Google Docs & Del.icio.us Support

I'm pleased to announce that MyHippocampus now supports the import of Del.icio.us links and Google Docs. I think this is a great step forward for us and hopefully it's just the beginning of our quest to integrate your existing sources of information.

So why would you want to use this? Well, Google Docs are great tool, but here at MyHippocampus we're rethinking the assumption that documents are a very good way to store knowledge for the long term. To us, information should be defined in terms of its connections, its place inside your brain and amongst your other thoughts. Information usually comes in little tidbits and notions, not big formatted documents.

Say I go to a conference and I end up meeting:

1. An engaging journalism student, who loves my new project (hmm... article?)
   
2. A oenophile doctor who invites me up to his summer house in Quebec (hmm... vacation? cardiology startup?)
   
3. A venture capitalist focussed on New England startups (hmm... $$$?)
   
4. The press agent for a famous video game developer (hmm... job? interface 3.0?)
   

Now we all agree it's information worth keeping, that's why we went to the conference in the first place, right? But how do we store that information? Should we create a 2-line Google Doc for each person and then tag it? Add them to outlook and then never find them again? Write it on a napkin?

No, we just add them to our hippocampus and attach a quick note about who they are. Now they're a building block and we can add connections to track how this new piece of information relates to what we already have. Our web of knowledge is growing.

"But I thought you were talking about Del.icio.us & Google Docs?"

I am! I'm just incurably wordy! So now we're browsing the web one day and we find some link that relates to the Journalist. We add that to our hippocampus using Del.icio.us, (or by just using the MyHippocampus browser plugin). Now we've associated this simple link with our information about a person in our life. If we start to collaborate on a Google Document with him we can continue to attach information to his topic by importing our Google Docs and making the connections.

To me this is something that's fundamentally unworkable using Del.icio.us or Google Docs alone. The only way to connect things is to make another tag, but having a tag for everything under the sun in those two programs would make your head explode. Tags are great, but when the only way to look at them is alphabetical chaos starts to reign pretty quickly.

With MyHippocampus we're trying to reign in this chaos by revolutionizing the interface which you use to interact with your information. Hierarchical tags displayed in a personal mental landscape? Zoomable timelines? What's not to love? (besides aggressive sales pitches)


Last note, the Del.icio.us import will respect your 'bundles' so bundle up and then, give it a try.