Forgetful Interfaces

Computers are discrete. Governed by 1s and 0s, they dutifully record all our traces. Half of the time, that’s not so bad. It’s a good thing my bank doesn’t lose track of my money. But when it comes to that other half, when we create and publish huge amounts of material online, perhaps it is too bad.

I believe there are two kinds of content, let’s name them ephemeral content and solid content. Ephemeral content has a short life span, the Jaiku I just posted about my train schedule looses its value the moment I arrive (1h45 from now). Pictures I take during the day with my camera phone are mostly ephemeral as well. They tell a very small story whose context is quickly lost. The pictures I took during my stay in Geneva for LIFT 07, however, are part of a photo album on Flickr and very much solid. I wouldn’t care if my Jaiku message got lost, but seeing those photos disappear would make me sad.

And yet, Jaiku stores my messages forever. Truth be told, you can currently only go back about ten pages, but when that changes you’ll be able to go back right to autumn 2006, when I started posting on Jaiku. And frankly, I’d prefer it if that wouldn’t happen.

On the other hand, there’s a ton of value in those messages. For me, but also for historians and writers of my autobiography (hah! as if that would happen). I wouldn’t want the information to be destroyed, either.

One solution would be to limit the view to the past week, but come on, that’s not very interesting. My Jaiku contacts for example know about the messages, perhaps they want to look them up. Give them full access? Well, preferably not. What would be really, really nice, is being able to search for messages using a rough time frame and some keywords. You know, just like you’d try to remember tips from the workshop about creativity you were in last year.

In other words, I want a forgetful interface.

Wew, took me some time to explain that, eh? If you’re still with me, great, and I hope you’ll be with me in Geneva when we’ll discuss the properties of ephemeral and solid content, and how forgetful interfaces. should act, and be created. Let’s make the web act more like we do, and get rid of that cold dehumanized computer.