Tuesday 2 August 2011

Everything in one place

I was searching my Gmail today for message I'd received and couldn't find it. It turned out the message had been received as a text message to my phone, so I was looking in the wrong place. This highlights the need for further integration of information and communications technologies. I need everything in one place. Everything. Absolutely everything. The personal digital life aggregator.

And I need to be able to search it.

This includes:
  • documents (the kind we typically have stored on our hard drives, but soon to be stored in the cloud) (text, image, sound, video, etc)
  • emails
  • calendar
  • voicemails (with transcription)
  • text messages
  • blog posts
  • forum posts
  • data from apps on my phone (e.g. my to do list)
  • rss feeds
  • articles I've read
  • web favorites/bookmarks
  • bank statements, bills, pension, investments, etc
The key barriers to the everything in one place dream are:
  • company security policies will prevent your content from work being in your personal "one place"
  • closed online systems that don't allow a metasystem to pull it all together
  • content that's not owned by one person (e.g. a photo taken by one person, but tagged by another; or a collaboratively produced presentation)

1 comment:

adreama said...

Add contacts to that list.

Another point: ability to access that "one place" from any device.