It seems that I am getting crazy over this subject. Here's yet another blog entry in its name. (I am talking about Information Management).
Here's a list of tools that various sites provide to help us in managing or drowning ourselves with information (I understand that the 2 are rather different things but anyway…)
* The search engines in their native form.
* Personalized search engines.
* Personalized pages with RSS feed readers.
* Desktop search.
* Google sets (not quite useful as of now, but surely gonna be a hit in the near future).
And this clearly suggests one thing. In the near future, you will have a vast majority of your personal data (if not everything) online (and mind you online means pervasive)! And you probably will have 2 types of service providers – an Internet service provider and a data solutions provider – who takes care of all your data. (Grid computing?) Your system is a minimal workstation with just enough processing power to boot an O/S and then take care of the aspects of communication with these 2 providers. Your workstation could be your mobile or some other new tool that will be available shortly. The advantage? No need to worry about managing data, no need to worry about backups (because that will be the job of the data solution provider and not yours) and all other advantages that grid computing has.
Your system will then have an integrated work environment that is capable of displaying just about anything, your mail, news alerts, your actual working tools (ex: IDE if you are a programmer), the multimedia components all plugged into a single system. I believe many companies are already working on the development of such an environment. (People who are working on such projects please let us know… 🙂 )
And of course this is for techies and geeks and for people who use computers for business and for others, computers are going to be prettier (with improved GUI's – wait till the release of Longhorn), less expensive and faster of course.
