Lindholm, And The Future Of Lifecaching.
Christian Lindholm, a previous guest on The Gadget Show, has some interesting reflections on life caching. He explains that he’s had “an electronic calendar and notepad since 1992″. Since this time his digital memories have expanded dramatically, to the point where he now has 150 GB.
He then poses 6 lessons learned and questions. I think the answers are straight forward, so here are my thoughts on his thoughts.
Lesson 1: We will record more than can fit into a phone or a laptop and these devices are the ones people carry around. - Where is the unlimited storage?
Lesson 2: I have one life, it is seamlessly split between work and leisure. I really want to access it from anywhere. - Can this become the norm or will corporate IT and security personel decide, what I store? They already decide what computer I should use, what apps to use etc. (OK, most people are not working in large organizations.)
Lesson 3: I have one life and hence one asset of memories, it all has to be in sync. - What would be a sync solution robust enough to manage 1 million files that can be anywhere and everywhere in numerous ‘resolutions’?
Lesson 5: Having lots of memories in the pocket is fun and useful. – The sync challenge again.
I think the answer to lessons 1,2,3 and 5 are the same. I also think that my answer will require a mind shift for some people who have concerns about security, and so isn’t going to happen overnight. It eliminates the concern for unlimited storage and syncing. The answer is the network. I already have public and private photos collected on naked self portraits that I’m worried about leaking on to the internet.
Back to lesson 4.
Lesson 4: Different media has different value to me. - How can we make the system forget, but still be able to retrive if I really ‘think’ hard.
This is why I use Gmail. I can store all my mail, not just the important information, and search for it in the future if I realise I need to “remember” the conversation. Google of course provides the brains to perform the search, and I can allow myself to forget.
Lesson 6: When I am participating in an ‘event’ I also want to have pictures that I am in. – How can I get other people’s memories in which I appear, with ease?
Flickr goes part way in solving this problem with tags, and contacts. They certainly aren’t the be-all and end-all, but clever metadata and an accurate search engine (like Yahoo! for instance) will go a long way to enable me to access memories that I participated in.
I don’t think we’re there yet with my “networked” solution. I mentioned security, which I believe is a lot further forward than most people think, and will require a shift in corporate and individual mind-sets. Bandwidth is the other major hurdle. In many cases mobile bandwidth hasn’t reached the point that these services require. Certainly from my point of view it hasn’t reached a low enough cost. I’ve heard of capped data usage plans by some carriers, and that’s getting us to the right point. It’s still not cheap enough for ubiquity, which is where we need the service to be before people forget about the network, and just think about their memories.
Coincidentally, Nokia, and Christian, are at the forefront of making this service available. Have a look at the instructions for uploading Lifeblog photos to Flickr. It ain’t movies yet, but that’s only a matter of bandwidth, which is only a matter of time.