0xDECAFBAD

It's all spinning wheels and self-doubt until the first pot of coffee.

News aggregators to converge toward Lifestreams/Scopeware interface?

Ziv Caspi of Y. B. Normal thinks that "Aggregators should bring more, not less, information", and I'm inclined to agree. Also, Adam wants to take the aggregator even further: "...I think the entire computer interface should be overhauled to be more aggregator like, events streaming by."

Along these lines, has anyone played with Scopeware, built from the research of David Gelernter? I think it used to be called "Lifestreams" before it was made into a product. I first heard of this work back when I read Machine Beauty : Elegance and the Heart of Technology, and was very interested but haven't seen anything other than screenshots and mock-ups. From what I can tell, this interface is literally "events [and documents] streaming by".

The little I've picked up from Gelernter's work, along with a few other influences (ie. David Brin's Earth), has really stuck the picture in my head of how I want my future info-sieve to work.

Along with all of this, something else I was vaguely considering adding to my AmphetaDesk outliner skin was an IFRAME attached to RSS items under a collapsed node. When the node gets expanded, the IFRAME is loaded up with the item's link. The notion is that you do all your browsing from your RSS feeds in a single window and within the same context. Neat idea, I think, giving a hook to pull more information into the aggregator upon request. But of course if I do it, it'll likely be messy as hell for a zillion obvious reasons and catch my iBook on fire.

Probably have more to ramble on about this later, but it's time for the first meeting of the day...

shortname=oooaif