i’ve been looking at transparent interfaces, because i hate applications interfering in my life (which i think is a common sentiment). i actually ditched my facebook account recently because there are so few ways to control how the information is molded to fit your world — you get the news feed with a few filters, but not much, and if facebook decides they know better (which seems fairly common), then your workflow gets changed out from under you.

right now my favorite apps are twitter and evernote; both offer multiple ways to get the info to the app so you can use it later. evernote’s great — i can email it, use the iphone app, a web interface, and i think i can text it to the app as well. twitter is, as far as i’m concerned, an extension of my phone’s SMS messaging.

i think, in light of those ideas, that the best way for this to work is for you to create some way for a user to create a fairly simple list fo criteria — say, a list that needs to have a single x added to it — and then let them SMS a mesage from their phones, call it in, or email it, since a lot of phones make it kinda easy for even unsavvy users to store those types of numbers.

(having said that, i was in a meeting yesterday with a 24 year old woman who literally had no idea her phone had a camera until i pointed at the lens, and she’d had the phone for a year. all she knew was that she could text. so much for technology journals’ advocacy of the notion of an entire generation of multitaskers. it’s just not true.)