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MIT's sticky notes killer (though they say it isn't)

By Alpha Doggs on Wed, 12/17/08 - 11:18am.
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MIT computer science professor David Karger's research team has developed software dubbed List.it that's designed to computerize many of the things people currently do through sticky notes: organize email addresses, passwords and the like.

The software, now in public beta, lives in your Firefox browser and can be downloaded here.

The software comes out of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL), a perennial hotbed for IT inventions, such as CarTel, a GPS-enabled mobile sensor network based on Linux and Wi-Fi designed to address traffic gridlock.

The beta version of List.It enables storage, search and retrieval of everything from email addresses to Web URLs to grocery lists.  

"I would never make the claim that we're trying to replace Post-its," says Michael Bernstein, a graduate student (shown here) in Karger's lab, in a statement.  "We want to understand the classes of things people do with Post-its and see if we can help users do more of what they wanted to do in the first place."

The research is funded by the Nokia Research Center Cambridge, the National Science Foundation, the Royal Academy of Engineering, the Web Science Research Initiative and Quanta Computer.

This is a big-week for to-do lists, with many people doing last minute-shopping. Perhaps that's why Google also picked this week to share news of a to-do list being added to Gmail.

ALSO READ: 10 really cool university networking labs

 

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About Alpha Doggs
The future of networking as seen through the works of university and other labs.

Our mission is to give you a peek into the future of networking by tracking "alpha" research at university and other labs and at companies based on this work. Your Alpha Doggs editor is Bob Brown, Network World Online Executive Editor, News.