In reading Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell’s great book Total Recall, there were certain passages that struck us as directly relevant to the problems that we are trying to solve here at X1. Granted, the MyLifeBits project is a fascinating and ambitious study that we won’t try to reduce to a few words in our blog post here! Much simpler, some of the language is virtually identical to what we hear from our users on a daily basis. Total Recall imagines a time when we have a full digital record of our entire life, in minute detail. The authors’ stress that such “e-memory” is less intensive than what we are limited to by nature as it allows us to rely on limited pieces of recollection, with confidence that the full corpus of information attached to the recollection is immediately retrievable with just a few key strokes.
The X1 Professional Client, from its very beginning, was architected to address the “findability” problem, with the important presumption that task-oriented search of personal information is fundamentally different than searching the web. Heavy users of email see upwards of 200-300 emails per day, and typically receive even more as members of distribution lists. What is it that our memory catches and holds onto months and years later? Is it a random, but significant word of text within the body of the email? A net present value figure within an excel attachment? Or perhaps it’s simply the sender’s last name and a faint idea that the information was sent at some point in late 2008.
It has always been our opinion that the speed of a business-related search, at an end-user level, is paramount – precisely because of the way our minds are trained to recall information. The application must be architected to allow the individual to wheel and pivot during the search, refine mid-typing, sort on various fields, and drill down where necessary. In short, a search experience that effectively renders the file tree approach to information retrieval irrelevant. We spoke with a long-time X1 user yesterday who lamented the process of setting up a folder file structure for a co-worker in conjunction with a new initiative at work. “I haven’t had to rely on folders for years – there is simply no need to do so with X1. I had forgotten how archaic and time-consuming a process it is.”
The “E-Memory Revolution” that Gordon and Jim write about is certainly upon us, and there is no shortage of revolutionary and complex products and technologies currently available to help us deal with the overwhelming stream of information we face in today’s world. What do you think? How do you remember the incredibly valuable communications and work product produced in both your current and prior jobs?




