Lifebrowser: Microsoft's answer to personal data mining

Having the ability to organize media and browsing data chronologically is important and Microsoft realises this. Lifebrowser aims to let your browse through grouped media more efficiently over time.

Jake Durasamy Neowin @Z31KKU · Mar 16, 2012 23:08 EDT · Hot! with 1 comment

It's not exactly a science to know that your computer contains a lot of personal information and this information ranges from photos and email to calendar appointments and browsing history. But Microsoft Research is trying to make browsing through that content much easier with a program called Lifebrowser. The software can detect what information is related to various events in your life, and then lets you browse it in a timeline-esque manner.

Lifebrowser is able to look at multiple photos and determine how important they might be, or even see how many people are in it. Once analyzed, the content is placed in the timeline relative to the specific events which is very similar to Facebook's Timeline.

Development for Lifebrowser began as far back as 2004 which would make it older than the Facebook timeline. The software is still considered a prototype but hopefully will be made public eventually. Naturally, the concept of a program accessing personal information so frequently may cause some to worry, but Lifebrowser should be able to avoid these issues by staying confined to your local computer.

Despite the media aspect being well discussed, we are still unsure of how browsing data is analyzed and categorized but once we learn more, we'll keep you posted.