|
A better abstraction will happen. It is inevitable. And my impression of Jan is that he is neither myopic nor naive. Files are an old, ugly metaphor born of the file cabinet. Remember when you had to label a file and then figure out where to file it: alphabetically, client name, recency, importance, by project, etc. You even used different color labels: green meant go, red meant it's hit the fan, etc. What seems unlikely is that the following WILL NOT happen in the next 5 years: A way to effortlessly tag any content, anywhere and on any device in a predictive and n-dimensional way so that content is broken down to its most granular, atomic and consumable unit- a quote of a book, a lyric of a song, a smirk or a smile in a photo, a highlight clip of a video, the exact anniversary gift you intend to buy- each having its own 'GPS coordinate' on the Web, or in some emergent meta-layer fabric that hovers above and interweaves our now-Web This much-faster way to navigate is a hyper-jump teleport to discrete coordinates, probably crowd-sourced like Waze. With combinations of tags parallax-sextant-triangulating there way more efficiently than today’s ubiquitous search query paradigm, another antiquated metaphor falls. A metaphor, no matter how popular today, I imagine not playing a major role in the future Internet What is this next new thing? My 10 year old would say he already has it: Minecraft |
Most of the time, people don't want to bother with several ortogonal tag sets. That's because most of the time, just one hierarchical set is enough, and when it's not people simply put lots of data inside a single file, and use application specific tools for dealing with it.
AI will probably change that. But untill then, no, people won't organise their data in an n-dimensional space.