The

1
The Lifestream Approach to Reorganizing the
Information World

• By
• Nicholas Carriero, Scott Feritag,
• Eric Freeman and David Gelernter

2
What is Lifestreams

• Uses a simple organizational metaphor, a
  time-ordered stream of documents, to replace
  conventional files and directories
• Subsumes many separate desktop applications to
  accomplish the most common communication,
  scheduling, search and retrieval tasks

3
Lifestreams Interface
4
Why is Lifestreams

• Users of common desktop systems have difficulty
  in
• Organizing and finding information within
  hierarchical file systems
• Making use of archived information
• Getting a big picture view
• Managing schedules and reminders
• Lifestreams organizes the electronic documents in
  a fluid and natural way

5
How Lifestreams works

• Five primary operations
• New creates a empty document
• Clone duplicates an existing document
• Transfer copies a document from your stream to
  someone elses
• Find prompts the user for a search query and
  creates a substream
• Summary allows users to distill the information
  in a large number of similar documents into a
  single overview

6
How Lifestreams works (cont.)

• Past, present and future
• Dialing the clock into the past allows users to
  explore past regions of the stream
• Dialing the clock into the future allows users to
  create a reminder notice
• Agents
• Used to extend the functionality of Lifestreams

7
Lifestreams Goals

• Names and directories should be junked as
  organizing devices for infochunks
• The system should provide logic for finding a
  chunk or group of chunks
• The system should provide logic for summarizing
  or compressing a large group of related chunks
• Compatibility should be automatic
• Explicit file-storage management should be
  junked.

8
Current Status

• Servers run on Unix workstation
• The chunks in a Lifestream are represented using
  a machine-independent external data
  representation (XDR)
• X-Window Motif user interface

9
Conclusion

• HCI Metrics
• User Performance
• Error Rate
• User satisfaction
• Learning time
• Retention
• Supports the management of electronic objects
  efficiently and transparently
• Organizes the electronic objects in the way that
  reflects the way users work