Days ago I had a chance to have dinner with an executive of a big internet company. When I mentioned that PIM is my research interest, he told me that it’s not very interesting in any sense and I’d better give it another thought.
To counter his argument and as an sequel of my earlier post on major concepts of PIM, I want to write about why one should care about PIM, from the perspective of business and research.
From business perspective, PIM matters because it’s the best way to understand the user, and the businessmodel of most internet companies critically dependent on this.
It’s not a coincidence that most of Google’s core services are managing personal information such as emails, schedules and so on. And having that many people manage their information by Google is its competitive advantage. Bing may follow Google in terms of index size and ranking algorithm, yet it won’t do the same without all the user information Google has access to. It’s like a comparison of a teller and a private banker.
From researcher’s view, PIM provides a venue for interdisciplinary research where Database, IR, HCI and many other fields in CS should make a combined efforts. It starts from storing heterogeneous information items, then choosing a relevant items based on user’s expression of information needs and finally presenting the result effectively. The challenge here is that a system should provide a seamlessly combined experience.
A perhaps less obvious reason is that one can easily experiment with PIM research by solving one’s own PIM problem. You cannot (and may not want to) build a web-scale search system, yet you can index your own documents and see whether you can do better than existing solutions. Once you can make it work for your problem, you can probably persuade people around to have it applied for them as well.
Although my previous work builds on the idea of building a reusable test collection for PIM (desktop search) research, I believe that PIM research should be done with real users and the best way is to build something useful for you and later see what happens to other people.
LiFiDeA 
Chris Augeri
December 13, 2010
Good post. Google, Microsoft Bing, Yahoo!, and other search engines, such as Wolfram Alpha are about putting folks in touch with the world’s data, i.e., information outside a person’s current knowledge base. PIM is about putting folks in touch with the variety and volume of information streaming through their world. In some ways, Google has made strides towards PIM, mostly of cloud-based variety, with various aspects of Gmail, and local solutions such as Google Desktop. Microsoft has provided Outlook, which can also be a great PIM (more on that via my blog soon). Of course, Evernote, Zotero, and products such as TiddlyWiki, are also in the mix. At the collaborative/enterprise level we have Groove, SharePoint, Wave, and others.
Philosophically, a position can be taken that users are overwhelmed with the data glut. Whoever can build the next great PIM service, and do so in way that it integrates PIM services across users, is a front runner for the next great killer app. Thus, many users would greatly appreciate the ability to have access to a semi-autonomously constructed and partially curated representation of the data streams in their lives, where the PIM info can be leveraged by other services (reference cueing, predictive text, etc.). In contrast, many PIMs place too high of an input burden on the user to maintain the PIM (standalone or integrated with that of other users). Fostering R&D on building PIMs of equal or better quality as current search engines, complete with agent support, is a lofty and worthy goal.
Waxing slightly more philosophical, the older I become, the more important do existing friends and colleagues become. Similarly, the older I become, the more I realize it’s less important to learn more about that which I don’t already know, but to remember that which I have already learned. Anyway, keep up the great work and look forward to more interesting posts.
lifidea
December 14, 2010
Thanks for your response, Chris.
I agree with you on that the company who will take control of biggest portion of user’s data will have enormous advantage in terms of service loyalty and advertising opportunities. All the companies you mentioned seems to be after similar goal.
And yes, I think being able to find your own information easily and reliably is important even at the age of Google. I believe that it is a key factor in a person’s productivity and creativity to do so. I might be able to write more about this later.
Chris Augeri
December 14, 2010
My primary motivation for advancing PIM R&D is the reason you cite — a person’s productivity and creativity. Zotero provides many great maxims / taglines along these lines, one of which is “research, not re-search.”