Alex Faaborg

Happy iPhone day everyone (iPhonemas?, iPhonukkah?). Steve Jobs is casting the release of the iPhone as a revolutionary event. On days like this it’s hard not to think back to previous revolutionary technologies, especially the ones that could have changed everything. One revolutionary technology in particular, also from Apple, and also on a handheld device, keeps popping into my head these days. It is the Apple Newton’s concept of “data soup.”

Here is the feature described in Apple’s getting started video that came with the Newton:

Everything is interconnected, you can get a message that someone wants to have a meeting with you, you can ask Newton to assist you, Newton will automatically put it on your Calendar… Kind of a communications center, or universal inbox or outbox.

What was truly revolutionary about the concept of data soup was that the Newton was able to break down all of the traditional barriers between applications. Barriers that still exist today.

Data in Newton is stored in object-oriented databases known as soups. One of the innovative aspects of Newton is that soups are available to all programs; and programs can operate cross-soup; meaning that the calendar can refer to names in the address book; a note in the notepad can be converted to an appointment, and so forth; and the soups can be programmer-extended — a new address book enhancement can be built on the data from the existing address book. (Wikipedia.org)

It’s been 14 years since the Newton came out. A lot has changed during these 14 years: we now have high resolution color displays, and multi-touch. We have wireless networking, and we have the Web. But the way we interact with data, and our ability to share it between applications didn’t improve. At all. Our applications are still data silos, we have to meticulously copy and paste structured data between them. We manually reenter information, into calendars, into address books, into forms on the Web. It is pathetic.

I’ve written a lot about my love of microformats, of the ability to send structured data from a Web page to another application with a single click. Imagine Firefox, with microformat detection and Places (SQLite data storage), running on a mobile device like the iPhone. After making a reservation at a restaurant, the user could bookmark all the associated data into Places (the soup) with a single tap. The restaurant’s phone number would be accessible from the phone’s contacts list, the resturant’s location would automatically appear in the phone’s mapping application, and the reservation itself would automatically appear in the phone’s calendar.

Mixing structured data on the Web into the data soup would make every application on a device like the iPhone so much more useful. Unfortunately, the iPhone is no Newton.