Robert Scoble has a post entitled Metadata without filling in forms? It's coming where he writes
Simon Fell read my interview about search trends and says "I still don't get it" about WinFS and metadata. He brings up a good point. If users are going to be forced to fill out metadata forms, like those currently in Office apps, they just won't do it. Fell is absolutely right.But, he assumed that metadata would need to be entered that way for every photo. Let's go a little deeper....OK, I have 7400 photos. I have quite a few of my son. So, let's say there's a new kind of application. It recognizes the faces automatically and puts a square around them. Prompting you to enter just a name. When you do the square changes color from red to green, or just disappears completely....A roadblock to getting that done today is that no one in the industry can get along for enough time to make it possible to put metadata into files the way it needs to be done. Example: look at the social software guys. Friendster doesn't play well with Orkut which doesn't play well with MyWallop, which doesn't play well with Tribe, which doesn't play well with ICQ, which doesn't play well with Outlook. What's the solution? Fix the platform underneath so that developers can put these features in without working with other companies and/or other developers they don't usually work with.
The way WinFS is being pitched by Microsoft folks reminds me a lot of Hailstorm [which is probably unsurprising since a number of Hailstorm folks work on it] in that there are a lot of interesting and useful technical ideas burdened by bad scenarios being hung on them. Before going into the the interesting and useful technical ideas around WinFS I'll start with why I consider the two scenarios mentioned by Scoble as “bad scenarios”.
The thought that if you make the file system a metadata store automatically makes search better is a dubious proposition to swallow when you realize that a number of the searches that people can't do today wouldn't be helped much by more metadata. This isn't to say some searches wouldn't work better (e.g. searching for songs by title or artist), however there are some search scenarios such as searching for a particular image or video from a bunch of image files with generic names or searching for a song by lyrics which simply having the ability to tag media types with metadata doesn't seem like enough. Once your scenarios start having to involve using “face recognition software” or “cameras with GPS coordinates” for a scenario to work then it is hard for people not to scoff. It's like a variation of the popular Slashdot joke
with the ??? in the middle implying a significant dfficulty in going from step 1 to 3.
The other criticism is the fact that Robert's post implies that the reason applications can't talk to each other are technical. This is rarely the case. The main reasons applications don't talk to each other isn't a lack of technology [especially now that we have an well-defined format for exchanging data called XML] but for various social and business reasons. There are no technical reasons MSN Messenger can't talk to ICQ or which prevent Yahoo! Messenger from talking to AOL Instant Messenger. It isn't technical reasons that prevent my data in Orkut from being shared with Friendster or my book & music preferences in Amazon from being shared with other online stores I visit. All of these entities feel they have a competitive advantage in making it hard to migrate from their platforms.
The two things Microsoft needs to do in this space is are to (i) show how & why it is beneficial for different applications to share data locally and (ii) provide guidelines as well as best practices for applications to share data their data in a secure manner.
While talking to Joshua Allen, Dave Winer, Robert Scoble, Lili Cheng, and Curtis Wong yesterday it seemed clear to me that social software [or if you are a business user; groupware that is more individual-focused which gives people more control over content and information sharing] would be a very powerful and useful tool for businesses and end users if built on a platform like Longhorn with a smart data store that know how to create relationships between concepts as well as files (i.e. WinFS) and a flexible, cross platform distributed computing framework (i.e. Indigo).
The WinFS folks and Longhorn evangelists will probably keep focusing on what I have termed “bad scenarios” because they demo well but I suspect that there'll be difficulty getting traction with them in the real world. Of course, I may be wrong and the various people who've expressed incredulity at the current pitches are a vocal minority who'll be proved wrong once others embrace the vision. Either way, I plan to experiment with these ideas once Longhorn starts to beta and seeing where the code takes me.