Opinion: The Beginning of The Archivist

In the beginning of June 2010 I wrote a short Opinion piece detailling how we at Microsoft’s MIX Online team determined the problems, did user-testing, and created scenairios to help guide us through the build of our new web-service, The Archivist.

A couple years ago, my friend irhetoric and I were chatting about Twitter, as we were at the end of building Flotzam, a social networking aggregator tool that collects and visualizes the ephemeral information floating around in the social sphere. In some ways, this ephemerality is beautiful: all this information swirls around us like leaves that appear and decay over time. On the other hand, if this information is valuable, capturing and keeping it could be useful.