With the proliferation of consumer electronics, such as personal computers having document generation and media content capabilities, digital video recorders, digital cameras, digital sound recorders, and smart devices having image and/or sound recording features readily available to capture various content, and personal digital media players and smart devices having image and/or sound reproduction features almost omnipresent to provide playback of the various content, the instances of digital media content created by and available to users is quite large. A user may, for example, generate and store numbers of digital documents, photographs, videos, sound files, etc.
Unfortunately, however, the organizational techniques employed for storing and thus later accessing such digital media content tends to be manual and relatively simplistic. For example, a user may employ a simple hierarchical folder or directory structure in which various digital media content is organized for storage and user access through their inclusion in a same folder. The level of organizational granularity provided with respect to such folders is typically not detailed (e.g., “my trip to Europe”, “work documents”, “videos”, etc.). Implementing a fine level of granularity for content organizational structure using such folders is often not practical, requiring significant time to navigate the hierarchical folders and to manually sort the content. Moreover, such organizational structures are static, providing a fixed granularity of media access defined by the folder structure, unless and until the user takes steps to manually reorganize the folders.
Accordingly, the use of such digital media content is often not fulfilling and generally diminishes with time. For example, the time required to access content of interest is sometimes impractical, and even more so with the passage of time. With the stagnant nature of the content and its organization, the user often looses interest in the content as time goes on.
A technique used to provide access to media, such as digital photographs, in a way that is often more relevant to the user than the traditional folder based interface is the timeline interface. For example, a social media platform such as FACEBOOK may provide a timeline interface in which a member's digital photographs that have been uploaded to the platform are presented along a timeline to provide a temporal aspect to the media interface. Such a timeline interface, although providing an interface that is not limited to a hierarchical storage structure used with respect to the media, provides a fixed, continuous temporal chain of media. The user is unable to control the granularity of the presentation of media through the timeline interface or the organization of the media.
USPTO Backgrounds
USPTO Backgrounds