| The ultimate task optimization is to eliminate the need to perform the task in the first place. It’s difficult to do better than a 100% reduction in effort. It’s been almost a decade since Bill French and I, working together on a project code named “Elmer” first discussed the idea of “information finding you” rather than “you finding information”. It’s the ultimate optimization of search. Imagine, exactly at the moment you realize you need to find something, that very something, somehow, finds you and arrives in just the right format, and in just the right context for the task at hand.  Around that same time, Microsoft introduced a new technology known as “smart tags” that was a step in this direction. Smart tags are words or phrases that appear in office documents—e-mail, Word, Excel, Visio, etc.—that are automatically hyperlinked in real-time to relevant actions based on current context. For example, a phone number may be linked to Skype (if you have Skype) to make a call and to your address book, allowing you to lookup contact details. A customer name might connect to your CRM or support systems so you can quickly access order status, contact details, open support issues, and so on.
At the time (and to this day), I found the smart tag framework to be a brilliant idea which, while not without some warts, was reasonably well implemented. We leveraged the smart tag framework in Elmer and later in the MyST platform and that feature rarely failed to wow folks in demonstrations. But for reasons of both ignorance and paranoia, the techno pundits—quite notably, Walter S. Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal—lambasted smart tags as an evil conspiracy of the evil Microsoft empire. (No matter that smart tags are opt-in, subscription based, user-controlled, just like RSS—as a pundit it’s more important to move units than to make sense.) As a result, there was such a public relations poo-storm that Microsoft pushed smart tags (way) off the radar. They didn’t actually kill the technology, but they buried it so deep that most people have never even heard of smart tags, let alone realize that they’ve been part of every version of Microsoft Office since Office XP. But good ideas are hard to keep down. When something is true, it just keeps being rediscovered and eventually, in most cases, old prejudices give way to reason. So, today, I had to smile as I was reading The Future of Search: What to Expect in 2010 and Beyond when I got to the part about “ambient streams”: “These are the major buzz words being whispered around the internet these days. Ambient streams are streams of information available in realtime, which, as Edo Segal explains in this TechCrunch article, “seek us out, surround us, and inform us”. What he means is that information from the web will not be attained by typing keywords into a search box in the future – rather, it will appear to us in an ambient way, on a range of devices.” Information finding you. Brilliant. What will they think of next? |
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