MyHippocampus Zeitgeist: Knowledge Made Public

There you have it, you can now share your hippo. See: my recipes or my movies (check out the timeline by clicking on the eye at the bottom!)

Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself. MyHippocampus contains multitudes. (apologies)

See comments on Reinier's review of MyHippoampus for my previous opinion on the nature of sharing. Frankly I haven't changed my opinion on the sheer uselessness of most online 'social' software, but I've come around a bit and decided that perhaps it's not the sharing itself that was irking me. The problem with most of these sites IMHO is that there's just no actual content of any merit. Our hope with MyHippocampus is that it's a place to keep good, deep, pregnant thoughts. Thoughts and connections that are inspiring to yourself, and (now) to others.

I still hope that people are careful about what they end up sharing. That's why I've chosen the 'manual' 'opt-in' share model. With MyHippocampus it's private until you say so, which should leave you the opportunity to have a secret garden of self-actualization on the Internet.

UI-wise you'll now see a share icon next to the title of your topics. When you click it, you'll get a little heads up about what will be shared and you can fine tune your selections.

Additionally, the main page has been totally redone. Simpler and well... uglier. All in due time.

-Jeff

New Screencast of Google Docs Integration

Well, I finally got a chance to make another screencast. It's available here and it shows off the new updates to the interface and our integration with Google Docs & Spreadsheets.

Don't miss the end, where you can see the new zoomable timeline!

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.

Beta 2!

MyHippocampus is very happy to announce that this beta addresses our number one most requested feature, "less features." That's right, welcome to beta 2, now with 66% fewer features!


I've really enjoyed all the feedback I've gotten and the verdict was pretty clear. "It's cool, but confusing." We'll I think I've finally got it through my technologist ridden brain and I think the new system is really an order of magnitude simpler. That does mean that we've needed to take some things out, but don't fret too much. The maps & timelines will be back, but we're going to wait until we've had a few more epiphanies about how to keep things simple. I'm reading my John Maeda breakfast, lunch & dinner, so I'm sure it can't take too much longer ;)



We're still working on getting some new screencasts together, so drop a line if you have any questions about the new interface. Also, don't be afraid to check out the Del.icio.us import! If you have more than a couple hundred tags it might behoove you create some bundles first, but give it a whirl either way.

OpenID, GWT 1.4, Zooming Timelines & more

MyHippocampus now supports OpenID. While this may mean nothing to you I promise you it's a good thing. The idea is that you'll be able to say goodbye to remembering 5 different passwords and 10 different usernames for all the sites you login to on the Internet & having to register and enter your mother's maiden name just to post a comment on some dumb philately forum.

Yes I see you in the back wearing the penguin t-shirt and rolling your eyes saying 'announcing OpenID support is sooo November 2006.' Be that as it may, we're still letting you sign up using a standard username & password, but I'd definitely recommend getting an openid. It's easy and you'll have all the cutting edge nerd points you can handle. You'll even be able to berate other sites for not having OpenID support, which is half the fun.

Next up is some huge improvements to the MyHippocampus timelines. After much searching and omphaloskepsis, I believe we've developed a nice intuitive method of visualizing your temporal data. We won't rest here long, but if you found the old version kludgy (it was) you should zoom around the new one.

Finally everything just works a lot faster & better, due in no small part to a new release of the Google Web Toolkit. Version 1.4 is of course just as wonderful as 'the google' promised it would be. If you're skeptical about GWT, check out the sublime beauty of ImageBundles. If this doesn't light your fire... you must not care much about minimizing HTTP round-trips! sigh.

That's all for now and apologies for the technical nature of this post. Sometimes the nerd part just takes control. A couple days ago, out of the blue, Microsoft just decided to up and send me, unbidden and in very expedient looking 'next-day-by-6:30am-hand-delivered etc etc' packaging, a black t-shirt that says simply 'geek.' Eerie that they can just tell. Disconcerting that they send t-shirts when they know.

The New Yorker Magazine Conference Example

I recently had an opportunity to attend the New Yorker conference. Basically the idea was to throw designers, chefs, architects, politicians, entrepreneurs & other creative types into a blender and see what they all thought the world would look like in 2012.

The reason I attended was that it seemed like an amazingly condensed MyHippocampus-style knowledge event. What could be better than an event designed to make huge cross-genre connections between Will Wright & his video games & Zaha Hadid's architecture or between Malcolm Gladwell's thoughts on geniuses & Cory Booker's inspirational work in Newark.

Now that I've had a chance to write up some of my thoughts, I think it has definitely been a success. MyHippocampus now includes islands of Forgetting, Happiness, Journalists & Doctors and you should see the size of the Morality island. It's growing almost uncontrollably. I just don't seem to be able to help the fact that Jonathan Haidt's talk about the 5 pillars of morality and moral relativism in general seems to color almost everything I'm thinking about. Just fantastic.

My Cory Booker topic prompted me to go out and rent Street Fight, which was definitely worth seeing, even if did get distracted from the point because I couldn't get over the fascinating flown-in-for-the-event press secretary for Sharpe James. Who was that guy?! I'd watch another documentary just on him. I wonder who he's selling his services to for this election.

My other background influence these days is "By Night in Chile," although, more than anything else this may be a good example for why I don't think that MyHippocampus should be a transparent & 'full speed ahead social I-can-see-all-your-thoughts' kind of website. I've been enjoying the book & I've been writing down my thoughts about it, but if you think I'm confident enough to share my 'analysis of the text' with the rest of the world you're crazy.

Overall a one day conference is a tough thing to evaluate. With a roster of stars such as it had, it was tough not to hope for something hugely magical. Instead we're left (as we always are) with some interesting thoughts to ponder, a few neat experiences, and a desire for more hors d'oeuvres in our daily lifes. I think that MyHippocampus will be a good way to encourage the insights gained not to fade away too quickly.

Day 1 - The Launch Honeymoon

You should all launch a website sometime, if for no other reason than the fact that it's just darn cool to see where web traffic comes from. At right are the last 1000 hits. It reminds me a bit of a game I used to play when I was younger where we'd mark out twelve rows on graph paper, then start rolling dice, marking X's and racing to see who made it across the page first. 7 was darn tough to beat, but every once in a while a number like 10 would make an amazing showing. C'mon Morocco! This is starting to prove my theory that the Internet is disproportionately Dutch as well. Has anyone else noticed this?

Happily, besides just watching the hit counter turn over, I've also recorded a new screencast that's a bit shorter & sweeter. Just because the screencasts are fun to watch doesn't mean you shouldn't check out the manifesto & the tour though. There's a lot more to this MyHippocampus idea than just a pretty face and I think it's tough to convey everything I'd like to in the screencasts.

A few people have asked me about how to share the topics within your hippocampus. This is a good question, although you might be surprised that this isn't one of the features we've included to start off with. The reason this isn't high on our priority list is that we really feel MyHippocampus is first & foremost a personal tool. It seems to us that this whole instant sharing of cat-falling-off-the-tv videos is a bit, you might say, empty? "But wait!" you say, "I wanted to share my thoughts about a book!" Well, yes, hopefully those are a good deal more interesting than the cat videos. The problem that we've found however is that when you write something for public consumption, you're immediately hemmed in by a number of constraints. You can't just dash out some thoughts and your entries start looking like reviews. While that's fine in some contexts, we want MyHippocampus to be a place where you can jot down half-thoughts, inklings, and other fragments of ideas that wouldn't make sense to anyone else.

Certainly as time goes on and MyHippocampus evolves, the ability to publish your fully formed thoughts to the world will be a wonderful and important utility. For now though, revel in the fact that this is one place on the Internet that's all yours.