Apple was, of course, the big news in the technology world today. Most inspiring of the product updates was iLife 09. Specifically, iPhoto has added some powerful new features to enable users to organize and find photos in their library. The new tools, Faces and Places (in addition to Events, from ‘08) bring new, better ways of organizing and finding your pictures.

The fact that they tie into your Facebook and Flickr accounts, and use built in geo-tagging to support these functions, is icing on the cake. But for a designer, these features are case studies in the profound impact of user-oriented information architecture (or Domain Language, as Paul describes it in his fantastic post over at 37signals). From the post:

A domain language is the set of words that reflect the way you cut up a domain. It consists of the pieces you sliced and the names you chose to give them. This language defines an application and makes it special.

Rather than stick with the old, tried and true – but ultimately dysfunctional – means of organizing pictures (roll and album) the new iPhoto app uses location, face recognition, and of course Events to cull together these artifacts in ways that are meaningful to people, rather than databases.

Each chance we have to examine and perhaps create IA (or domain language) for a new website or other app, we have the same chance to truly examine the way people think of the products or tools they’ll be using, and to ensure – or at least try – to make our language fit the way they think of things, and not the other way around.