review: Total Recall

Reading Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything, written by Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell. Both play a key role with Microsoft Research's MyLifeBits project.

The authors envision a world of "total recall," enabled by hardware, software, and networking advances (4). They acknowledge that the technological pieces that would support this vision are currently fragmented but have the potential to be unified. They are epitomized by cloud services such as Amazon's EC2, small digital capture devices, and social networking services that preserve info from a person's life.