Hurray for Google News Timeline user experience; hurray for Andy Herzfeld

Today Google announces the horisontal timeline for News. Like one could expect it works very well in the browser and is surprisingly fast. I am exceptionally happy to see a renaissance in horisontal timelines, as I have felt awfully lonely for many years not seeing any clones of horisontal timelines, which we developed for Nokia Lifeblog in 2004. The idea of a horisontal timeline seemed obvious once we came up with the idea, perfect as we expected screens on computers to grow from 4:3 to 16:9 and beyond, now a reality. What makes me exceptionally happy and proud is that Google's timeline was done by Andy Hertzfeld. Andy is in my book one of the greatest geniuses in the SW world as he understands all elements of a great user experience, making it work (Utilitias), making it beautiful (venustas) and making is tight (firmitas). Andy for example is said to have hired hired Susan Kare to Apple, who was responsible for the icons of the first Mac a longtime inspiration of mine. Andy did many key components what made computers what they are for example control panels

The timeline is simply one of the best ways to depict large amounts of data, I have more than 30000 of data items in my Lifeblog and it is still my preferred way to watch my own digital history. As Nokia killed Lifeblog last year, my history is fading fast as there are no new compatible handset made. Few days ago I got my N95 8GB back from service, the one Google Lattitude killed, I transferred all my sms back to the phone, 200 transferred eventhough I got a note that 2000 had transferred,what made the transfer amusing is that all landed on 21st of April, I guess it was an active day of texting. What can I say: metadata matters, content is nothing without its metadata.

To celebrate Andy's achivement I will start a club called Timeline fans, you can sign up on this blog and we take it from there. I certainly want to see more timelines otherwise I think we will become masked in bits hidden on disks in the cloud and we might actually never see the sun.