We’ve spent a long time trying to solve what sounds like a simple problem: how to get people information when they need it. Sounds basic, but it can affect everything: what you think, what you do, what you say, what you create. Every minute you spend looking for the right data could have been a minute spent building something new, or having an experience, or strengthening a relationship, or gaining a new insight.
People have used everything from carving on rocks to library cards to systems for organizing paper notes and drawings to get a better handle on information. With the advent of computers, we got the Graphical User Interface, hypertext and search as several key technologies to find and retrieve information efficiently.
But as information continues to explode (over 90 percent of all data created by humans was created since 2011) the pressure keeps rising to build more effective tools. And now we have a new problem:
We already have an unimaginably complex variety of information. The Internet of Things opens up a whole new front in the information overload problem, and will require better ways to capture, index, retrieve and distribute information.
Caught in a Trap
But there's an obstacle. A lot of our information is currently trapped in complex, variously structured and formatted websites. If you wanted a data table representing the relationship of kittens to happiness right now, you would typically have to define a search term, process the resulting index of results, choose an entry and then browse one or more websites of wildly varying structure, navigational ease, etc., until you found your target. And you'd waste a lot of time and energy in the process.
The basic building block of the web is a site. Notice the static term — site. It’s a destination. It’s also a virtualization of an old concept: a document. The web was built to handle research papers and that intention has stayed in its DNA even though we have dramatically changed it in the meantime. HTML still very much looks like a sort of table of contents for a college paper with sections, paragraphs, bullets and so forth. Google and others have embarked on the mission to break down these sites a few notches (for example by picking out images), but in doing so they’re trying to correct the shortcomings of a relatively heavy, complex information structure with a top down solution.
Atomizing information and indexing the smaller, discrete components can transform the Internet. Content wants to be free. Enter the card.
A Little Bundle of Content
What are cards? They are small containers of arbitrary size to house micro-content. Micro-content refers to small, visual, meme-size chunks of knowledge that summarize other, richer information. Micro-content serves both as primary content itself and as an index and link to other content. A card can serve as an index, link, mini-site, piece of content and even app all in one little bundle.
Websites are lengthy, complex, coherent, collections of information. Cards are precise, context agnostic bits of information. Just as we couldn’t do quantum physics before we got down to the subatomic level, so we want to break the atoms that are websites into their smaller components and let all the energy escape.
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