Memex, with links and comments holding a central role, served as our blueprint for MyLifeBits. Faced with folders full of documents, messages, phone calls, photos, songs, etc., with inherent or potential metadata such as author, camera, comments, location, and time, we needed a framework to hold and link all of these objects in the web-like and almost arbitrary fashion that Bush described. We deemed search to be the most critical requirement. Furthermore, we realized that metadata are often a key part of user recall, ., that an email was sent during a certain year, that a song was.
