Welcome to the Yale Lifestreams homepage!

Update 2000

Eric T. Freeman, The Lifestreams Software Architecture, Ph.D. Dissertation, Yale University Department of Computer Science, May 1997.

Printed copies can be requested by sending email to here.

• Mirror Worlds is a company started by David and I back in 1996; the company continues under his careful guidance creating Scopeware.
• Xerox is working on a concept called Placeless Documents
• Sony has an effort underway in Japan (link coming).
• Ricoh is using the stream metaphor as part of its new eCabinet product.

David and I both believe Lifestreams is an idea whose time will come, one way or another. If you are working in an area related to Lifestreams I'd love to hear from you.

The Yale Lifestreams Project Page, Circa 1996

This page contains news, articles, information and frequently asked questions about Lifestreams. Lifestreams was developed by Eric Freeman at Yale University as his thesis topic (under the direction of David Gelernter).

The following information is currently available about the academic project:

• What are lifestreams?
• Where did the idea of a "lifestream" come from?
• What is wrong with today's systems anyway?
• Are there any technical papers available on Lifestreams?
• Are others working on new ways of managing our information world?

A lifestream is a time-ordered stream of documents that functions as a diary of your electronic life; every document you create and every document other people send you is stored in your lifestream. The tail of your stream contains documents from the past (starting with your electronic birth certificate). Moving away from the tail and toward the present, your stream contains more recent documents --- papers in progress or new electronic mail; other documents (pictures, correspondence, bills, movies, voice mail, software) are stored in between. Moving beyond the present and into the future, the stream contains documents you will need: reminders, calendar items, to-do lists.

You manage your lifestream through a small number of powerful operators that allow you to transparently store information, organize information on demand, filter and monitor incoming information, create reminders and calendar items in an integrated fashion, and "compress" large numbers of documents into overviews or executive summaries.

You can read a vision paper here.

Lifestreams had its beginnings in David Gelernter's "chronicle streams" (in his book Mirror Worlds) and was first described as a structure for managing personal electronic information in his Washington Post article "The cyber-road not taken" (available here).

What is wrong with today's systems? Consider the "desktop metaphor," which attempts to simplify common file operations by presenting them in the familiar language of the paper-based world (paper documents as files, folders as directories, the trashcan for deletion). Although this metaphor has been successful to a point (one usually has to explain to a new user how the computer desktop is like a real desktop), the paper-based model is a rather poor basis for organizing information. The work of Malone, Lansdale, Carroll, Dumais and others has looked at the ways people use information and electronic systems and identified a number of problem areas. We've tried to lay out our argument in the following SIGCHI Bulletin article:

Scott Fertig, Eric Freeman and David Gelernter. "Finding and Reminding" Reconsidered. In SIGCHI Bulletin, volume 28, January, 1996.

Available:

• From ACM SIGCHI
  
• PostScript
  
• HTML
  

The most current technical papers are available below. Lifestreams was demonstrated in video form at the CHI'96 conference, and we have an article in the February 1997 issue of Wired magazine.
• Eric Freeman and David Gelernter. Lifestreams: A Storage Model for Personal Data , ACM SIGMOD Bulletin, March, 1996

  • (PostScript)

• Eric Freeman and Scott Fertig. Lifestreams: Organizing your Electronic Life , AAAI Fall Symposium: AI Applications in Knowledge Navigation and Retrieval, November, 1995, Cambridge, MA.

  Available in:

  • PostScript
    
    

• Eric Freeman. Lifestreams for the Newton , PDA Developer, Volume 3.4, July/Aug 1995. Appears to no longer be available

  • Web version

Are others working on new ways of managing our information world?

Yes, there is a lot of exciting work going on; to name a few:

• Ben Bederson's Pad++ Zoomable Interface at the University of New Mexico. Update: Ben is now the Director of UCIL at UMD, his Pad work is now Java-based and called Jazz.
• Mirror Worlds related projects of Gelernter's Linda Group here at Yale.
• Manber's work at the University of Arizona. Update: Manber is now Chief Scientist at Yahoo
• Ben Shniederman's HCIL group.