Lee Gomes’s latest “Portals” column, Folders That Now Seem So Yesterday May Be Very Handy Tomorrow, demonstrates that he’s not a data-structures kind of guy:
As noted, Gmail does have labels, which do some of the work of folders. You can create any kind of label you want in Gmail — “Day-trip ideas,” for instance — and then assign it to an email and have Gmail show you only those emails with a certain label.While labels are similar to traditional computer folders in many ways, they also have a big advantage. You can assign more than one label to an email, thus allowing something to exist in several categories at once. (Many Web sites use labels now; they are also often called “tags.”)
Google, however, doesn’t allow sublabels. That’s not a minor omission, because their absence precludes people from creating the very familiar sort of hierarchy described above.
The company patiently explains why. It says, for instance, that information such as emails is accumulating too rapidly for people to sort everything properly into folders and subfolders.
It remains beyond me, though, why they don’t simply offer people the choice. And does it seem rather odd to you, too, to respond to an increase in information by depriving people of an obvious information tool?
If you can apply multiple labels (Vacation, Restaurant reservations, and Day-trip ideas) to a single document, that achieves the same purpose as placing that document in a sub-folder of a sub-folder of a folder (Vacation/Restaurant reservations/Day-trip ideas) — only without requiring a strict hierarchy.