Since I had so much trouble managing my entire digital information universe [1], I decided to scratch my itch and solve it for myself and maybe others as well. Here are my ideas about my product:
- Manages the entire range of personal (and maybe business) information/content: Documents, Media, Messages (email, instant, etc.), Contacts, Bookmarks, Calendar, etc.
- Tag based, so that the question of where to put and find content is quite a bit easier to answer. Think of a set of flat folders, on one or more devices, within which the files are stored with tags attached. However, there will be some improvements on the usual implementation of tag-based systems out in the wild. Since people find navigating/browsing files more natural than searching, virtual folders will be dynamically generated to provide guided navigation. Also, entire folders can also be treated as atomic and tagged/managed as one object, useful for repositories and projects. And, heuristics (and maybe AI) will be used to automatically tag files when they are imported into the tool, greatly reducing the tedium of adding tags the first time.
- Is file based, so that all information is ultimately physically stored as individual files. This allows information to be more easily managed on a physical level: moved around, backed up, exported/imported, searched, navigated, etc. without the restrictions imposed by the opaque islands of information we have now. So in addition to docs, each email/instant message, contact, scheduled task/event, bookmark, etc. would ultimately be stored as a file, unlocking all the things you can do with files.
- Has a local web-based UI launched from a local agent, so actual file content does not usually need to move across the network and stays local, and the tool is also easily multi-platform, with consistent UI irrespective of platform.
- Provides a cloud web UI as well, that communicates with content devices through the local agent, so that content stored across multiple devices can be managed in one central location, even without direct access to those devices, team/org features can be provided. However, file content still stays local, except when shared.
- Provides tools for exporting data as file from the data islands of various apps and service, and backing up as files to cloud storage services.
My vision is a situation where I am in charge of my own data irrespective of whatever device, app, or service I use, can ensure that it is always available and will not be lost, and that I can easily navigate and search through it all to find whatever I want, no matter how scattered and massive it is.
I welcome your thoughts. What would make this work for you? Would you mostly prefer a cloud UI or a local UI? Are there any technical or market gotchas I should be aware of?
[1] Here are some of my issues with personal information management affordances of current tech, which is driving me to work on a solution:
- Our data is too bound to device and vendor islands. Can't easily move my information across Apple/Google/Whatsapp, etc accounts. Can't easily merge and de-duplicate either. I almost always somehow lose data whenever I have to move to a new phone, etc.
- Hard to own your data on many services: Discord, Slack, etc. Can't easily export, search
- Hard to have a 360 overview and handle on all your data assets and query them in consistent manner
- Files as a unit of information storage and management is very ergonomic; we shouldn't allow that concept to be buried by vendors for their own gain.