Prescience:
Yesterday I came across these comments from Joel on Software about a new product called Six Degrees. According to the marketing blurb, Six Degrees is “is timefreeing technology that helps you work more efficiently and complete projects faster. Six Degrees continually makes connections between the messages you send, the files you create, and the people you work with.Once these connections are visible, you can use them to navigate through your projects in a simple and powerful new way – regardless of where on your system these files and messages are stored.” Hmmm. Sounded familiar, so I started digging through the archives of Future Culture, an email list I used to participate in regularly, and came across this nugget of mine from August 1997:
Right now, if I want to draw relationships between units of information (i.e. files) I have to do it myself by organizing them into directories or by setting up links between web pages or whatever. What I want is for *the computer* to begin making those relationships, especially the simple ones. Of course, the user should retain a good deal of control over whether those relationships are made and how they are made….It should recognize content and be able to draw relationships between content on its own (according to parameters I, the user, find valuable). It should be able to automatically organize the content in a useful fashion.
I hope Six Degrees pans out to be a cool tool. Of course, if I could ever get these ideas into a business plan I’d be a gigazabillionaire.
I also independently came up with the idea for Magnetic Poetry about two years before it hit the street. I just never did anything with it besides tell my then-girlfriend, “Hey, wouldn’t it be neat if….” She thought it was dumb idea. Well, I guess somebody else showed her, huh?!