Beyond Finder, you'll notice that on your iPhone / iPad this paradigm is everywhere. When you see a list, you can select an item and dive into the next level. The only difference is that a single column consumes the entire screen width. See UINavigationController: http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/uikit/...
Think Smalltalk's code browser: http://www.pharo-project.org/about/screenshots
Or NeXSTEP where you see the Cocoa ancestry for this columnar display: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:GNUstep-liveCD.png
Beyond Finder, you'll notice that on your iPhone / iPad this paradigm is everywhere. When you see a list, you can select an item and dive into the next level. The only difference is that a single column consumes the entire screen width. See UINavigationController: http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/uikit/...
In Cocoa, there is a general NSBrowser class, which implements this paradigm: https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Cocoa...
Another application that uses faceted browsing is of course iTunes: http://screenshots.oahermes.com/6/large_4_itunes_store.png
One project which I tracked long ago, called mSpace, has some good stuff: http://research.mspace.fm