Think about the task of correlating online events with events from your memory.
Suppose you see a quote from you, saying something rude that seems out of character. Knowing that it was however many hundreds of days ago is useless; see that it was July 27, 2011, at 4am, and you'll say "oh, yeah, somewhere in late July we had X and Y over drinking into the wee hours... those #%#$%s must have been futzing with my computer after I fell asleep, and somehow I never noticed".
Most importantly -- you have to predict the reasons people will be looking at dates, and this varies. Gmail shows both because they can't guess; email can carry so much different stuff.
HN post/comment timestamps beyond a few days ago can be notated in number of days as far as I'm concerned; I don't need to know what year, even -- just "this is old".
The timestamp on a blood sugar reading should include time of day (and possibly day of week even) -- a full timestamp, minimum -- to be useful.
Think about the task of correlating online events with events from your memory.
Suppose you see a quote from you, saying something rude that seems out of character. Knowing that it was however many hundreds of days ago is useless; see that it was July 27, 2011, at 4am, and you'll say "oh, yeah, somewhere in late July we had X and Y over drinking into the wee hours... those #%#$%s must have been futzing with my computer after I fell asleep, and somehow I never noticed".
Most importantly -- you have to predict the reasons people will be looking at dates, and this varies. Gmail shows both because they can't guess; email can carry so much different stuff.
HN post/comment timestamps beyond a few days ago can be notated in number of days as far as I'm concerned; I don't need to know what year, even -- just "this is old".
The timestamp on a blood sugar reading should include time of day (and possibly day of week even) -- a full timestamp, minimum -- to be useful.
Etc..