Deep Archiving: Keeping content relevant in 2015

A sunny morning was spent in the company of Mark Wubben at Lift08 last week, who posed to a number of us the strange idea of the ‘forgetful interface’.

Sorry? Forgetful interface??

Well, if we are to make better sense of the present, the past must be better managed in the future.

For, with ever-increasing amounts of information being created over time, relevancy is key; systems that allow for ‘purposeful forgetfulness’ will have to be given greater attention.

But what do I mean by a ‘forgetful interface’? Surely not a system that actually forgets my personal, treasured information?

Well, no. In my own forgetful interface, there would be no automatic purging of any data. It would remain stored unless explicitly removed by the user.

The internet in its present form is a relatively young beast. Though its many users have been creating, tagging, archiving, sharing and managing data across an ever-widening range of applications for a while now, this is only just the beginning. Ten, twenty, fifty years from now, even if the notion of the web changes radically (which it is certain to), it’ll play host to an incredible amount of data, in need of new depths of information management.

The key here is relevancy – getting the information to the user that is most applicable to them at the current time. To help take some of these ideas a little further, I’ll use a simple example.

Geoff’s size problem

The year is 2015. Though its form and the company that maintains it has greatly changed, Geoff, a 54-year-old, self-employed business consultant, still uses Gmail: an email web application popular with many users across the world. He was a relatively-early adopter of the free service, signing up in late 2004. He’s a heavy user, using this email account as his primary point of contact. Gmail holds over ten-years-worth of his emails. Despite this, it remains incredibly responsive, due to the nationwide fibre-optic rollout policy adopted by the new Government some 5 years ago.

However, the problem has shifted from one of reliability, to one of relevancy. Even though the tagging system used heavily by Geoff has been refined and developed by Google over the years, he now has tens of thousands of email conversations stored under the numerous labels he’s created.

Geoff regularly searches for emails relating to meetings with his current clients. He has a good reputation, and many of his clients have been so for years. A search for a keyword relating to one of these clients brings back 1000s of results, and every time Geoff wishes to search, he has to set the dates within which the search should take place to be the last 6 weeks or 6 months. He’s frustrated by this – although he greatly values their importance and in no way wants to get rid of them, his emails from 8 or 9 years ago hold little relevance to his operations and requirements today. “If only there was some way that Gmail would take these really old emails somewhere else, a safe place, away from my what I see every day, it would realy help me out – there’s tens of thousands now. I don’t want to delete them, but they’re just not relevant to me anymore”, he ponders. If only the system could ‘forget’, and keep the information shown to him relevant, it would greatly simplify his experience for many years into the future.

Deep archiving

Unbeknown to Geoff, Google had been thinking about this issue for a while now, and is currently undergoing internal user testing of a new service, code-named ‘aMail’, short for archived mail. aMail would be a subsidary service offered to gmail users whereby older mail (at what point the mail becomes old being determined by the user), auto-tagged by time in years (2004, 2005 etc), would be available for aMailing; that is, it is sent to another place: a mail archive, stored at a deeper level of the Gmail system hierarchy.

Though Google sees this service as free, it too will be ad-funded, by a new, more intelligent system that gives user-specific advertising based on more long-term analysis of email content – as opposed to the previous keyword-based system, it can now read content as a narrative – giving the ads a far more personal, deeper focus on Geoff’s long-term requirements and desires.

9 months later, aMail, now known in the industry as ‘deep archiving’, is silently released as an option within Gmail’s existing archiving ability. Geoff is notified of this update, and tries out the new feature. He chooses to deep-archive all emails but those from the last two years. Now manageable on a larger scale, the myriad unnecessary information clogging up his everyday interface is greatly reduced. Performing searches is now a more simplified experience, and far less time is spent browsing through pages of results.

This service allows the interface to safely ‘forget’ old and unnecessary information, keeping the data relevant to the present-day needs of the user.

Monetization through added value & meta-social management

Other companies soon copy and further monetize this system. For example, a social networking site specializing in the sharing of hi-definition video content since 2009 offers a deep-archiving service as part of its ‘Enterprise’ account – where users can safely ‘deepen’ an unlimited amount (well, not unlimited, but a lot) of now-not-so-relevant content, keeping users’ content as fresh for both themselves and all others who view it, as they need it to be (a lot can change in a decade).

We can also take this a step further; a service could be developed that aggregates the user’s deep-archived content from across their numerous now-open social platforms, spread across a wide variety of mediums (e.g. your photo albums from Facebook, your blog articles from Blogger, Twitter posts, youTube videos), and packages them all together, as a life narrative tool of all your memories down the years in digital form. You can view it as a spin-off concept of Google’s upcoming Open Social platform, but more content-specific, and focused more on the past as opposed to the future.

Regardless, though this is very much a fictitious, simple example of a forgetful interface, and one can see how aspects covered here regarding the gathering of information over time raises some interesting questions about how best we can look to manage it.

To conclude, though the notion of archiving already exists across many web application systems, how it will deal with the ever-increasing amount of data some many years down the line is something important and not yet fully defined. That the interface will ‘forget’, does not mean that the system will necessarily do the same – very much the opposite, in fact. The key point is that the user’s experience is simplified, and given greater relevancy to the events and requirements of the present day. That this can be monetised through its perception as an added-value service for the organised, heavy or sentimental users among us can only further catalyse its inclusion within future interfaces.