langreiter.com plain, simple: 2005-05-16-associativeAge

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2005-05-16-associativeAge

CREATED BY chris • LAST EDITED BY chris 7123 days AGO

Philip Greenspun: "There is nothing wrong with the hierarchical file system as a tool. Assuming you know a file's name, it provides O[log N] access to a corpus of N documents. This makes a hierarchical file system great for computer programs and computer programmers but why should users have to see the innards?" — Indeed.

"The average household user of a personal computer doesn't need anything with many more features tha[n] the Palm OS or Microsoft Outlook and probably has far fewer megabytes of documents than he or she has of archived email."

Not quite unrelated: Gmail as the Notepad of the Web

While I'm not a particularly heavy Gmail user (using it mainly as mailing list reader), I've been increasingly finding myself sending small snippets of information (dates, adresses) to my own account in the past couple of weeks - sort of like a private Wiki, but with the ~~questionable~~ added benefit of not even having to think of a somewhat sensible page name. There's something very appealing about the "just dump it in there, find and fix/enrich it later" approach to information un-management ...

Addendum: As Gavin dutifully reminded me, one can't really talk about Email as user interface without mentioning that recent entry on the Smallthought blog. Asynchronicity, multiplexing, persistence, we can have it all.