I wonder if we could do more by replicating a search engine's approach to information management, but in different and more personal scopes.

Google works quite a bit differently from, say, an application-specific search engine: it doesn't operate on an underlying database, it freely traverses across applications, and it includes understanding from that entire system.

It does this by acting as a user, using the same surface area that a person inspects.


It does this on a global scale, but it seems like this should be doable on a personal scale. The opportunities aren't just to create a personal search engine, but also personal cross-cutting views or operations.

But what we seldom do is actually _do_ this, actually have personal entities that scan and learn. Even though it's not particularly hard. I can't quite decide why it's so hard... are we worried about what an entity might do? If it might go crazy? Or is it too hard to get any value from it?

Also of course the problem that creating ever-more-frenetic experiences isn't anybody's idea of fun. Proactive notifications sound good but feel bad.

So what does a reactive tool actually do? What would people ask for that it could provide?

@ianbicking I'm not sure what kind of UX you envision being frenetic, but I like the cross-domain concept. Actually, I like it enough to have been working on a computing platform with that as a foundational principle for probably ten years now (it's a pet project).

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