a million monkeys typing

Whatever Happened to Haystack?

Posted January 2nd, 2005 at 03:18pm

I had really high hopes for MIT’s Haystack project when I first came across it a couple of years ago, and firmly believed that it had the potential to meet all my organisational needs. See the screenshot available on the homepage and you’ll probably see why I thought it would be a good match for GTD-style organisational methodologies.

Basically, Haystack is a semantically-driven (i.e., based on perceived connections of meaning) personal information manager that incorporates tasks, memos, email, news feeds, calendar, sharing and more. All these can be associated through categories, content cues and (as yet) rudimentary Artificial Intelligence algorithms. Unfortunately, the project either seems to have stalled, or the focus is changing somewhat (perhaps to the Eclipse-based projects such as Hayloft).

There is an OS X version, but I only tried it on an old Pismo last year, and it was rather painful. It was fairly slow (it runs using Java, if I recall correctly), bloated, and needlessly complex. It’s essentially still at the “computer scientist” stage, so I wouldn’t exactly recommend it to my mother.

If it manages to keep going, I can certainly see it being an important organisational hub for my digital activities. Its future, however, seems to be in doubt at the moment, at least in its all-in-one Java incarnation. Does anyone out there know anything about its status?