#ToolsForThinking @kevinmarks: I'll be taking notes on twitter, and posting them here afterwards kevinmarks.com/toolsforthinki…
#ToolsForThinking @betaworks: Tools for Thinking help us ideate, think and work better. You'll see people using tools, and we'll also be using plexus to help share thoughts
#ToolsForThinking @betaworks: Neel Baronia: We're running a ThinkCamp accelerator program at betaworks.com/camp
#ToolsForThinking @betaworks: Neel Baronia: we'll be organising some follow on talks over the next few weeks too
#ToolsForThinking @Borthwick: Part of the purpose of this is to kick off a conversation. Jerry and I are going to start with a couple of rants about this.
#ToolsForThinking @Borthwick: we have access to all this information, but we don't have access to great tools to make meaning out of , which is why I think we need better tootls for thinking.. We are forming our minds to be mass consumers and not great thinkers
#ToolsForThinking @Borthwick: The moment we are in is also important. We have seen a lot of development of graph databases and machine learning, and with web3 we could have data owned by everyone and shared across apps
#ToolsForThinking @Borthwick: We're starting to see more semantic spatial work begin, and I think we're going to see UI to make this work better
#ToolsForThinking @Borthwick: We need to think hard about how different people think. I first thought of tools as memorisation tools, but I never went back to them. I went back to pen and paper because the associative function was more important than the memoty
#ToolsForThinking @Borthwick: I find that going for a walk and going to sleep will often find a new association for me. Let me hand over to Jerry, who has two brains
#ToolsForThinking @jerrymichalski: I have a piece of software called 'The Brain' that is a mindmap of my thoughts - which is software from a tiny company in Los Angeles
#ToolsForThinking @jerrymichalski: this is the same file I opened in december 1997, and there is a half million of these 'thoughts' in the mindmap - I'm like the guy who made the palace of fine arts out of toothpicks
#ToolsForThinking @jerrymichalski: Raise your hand if you thought that HyperCard could have been the web, but Apple was stupid
#ToolsForThinking @jerrymichalski: Most people use mappy tools for mindmaps etc - there are lots of these - what i want to show you is someone using one of these tools for himself
#ToolsForThinking @jerrymichalski: How can we make a social memory so everyone can use their favourite tool, but connect between them? [km webmention!]
#ToolsForThinking @jerrymichalski: By putting things into this tool, I have improved my recall because by adding 'thoughts' to this brain, which helps remind me of connections between them
#ToolsForThinking @jerrymichalski: how do we connect these tools? our datasets are all siloed, we need a bonfire in the middle to share around
#ToolsForThinking @jerrymichalski: If we do this right we can help make better decisions as a society, and we are in 5 simultaneous crises right now
#ToolsForThinking @jerrymichalski: The web is stuck in Web 1.0 language- ideas go into books or PDFs, so we can't connect them well
#ToolsForThinking @Borthwick: It's a big space, and there's a lot happenign in this space, we're looking at the history of computing and the way it's moving forwards
#ToolsForThinking @jerrymichalski: PDFs are where information goes to die
#ToolsForThinking @homsiT: Dan and I founded Readwise over a passion for reading and spaced repetition. It's a tool to help you read better and retain more of what you read
#ToolsForThinking @deadly_onion: we want software to improve reading the way it improves writing - people were highlighting things, but never revisiting them, so we showed them back to them
#ToolsForThinking @deadly_onion: we then got asked to bring the notes inot other tools, so we're like the Zapier of annotation
#ToolsForThinking @Borthwick: I thought this was a memoisation tool, but when you started moving highlights to other apps it made more sense to me
#ToolsForThinking @homsiT: When we staretd Evernote was the main note taking app, over the past 5 years we have paradigm shifts over time - vernote made it 'save and search'
#ToolsForThinking @homsiT: the next shift was Notion 2015-2019 - block based architecture - pages, images are all block that you can nest infinitely, and also multiplayer
#ToolsForThinking @homsiT: We think tbe most recent innovation was Room - the first graph database that broke through with backlinks and transclusions in 2021
#ToolsForThinking @homsiT: There are a lot of spatial and visual writing tools going on, but we're waiting for the next inflection
#ToolsForThinking @Borthwick: why did Evernote get stuck?
#ToolsForThinking @deadly_onion: Evernote nailed the consumer usecase but never got the enterprise or multiplayer part right compared to notion- they got distracted during their growth by recipes etc
#ToolsForThinking @Borthwick: How do you think about the funding models? Evernote and Notion raised a lot of money, but there are people looking at other models
#ToolsForThinking @homsiT: The promise of the internet is to be able to start a business - it is now easy for one hacker to build a first version before looking for funding
#ToolsForThinking @homsiT: We tried for 2 years without raising any money, so we charged a monthly fee and walked up the SaaS ramp until we could support a team
#ToolsForThinking @deadly_onion: Enterprise SaaS is the most proven busisness model, when you're in the consumer zone like readwise, it's not clear that this is venture scale
#ToolsForThinking @Borthwick: The SaaS economics of Web 2 tend to silo data and system in a specific way - Gordon Brander is going to talk about that
#ToolsForThinking @deadly_onion: People will put a book into Readwise as paragraphs and review it via themed review, then put it into their note taking app and sequence it. Theer is an mazing writing product waiting to be made there
#ToolsForThinking q: I have tried the GPT and AI writing tools, and I coudl write better myself
#ToolsForThinking @deadly_onion: the person who writes and the person who edits can both be you if you use this to separate yourself
#ToolsForThinking @homsiT: AI is not the product, but there are opportunities for it to help enhance your work
#ToolsForThinking @Borthwick: Starting with a blank page is broken - you come to the page with all the ideas but they are in different silos - Machine learning tends to overpromt, and you get fascinated by the machin instead of thinking
#ToolsForThinking @homsiT: it's very common in our space to get stuck on the system, so they're optimising the process rather than writing or thinking
#ToolsForThinking @deadly_onion: it feels like this space has become more mainstream, but it is till really early adopter - we need to find ways to use it to improve things in our lives
#ToolsForThinking @Borthwick: What about Audio? We have seen the rise of podcasting and there is lots of audio, but it is challneging to move inot this space as you need to transcribe and excerpt
#ToolsForThinking @deadly_onion: we've been blown away by the growth of audio- books are growing 1% a year, audiobooks are growing 15% a year
#ToolsForThinking @deadly_onion: we have a text to speech option and it is being very popular. Transforming audio into a block or a highlight - there are tools that can snip, but it needs improving
#ToolsForThinking @homsiT: we're in the final bit of the uncanny valley for text to speech and speech to text, but ti is getting there and it will be free and everywhere
#ToolsForThinking @deadly_onion: the audiobook side is dominated by one company at 95% and is a very closed format - we're seeing innovation on the podcast side and TTS
#ToolsForThinking @Borthwick: Silos all the way up and down - saying 'siri take an airquote' gets you stuck in OS level and amazon and audiobook trapping
#ToolsForThinking @Borthwick: we went on an adventure several years ago at Betaworks with an annotation app called Findings that Amazon killed
#ToolsForThinking q: how have you seen the usage of your product change over the years?
#ToolsForThinking @deadly_onion: we started with spaced repetition - the daily habit hook - we got pulled into the note taking apps, especially Roam
#ToolsForThinking @homsiT: the explosion fo different apps has been incredible to watch - it used to all be Evernote, and now there are so many requests for integration
#ToolsForThinking q: Have you thought about Enterprise, and what does this look like there?
#ToolsForThinking @deadly_onion: we talk about single player versus multiplayer, but we haven't found good ways to do multiplayer reading
#ToolsForThinking @homsiT: our main interest is in helping people read better, and we'd love to jump on enterprise Saas, but there isn't n analog compared to Notion
#ToolsForThinking q: You talked about information density - you can read twice as fast as you can listen - are people reading slower?
#ToolsForThinking @deadly_onion: it's a divided attention thing - people are listening while doing other things so there is less information going in. People who listen and read tat the same time seem to absorb things faster
#ToolsForThinking @homsiT: people are saying there is no attention span left - people are Wladen Ponding by going to cabin and reading paper insetad - we want to fight tech with tech
#ToolsForThinking @homsiT: immersion reading - parallel audio and reading - cna help you get this
#ToolsForThinking q: you're now unexpectedly owning the plumbing between the thought products- how do you make it better?
#ToolsForThinking @homsiT: we backed into this owning the plumbing sitiuation - it would be great if there was a standard format for annotation- there are some ways to do this but it;s very web focused
#ToolsForThinking @homsiT: we have annotations for PDF, kind, podcasts audiobooks - there's no spec flexible enough for that - if you cna please help
#ToolsForThinking @Borthwick: you're talking about annotations and highlights - knowledge blocks are important - I give both Roam and Twitter credit for that context too
#ToolsForThinking @deadly_onion: we have our own reader app, and the promise of the block drew us in where every paragraph was a block
#ToolsForThinking @deadly_onion: we found that 'blocks are too soupy' - they're very fluid - there is a phase change from the fluid blobs to a coherent text - blocks to docs
#ToolsForThinking @deadly_onion: the challenge is to take the doc and make it into fluid blocks, and connect them back together again
#ToolsForThinking @deadly_onion: highlights and notes are the connections between the media
#ToolsForThinking @homsiT: with a 100 twete thread, our users want them as a single document that they can highlight as a document
#ToolsForThinking q: I love readwise as a way to jump from tool to tool - could we customise the ingestion somehow? Also readwise for slack
#ToolsForThinking @homsiT: the formatting came out of Roam - we let you take your notes and sync it out; before Roam we just dumped highlights - Roam users wanted more choices
#ToolsForThinking @homsiT: after a bit of that we gave them jinja2 templating language to export info in a flexible way
#ToolsForThinking @deadly_onion: I have an alpha for readwise for Discord I cna show you later
#ToolsForThinking q: have you looked at using this in education? Would students be forced to use it
#ToolsForThinking @deadly_onion: we have never had any success with academic or school users, we tend to appeal to autodidacts instead
#ToolsForThinking @gordonbrander: Subconscious is social notetaking - I want to talk about something a bit bigger - the internet is already a tool. for thought - it should get good at it
#ToolsForThinking @gordonbrander: the internet has not yet produced tools that help us cope and make sense together
#ToolsForThinking @gordonbrander: when societes first became complex we had a sense making crisis, we have another one now with the climate crisis
#ToolsForThinking @gordonbrander: we need to get off the collapse trajectory and onto the sustainability trajectory or the go to space one
#ToolsForThinking @gordonbrander: we have all these great tools for thought, but apps trap thoughts in SaaS silos - the same origin security model causes this
#ToolsForThinking @gordonbrander: each app lives in it's own pocket uviverse by default, and you often need bizdev to connect them which is no way to scale
#ToolsForThinking @gordonbrander: we need a protocol for thought - what if you could draw knowledge form anywhere and connect them together, like Xanadu
#ToolsForThinking @gordonbrander: we're building Noosphee,a. world-wide knowledge graph - permissionless, decentralized over IPFS, user owned and multiplayer, belomnhg in to everyone
#ToolsForThinking @gordonbrander: It's liek HTTP - belongs to evreyone [so use HTTP - km]
#ToolsForThinking @gordonbrander: you get cross-app transclusions and back links, change history, and user owned back pack, and Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe
#ToolsForThinking @gordonbrander: libp2p from IPFS - we have p2p petnames, versioning like lightweight git, and signing with a UCAN key
#ToolsForThinking @gordonbrander: you link to @gordon/composability - @gordnon maps to your key, and composability is a petname for your info hash in IPFS
#ToolsForThinking @gordonbrander: we have a generic envelope called memos that has metadata, body ContentID, and a pointer to previous (parent) ContentID
#ToolsForThinking @gordonbrander: UCAN uses and OCAP model to enable access and editing - you own your keys [so you have to keep them safe?]
#ToolsForThinking @gordonbrander: the Sphere server talks to IPFS, maps this to your public key and paths to ContentIDs, then it gossips them so you have lots fo copies, and it bridges to the web
#ToolsForThinking @gordonbrander: running on the device was too battery intensive, so we run it on a web2 server [so you don't replace HTTP after all then?]
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