MSFT's new project takes all of your life experiences and puts them in an unstructured database, making a searchable record of your life. I imagine this will including your GPS readings as you walk around, the RFIDs your PDA logs, the numbers you call and the numbers that call you:
It is part of a curious venture dubbed the MyLifeBits project, in which engineers at Microsoft's Media Presence lab in San Francisco are aiming to build multimedia databases that chronicle people's life events and make them searchable. "Imagine being able to run a Google-like search on your life," says Gordon Bell, one of the developers.
The motivation? Microsoft argues that our memories often deceive us: experiences get exaggerated, we muddle the timing of events and simply forget stuff. Much better, says the firm, to junk such unreliable interpretations and instead build a faithful memory on that most reliable of entities, the PC.
Bell and his colleagues developed MyLifeBits as a surrogate brain to solve what they call the "giant shoebox problem". "In a giant shoebox full of photos, it's hard to find what you are looking for," says Microsoft's Jim Gemmell. Add to this the reels of home movies, videotapes, bundles of letters and documents we file away, and remembering what we have, let alone finding it, becomes a major headache.
(Thanks, Will!)
