MIT looks to launch electronic Post-Its

A team based at MIT has developed software that could spell the end of the ubiquitous yellow sticky note.

Computer science professor David Karger's research team has developed software dubbed list.it that's designed to computerize many of the things people currently do through sticky notes: organse e-mail addresses, passwords and the like.

The list.it software, now in public beta, lives on the Firefox browser and comes out of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL), a perennial hotbed of IT inventions, such as CarTel, a GPS-enabled mobile sensor network based on Linux and Wi-Fi designed to address traffic gridlock.  The beta version of list.it enables storage, search and retrieval of everything from email addresses to web URLs to grocery lists.

"I would never make the claim that we're trying to replace Post-its," says Michael Bernstein, a graduate student in Karger's lab. "We want to understand the classes of things people do with Post-its and see if we can help users do more of what they wanted to do in the first place."

The research is funded by the Nokia Research Center Cambridge, the National Science Foundation, the Royal Academy of Engineering, the Web Science Research Initiative and Quanta Computer.