From Jan Senderek, the founder of Loom, a photo management startup:
Kids today who start out with iPads and iPhones will never or rarely be in touch with a file or a folder. They won’t care about the type of data created or consumed on their devices. Apps are used to generate and consume content such as photos, emails, and news. They are the new ‘folders’. To try to find a file extension on an app or mobile device is hard. The interface and experience deliberately takes away the need to know whether an image is a .jpg or .png because you don’t need to know. Even if the next generation still uses a desktop at home or at school, the iPad will shape their behavior. The next wave of consumers are using cloud-based services to consume content that isn’t file-based like Facebook, Spotify or Netflix. Content provided by these services no longer sits on a computer taking up valuable hard drive space or requires conscious awareness of the makeup of the file.
The way computers work are changing. More convenience, less control.
Interesting – where are you keeping your stuff? Trust Google and the cloud?
Hi David – my current approach is a total mess with content in a variety of locations – Pinboard, Evernote, Google Docs, Simplenote, Dropbox…
However my recent paranoia means I am making changes to the way I do things – I recently swapped my MacBook Air for a Dell laptop running Ubuntu, for instance, and am looking to wean myself off proprietary software and web apps that don’t give me control of my data in an open usable format.
One web app that does things properly is fargo.io – keeps your data in Dropbox so you have a local copy, and it’s in the open OPML format that can be used with lots of other apps.
I’m also recruiting people to help me develop http://webnot.es/ a web based text editor that will be open source and use open formats.