Action@Home

From BusinessWeek: "Much of the truly exciting innovation in technology is now being developed for consumers."

It adds: "The real key to the exciting new products on display at CES -- and soon, at a discount electronics chain near you -- is that all these digital products are starting to work together in ways that make them much more useful. It's now relatively painless to film a child's birthday party with your camcorder, edit it on your PC, and burn it onto a DVD to send to relatives. Technofiles can display their own digital photos on their digital TVs' vibrant liquid-crystal displays. Or they can send audio files from a PC over their home wireless network to the new "media hub" -- a combination digital hi-fi stereo receiver, media server, and wireless router (think of a souped-up set-top box) -- in their living rooms."

End-to-end Network

Writes David Isenberg (IEEE Spectrum) on the move of network intelligence to the edges rather than being centralised:

The Internet, the world's overarching end-to-end network, is now the connectivity medium of communications. Yet telephone company networks are still centralized networks designed for a single application, voice. Phone companies still make more money from voice than from other network traffic, even though the volume of data traffic now exceeds voice. Furthermore, Internet voice is getting better and better—its quality can, in fact, far exceed the "toll quality" voice of plain old telephone service.

In addition, smart end devices can set up and manage telephone calls far better than a centralized network. (Why dial a number when you can double-click on it?) In fact, when voice is implemented in end devices, the ability to mix it into other kinds of interactions—online game play, collaboration, mutual Web surfing, and many more yet to be discovered—the idea of a "call" as a special, discrete event could well disappear.

The Internet stands on the brink of making the entire functionality of the telephone company obsolete. But that's not all—with access improvements within the grasp of today's technology, the Internet can do video entertainment better than broadcast, cable, or satellite television can. The Internet stands on the brink of subsuming the value of all existing special-purpose networks.

Simplifying Information Storage

From 0xDECAFBAD (via Scripting News and Jeremy Zawodny):

Years ago, when I first started using email, I did indeed do this with procmail and other arcane beasties. Then, I found myself cursing that I couldn't do cross-folder searches very easily. Also, the filters and folders started making less sense as their structure represented only one possible scheme for finding what I was looking for, and I was needing many possible kinds of schemes over time. So, eventually it all ended up in one pile, and searches became my way of finding things.

I abandoned bookmarks for Google by the same principle. Now, my bookmarks consist completely of bookmarklets and a few stray links to local on-disk pages like Python documentation. In fact, I'm wishing that I could create bookmark folders that are fed by Google API powered persistent searches.

that's what I want to see: Storage without explicit organization, but with super-rich metadata for super-fast searches. Allow me to create views made from persistent searches - my "project folder" is simply a collection of resources tied together by a common tag, one of many. And, if I want to form a project hierarchy, make my persistent searches into file objects too.

The main thing in all this, though, is that it be woven very deeply within the OS. I don't want a helper app. I want this to replace the standard metaphor completely.

For a start, I am doing to do one thing with my email folders. I have zillions of folders hierarchically organised in my Evolution (with all data stored on our "thick server"). Just have a single folder called "Keep" for all the emails I want to keep. Others are either in the Inbox or Deleted. And then, when I want to find an email, I just do a Search on the "Keep" folder (and perhaps the "Sent" folder, since that has a copy of everything that I write). Goodbye to all them folders. Lets see how it works.