http://www.plastic.com/article.pl?sid=01/05/18/1818239
David Gelernter is the fellow who invented Linda, the tuple space paradigm
now called T-Spaces (IBM), JavaSpaces (Sun) and so forth. He also created
LifeStreams, a time-based metaphor for information management. This
article is an interview with him. Here is a quote from the intro.
"One of the most useful ways to detect potential new avenues in the
software world is to observe the unusual ways in which people interact with
their interfaces, pushing them in surprising directions and using tools to
do things that they weren't originally designed to do. For the past year or
so, I've found myself using my mail client, Eudora, as my default scratch
notepad; when I need to jot down a number or sketch out a few quick ideas
or take notes during a meeting -- anytime I'm doing quick, spontaneous
writing -- I find myself doing it in an email message, and not a word
processor or a notepad application. It took me a while to notice that I had
developed this habit, but once I did, I tried to figure out what was
drawing me to Eudora over more conventional tools.
Partially, it's the auto-save function, and the fact that my email client
is always open. But mostly, the appeal is that any notes I create in Eudora
are automatically saved as part of a timeline in my out box. There, I can
seen them all lined up chronologically, and when I'm looking for something,
I don't have to think, "What did I call that document?" or "What folder did
I put that file in?" I just think to myself, "Okay, I wrote down that
number two days ago." Once you reach a certain threshold of data, which
seems relatively low, the time-based metaphor trumps the spatial or
semantic metaphors of the traditional folder system. "
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