I got some feedback to my series of questions/observations about Roam's product, which does appear to be an outliner after all. This was my most basic question. I could see that users had the ability to control detail with a familiar expand and collapse operation, but could it reorganize according to structure, the second major feature of outlining? Text on rails. It does have that ability.#
I spent some time a few years ago brainstorming with Ward Cunningham, the great wiki dev, about how we could combine outlining and wikis. We didn't figure it out. It seems Roam, or one of the products it has inspired, may have it. Andrew Shell, who has spent more time with Ward recently said he had the same thought.#
I should really spend some time learning this product, but it's hard to find that kind of time. This is one of the problems with software development. It's not like listening to music, which you can do while you are driving a car, or seeing a movie, which takes at most a few hours. Learning to use a software product can take months or even years. Very few products get used by most developers, which is a big reason we keep reinventing each others' wheels.#
I have to distill this down to something shorter, but don't have the time right now..#
When I first showed up in Silicon Valley, after spending a couple of years in Madison making my first outliner (and getting a CS degree), I was disappointed to find out that someone else had thought of outliners before I had, years earlier, and had developed one, and made a big splash, of sorts -- but opinion-leaders were just as puzzled about his product as I found people were with mine. #
Now I'm having a different feeling, after I stopped trying to make outliners pop up everywhere, and turned to other interesting products such as system-level scripting, RSS readers and web CMSes -- that now a new generation of devs is trying again. #
We had tens of thousands of users of our outliners in the 80s, not millions. People who use outliners are rare, I found. I think it may be possible that doesn't have to be that way, there's nothing very hard about using an outliner, but people have to be interested in how they organize and use info, to see the possibility of tools to make that more efficient, and most people aren't that interested.#
The product didn't take off until it did something other than outlining -- presentations. Some people asked if they could just have the outliner, and others wanted just the presenter. Which raised the question, why are these two very distinct functions, in one app? Shouldn't they be split into two, so users could plug them into other tools? This is a big idea, that still hasn't seen its day in the sun.#
That made me turn to making glue that could combine the features of products to make a hybrid product. That's the germ of an idea that led to Frontier. #
Anyway, when I knock on any developer's door and ask about their connections to the outside world, this is what I'm getting at. I once approached a company making a notification system if they supported RSS and rssCloud. They said it was a third-party opportunity and sent me back a link to their developer site (it cost money to be a developer, btw). This felt like when I approached WBUR at the dawn of podcasting to offer to work with them on a new kind of public radio, and they sent me a prospectus for giving them money. Or the time in 1978 that I cold-called the Encyclopedia Britannica and told them I knew how to create a computerized encyclopedia and would they like to work with me, and they sent a salesman to try to sell me books! The guy was persistent, we kind of became friends, but he never understood one word of what I was talking about. Heh. I guess it was hard to understand that someday they would be on the web, but this was way before the web existed. #
Anyway, I want to know what kind of product Roam is making. One that welcomes the rest of the world, or one that wants to be its own world. Not really judging, just trying to understand. It's like asking if you want to be a cop or the Chief of Police. (A rabbi, or god?)#
PS: Ultimately I personally decided I wanted to be a cop. 👮♂️#
PPS: Anyone else working in this area, if you're planning an API, let's collaborate, I have some working code in this area. #
PPPS: I wonder if Jerry Michalski has looked at this? He was and is an advocate of a product called The Brain, it seems a lot like Roam too. If Jerry likes it, that means something, imho.#
Last update: Wednesday March 17, 2021; 4:19 PM EDT.
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