I see that the Guardian carried an article earlier this week on the Microsoft Research project: MyLifeBits. Gordon Bell, a computer pioneer, is the guinea pig who is having his every waking moment recorded for Posterity – although whether Posterity will be pleased is probably a moot point.
The article carries a sentence that seems to me to put its finger on the weak point of the project:
If he wants to recall something, he switches on and picks his way through days and months of information until he finds what he is after.
"Picking one’s way" through reams of information hardly seems to me to be the most efficient manner of information retrieval. What I think the MyLifeBits project is so far is a "write-only" data vault. Until ways can be found to retrieve information quickly from all that data, then I would classify this as an interesting, but so far a sterile, piece of research.
Geoff Coupe's Blog 
Although the project does allow you to browse via a timeline etc. it definitely indexes all the content etc. and allows other types of searches through the data. Take a look at the following video which is an interview with some of the people involved and includes demos of the project as well.http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=46702
OK, thanks for the pointer, Sean. The ultimate goal would surely be to have recall as instantaneous as possible… but I suspect that’s some way off…