ryan kennedy's blog

Scoble’s got a post where he shares his thoughts about why WinFS was yanked recently by MS. I think the minor shit storm going on in the comments is amusing. Reminds me of trying to crawl my way through Slashdot comments (crap, crap, crap, insightful, crap, crap, etc). But listening to all the bitching in the comments did remind me of one thing: that sweet mother of a filesystem that is BeFS.

Everybody I know has one of two reactions when I bring up my love affair with BeOS. It’s either “what’s BeOS?” or “what’s wrong with you?” Little do they know, BeOS had the sweetest filesystem. Here’s the easiest way I can explain why BeFS is so awesome. Every file on your computer has an associated type. It could be an MP3, an email message, a Word document or a video. Each file type has an associated set of metadata that goes along with it. For instance, an MP3 might have an artist, album, song title and duration. An email message might have a sender, recipients, subject, date and whether or not there are any attachments.

I can hear you all getting bored. You’re all saying, “yeah, so what…everything has metadata.” Yes, the only difference is that BeFS made it incredibly easy to store, access and search metadata. The metadata was indexed so you could search it fast, really fast. So imagine you’re on your desktop and you want to search for something. Let’s say you want to look for all of your Bjork songs. Easy as pie, just ask BeFS to find you all files with a metadata field named “Artist” with the value “Bjork”. Even if the filename is ABCD1234.mp3, BeFS is gonna find it. Filenames are irrelevant. Not only is BeFS going to find it, it’ll find it anywhere. You don’t need to have all of your MP3s in one “Music” folder. Because the entire filesystem is indexed, BeFS can find needles in a haystack in the blink of an eye. Want to find all the email sent from your boss? Come on now, at least make it difficult on BeFS. How about all email on the entire computer sent from your boss with the word “bonus” in the subject sent between 12/1/2005 and 12/31/2005? Just like searching for Bjork, BeFS chews it up and spits it out faster than you can say “refresh rate”.

And because the searches are so fast, you can do some fun stuff. You can, for example, create “smart folders” that are really just a familiar way of exposing these filesystem searches as everyday folders (BeOS did that too). The speed of the filesystem search makes it feel just like opening up any other folder. Remember when you had to download someone’s special desktop search application to do this kind of stuff for you? You’d download it and it would spend the next 6 hours crawling your hard disk to build up a search index and when it was done you’d have to launch that application to perform the search and then another application to open the file when you found it. Well, all that was built into BeFS. BeFS was actively indexing all the time. There was no 6 hour long process to index everything. And if an application wanted to search for something, it just asked BeFS to do it.

This is what I miss the most about BeOS, the beautiful filesystem. I miss some other things, but BeFS is what I miss the most. It’s a shame to hear that MS is killing something (WinFS) that sounded an awful lot like BeFS. If it’s true and the two are very much alike, I’m not quite sure how Scoble thinks the web destroys the advantage a system like WinFS provides. If anything, WinFS provides a powerful tool to make the web experience all that much better. Think of all of the web services that are probably implementing metadata in a database by hand right now. Services like flickr with their plethora of photos, just begging to have all of the EXIF data indexed. Services like Yahoo! Mail/Hotmail/GMail all begging to have MIME headers indexed. Services like WordPress, YouTube and more that have a metric buttload of user data crying out to be indexed so it can be made more accessible. And as long as Scoble’s making the web the lynchpin, what about tagging? Everything on the web is tagable now. Filesystem metadata means you can have a metadata attribute called “Tags” that holds all the tags for a given file. Instantly every file on the computer is searchable by tags and the developer didn’t have to do a thing. Now what web service wouldn’t die to have all of that tagging and searching infrastructure already built for them? That’s a huge time sink for the developers that’s been taken care of in one shot by adding an advanced filesystem to the mix.