, content-based, meaning-based approach is most likely the future of computer interfaces — not virtual physical spaces. These system have the ability to consume and collect untold, unpredictable amounts of data into an index without having a user work at maintaining it and then offering tools that can create collections on the fly, on demand, whenever the need arises. Of course, there are probably queries that repeated, so accommodations can be made for that. Of course there are just relatively special and small, ad hoc sets that just belong together, so users can define those also. But the magic is that the saved queries and the manual collections are no barrier to having that manually tagged information included into any dynamic collection. Of course, the queries don’t have to be text, they can be anything — faces of your friends or family, songs that have the same BPM. It’s limitless. The key element here is the hyper-reality of digital information. It’s way, way better at dealing with information (kinda like our brain). There is really no good reason to bring artificial barriers of physical space in the digital world.

It’s visceral. It may even be charming. But, it’s not the future.

Albert P. hit the nail on the head. These types of tech demonstrations will go the way of the video phone pictured in Scott’s latest entry today.