Thinking about why no time-based organization system works as well as my phone’s photo stream.

It’s super easy to find screenshots of directions, confirmations, receipts, etc. Email inbox, Google Docs “Recent”, and similar are somehow inferior.

One reason is that I can easily orient myself in time when I see thumbnails of photos I took. Any other temporal list loses resolution beyond the last week or two.

But Google has access to my photos! They could put thumbnails in Gmail, Docs, etc.

Another reason is that my photo stream is totally in my control — it’s pretty much guaranteed to be relevant to me. That’s not true for other things (bulk mail, docs shared with me, etc.)

Things in the photo stream also stay put. GMail threads, “recent docs”, etc. are much more dynamic and you can’t rely on something being go in the same place today as it was yesterday.

Maybe it’s time for another run at the Lifestreams idea? cs.yale.edu/homes/freeman/…