The Power of the Link

Small stuff that points to bigger stuff

Once again I’d like to welcome all of my new subscribers! It’s great to have you along with me on this research journey. Do feel free to post your thoughts below in the comments.

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The previous Object Network “Lab Note” asked the question: Why do we even need applications or apps? With apps replaced by an intuitive 3D environment, all of our stuff is freed, blinking, into the light, where we can see it and mash it up any way we like.

This mashing involved words such as “pin”, “drop”, “grab”, “key”, “hook” - all of which we’re now going to replace with the single word: “link”. The link is the formalisation of the way we can mash all of our stuff up, now it’s freed from the app trap. We can link anything to anything:

Our document in the previous article just links to that photo that was on the wall and that we dropped into it. No need to make a complete copy. We can link from our real living room to our virtual gallery, and link from our real kitchen to the virtual shopping list. The gallery wall is an array of links to the photos pinned to it. Indeed, why not have the gallery walls, floor and ceiling pinned together by links as well? The house is a collection of links to rooms, and so on, all the way up to entire virtual cities, overlaid on and linking to real cities!

Links are in fact the foundational concept for the Object Network and its operating system that we’re imagining here in these Lab Notes.

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The Object Network

All of our stuff - like photos and walls - we’ll call "objects" in our virtual or augmented reality operating system.

Each such object has its own unique ID that can be used in other objects as a link between them. We don’t need to say what the ID looks like, as long as it’s unique.

All of our objects will link together into a single global web called "The Object Network". Now you know how it gets its name!

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Traditional links

We’ve come a long way already, and it’s worthwhile to quickly look back at traditional operating systems, to see how such objects and links compare with how they do things.

Firstly, while throwing out the apps - have we thrown out “files” and “folders” too? I mentioned our digital stuff but dropped it right into a virtual world without stopping to talk about traditional file systems. Let’s go back and look at files and folders, and their idea of links.

Normally when we say "link" we mean a web URL pointing at a page on an online server. But it can also point to a local file; in Windows you may say “file path” or "shortcut". And it can also point to a file on a local file share server:

C:\Photos\img-143143.jpg

/Users/frank/Photos/img-143143.jpg

http://franks-server.com/Photos/img-143143.jpg

smb://franks-server/Photos/img-143143.jpg

In all cases these "links" are just a short piece of text pointing to a file. This can be used to refer to it and fetch it when needed. Now, in fact, if you take off the file name, you're left with the containing folder name:

C:\Photos\

/Users/frank/Photos/

http://franks-server.com/Photos/

smb://franks-server/Photos/

.. and these are also a valid "links", only now they are links to a folder: a sequence or collection of files.

But linking stuff in this way means we are forced into a "tree" structure where you only have a hierarchy of folders-folders-folders-files, branching deeper. And further, these links carry too much meaning and weight: you have to look inside them and read them and unpack them for them to work. A link or path to a photo tells you its one parent folder and its single hosting device. It’s a very rigid system. Our operating system doesn’t need “files” or “folders” like this and doesn’t need this rigid way of referring to or addressing them.

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Comparing Object Network links to files and folders

In our 3D world, where links are opaque object IDs, we can have a gallery object that contains a sequence of links to (IDs of) photo objects. Now we can simply link to some of the same photos as appear in other collection objects:

The shared photo has broken free of its “folder” and is now an independent entity.

Plus, instead of a tree-like filesystem structure, we can create arbitrary webs of linked objects with circular loops, where walls and galleries and rooms can end up linking back around to themselves. This is a much more powerful way of organising our stuff.

What was a file is now an object. What was a folder is also simply an object, with a sequence of IDs to other objects.

All of this can be viewed and manipulated in 3D instead of the flat 2D file managers and desktops we’re used to in traditional operating systems.

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The power of the link

The link is a fundamental, pervasive and powerful concept that emerges from our virtual world operating system without apps; emerging from its unlimited space filled with our digital stuff. Links deliver mashability!

In the articles that follow, I will explore three different types or “powers” of links: Structure Links, Sharing Links and Semantic Links, allowing us to respectively re-structure, re-decentralise and re-activate the shared objects in our operating system’s virtual world.

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What do you think? Drop your thoughts into the comments below. And I’ll see you in the next Lab Note!