Question
Dropbox (product): Will the metaphor of files and folders become obsolete?
Answer
This is a fascinating question. Metaphors generally do not live on in their full complexity once the source domain has disappeared through obsolescence.
For instance back during the Old West, horse/cowboy related metaphors were very common, but now they just sound campy.
On the other hand, virtualization is unique, because instead of one real domain replacing another (driving replacing horses), there are no new source metaphors.
So more abstract metaphor sources may start to dominate. For example, things like the Quora front page are called "stream" these days (a nature metaphor) rather than "index" (a paper publishing metaphor). Google went even more fluid and tried to reinvent email (a completely paper-based metaphor) around the "wave" metaphor.
I think discrete portable data units will always remain, but content may become so inter-related that it is much less useful if isolated, and instead of a simple save/backup/store metaphor for disconnected objects, you would need something more like surgery to extract isolated information. Emerging metaphors for this are:
I wrote an article about how these metaphors work and how they might evolve, on Mashable a while back:
http://mashable.com/2010/01/13/c...
I definitely think Dropbox needs to keep your question on its radar.
For instance back during the Old West, horse/cowboy related metaphors were very common, but now they just sound campy.
On the other hand, virtualization is unique, because instead of one real domain replacing another (driving replacing horses), there are no new source metaphors.
So more abstract metaphor sources may start to dominate. For example, things like the Quora front page are called "stream" these days (a nature metaphor) rather than "index" (a paper publishing metaphor). Google went even more fluid and tried to reinvent email (a completely paper-based metaphor) around the "wave" metaphor.
I think discrete portable data units will always remain, but content may become so inter-related that it is much less useful if isolated, and instead of a simple save/backup/store metaphor for disconnected objects, you would need something more like surgery to extract isolated information. Emerging metaphors for this are:
- "Bundle" and "unbundle" is used by Amazon S3, which gets at the idea that the preparation of data for storage is getting more complex.
- In the context of databases, we've always had metaphors like "slice" or "view" (which implies some skill as in slicing a cake cleanly). As more users store their structured data in data-base type systems rather than flat files, the slice/insert type metaphors may come to dominate.
- For object-oriented information (example, your profile data on Facebook, which relies on whatever the "user" class looks like on FB), there are no good user-level metaphors. We will need some soon.
- For dynamic/live data, the metaphors of "freeze frame" or "snapshot" are already coming to dominate. Google Wave already moved away from the floppy-like "save" metaphor UX to the pause/rewind/fast-forward metaphor. This type of metaphor is currently restricted to programmers who use things like version control, but I think this is going to be the dominant candidate to displace file/folder.
I wrote an article about how these metaphors work and how they might evolve, on Mashable a while back:
http://mashable.com/2010/01/13/c...
I definitely think Dropbox needs to keep your question on its radar.