More Nouns, Please

I started playing with the new version of iPhoto last night. The new Faces and Places features are totally addictive. For those who don't know, they allow you to tell iPhoto who's in your pictures and where those pictures were taken. Then you can navigate all of your albums based on those cross-cutting pieces of information; I can look at all of the photos that include a particular friend of mine, for example, or all of the photos taken at Stanford University. And here's the really cool part: iPhoto can recognize the faces in your photos, so once I identify someone in one picture, it can show me other pictures that might also contain that person and allow me to confirm or reject those matches.

In general, the recognition is pretty good. I enjoyed seeing how often it mistook members of the same families for one another -- even when people were only related by marriage (maybe we copy each others' facial expressions over time). Of course, it's not perfect: iPhoto thought that the reflective flank of a mechanical bull contained a face -- the Virgin Mary, perhaps? -- and it suggested that the hind end of a millipede looked like my uncle Donny. But in most cases, there were many more correct matches than incorrect, and it let me correct the incorrect ones.

It all just leaves me hungry for more. My computer's desktop is very good at organizing things: files and folders. But why have we been stuck there for 20 years? Why are people and places trapped in the ghettos of individual applications? Sure, Apple Address Book and Microsoft Outlook provide programming interfaces to allow other applications to access the contact information they store. But that doesn't change the fact that the information lives in those applications. I can't browse that information from my desktop alongside my files, and I can't click on a name in iPhoto to see all of the documents created by that person, all the emails I've exchanged with him, or the next event on my calendar that includes her. I can't even navigate between iPhoto, Address Book, and iCal, even though all of those applications are from the same vendor.

Innovation, please!