Today I met with Clemens Buss (creator of Project Gothenburg) who’s doing research for his masters at the Weizmann Institute. We talked for half an hour about Zeitgeist, Feedgeist, and Gothenburg, along with an entrée of side topics including developer documentation and Mono.

A few highlights:

1. It’s very easy to extract (or log) lots of useful information on the desktop. However, to date, no one has actually succeeded in doing anything useful with that metadata.

2. People have developed successful user interfaces for very specific types of metadata. (E.g. F-Spot, Rythmbox, etc.) Perhaps the approach that Zeitgeist should take is to develop totally separate user interfaces for browsing web bookmarks, local files, and other types of documents. After perfecting each user interface separately, we can slowly merge them into one application.

As much as we’d like there to be one user interface that works for everything, there are differences between different types of documents that we can’t ignore. (For example, users usually have many websites in their history which can make the small number of important local files in their history seem to be less significant.)

3. Stick to well-defined use cases and make sure to justify code that you write.

On a different note, I just heard an amazing lecture by Adi Shamir (the S in RSA) this evening. Overall, the past week at Weizmann has been truly wonderful- I love the lab I’m working in and the entire place is growing on me fast.