Jon Udell speculates on what our OS would do if Google wrote it instead of
Microsoft:

On the Google PC, you wouldn’t need third-party add-ons to
index and search your local files, e-mail, and instant messages. It would
just happen. The voracious spider wouldn’t stop there, though. The next
piece of low-hanging fruit would be the Web pages you visit. These too would
be stored, indexed, and made searchable. More ambitiously, the spider would
record all your screen activity along with the underlying event streams.
…

Interesting idea! And couldn’t we implement enough of this to test its usefulness pretty quickly? After all, macro programs such as ActiveWords already watch our every click and stroke. I believe ActiveWords already keeps a history. Of course, that wouldn’t tell us the precise state of, say, the word processing document when we jumped over to our browser window and typed in an URL, but it might still be useful.

When I say “might,” I mean it. I’m not at all sure I’d actually use
such a system. It might feel invasive and it might have to operate at such a low
level that it introduces deep-seated instability. More worrisome, I tend to be so distracted in my work patterns
that the sequence of my small-motor movements may not be a good way of
searching for the threads of activity.

Behavior obviously contains clues
about the intent that stitches actions into meaningful streams, although the
clues can be awfully misleading: If you see that I move from a web page to a
word processing document, there’s a chance the first inspired me to write
something in the document, although it’s also possible that I got bored
reading the Web page and decided to get back to work. If I copy from the
Web page and paste into the document, you have a stronger clue.

A Semantic Behavior Index could be better at inferring third-party intent
from behavior than we humans are, although it’s hard to see it getting
better at interpreting my behavior than I am. But it doesn’t have to be that
good to be useful. The question is, would it be useful to have a searchable
table like the following:

Would something roughly like this be feasible? Worth indexing? Would it be useful without that fourth column, since that’ll take up a lot of HD space? Or would it all be nothing more than noise and an invitation to come invade our privacy?

Categories: Uncategorized dw