Why We’re Building Collections

The file manager remains the bedrock application of the personal computer. Every day over a billion people use Windows Explorer or Apple’s Finder to manage their digital content. And yet the file manager is an anachronism. In an age defined by cloud, mobile, and tablet computing, the file manager is a clunky remnant of simpler times, a quaint reminder that all of our most important digital content used to dwell contentedly in the local filesystem on our personal computers.

Today, the files, photos, documents, and videos we care about are strewn across the consumer Internet. To sync our files we use Dropbox, Box, Google Drive, and SkyDrive. For photo storage and sharing we turn to Facebook, Instagram, Flickr, and iCloud. For more productive pursuits, we increasingly rely on Evernote, Google Docs, and, assuming Microsoft’s plans come to fruition, the Office Web Apps. YouTube and Vimeo...