What Up Derek?

jakelodwick:

What have you been up to, Jake?
In July 2009 I started a video project called Odwick.com, where I directed a new (weird) video every week for ten weeks. This was very ambitious, because I’d been languishing for a long time, unable to get into a productive groove. When I announced the project, I felt a rush of adrenaline — how the hell could I count on myself to work on a project for ten straight weeks? Normally I lose interest after a few days. But, thanks to my Standards system, I was able to monitor myself and keep a disciplined schedule. And I did it! Ten videos, some of them watchable, each posted within a few hours of the Wednesday deadline. When I finished the last one, I felt like I’d built a house with my bare hands. And I was tired, so I took a vacation. I went to Australia for three weeks.
While there, all I could think about was Odwick Season Two. I would start it the day I got back. I would produce a video every two weeks, each one ten minutes long, each delving into some creative dungeon of my brain, exploring sex, philosophy, rhythm, and color. I wrote pages and pages of ideas.
But when I got home, and tried to start making stuff, nothing came out. It was like I’d expelled all the backed-up creative energy into Season One, and there was no fuel for Season Two. I had nothing left to say.
Unwilling to go back to purposelessness, something told me that I like making websites. Oh yeah, I used to spend 12 hours a day programming sites. Maybe I should try that again — it’s creative, but in a much different way than directing art videos. So, for the pure enjoyment of doing quality work, I started fleshing out an idea that had been in my head for years: a memory tool called “Membox”. It’s a simple concept: a site that lets you store and retrieve private bits of text, like if you wanted to remember someone’s favorite meal or the steps for configuring a new server. Zach Klein and I maintained something like this at CollegeHumor called “Jotter” as an internal company tool, but Jotter was long-gone and I wanted something even more bare-bones. So I started working, evolving the project bit-by-bit every day.
From the start, I gave myself two “design principles” for Membox: It must be fast, and it must be brain-like. Any change I made to the site had to make it faster or more brain-like. The first version was just an “Add Note” box, a “Search” box, and a list of memories. Next I added a hashtag system (like on Twitter) — if you saved the memory “Pistachio ice cream #Robin”, you could access that memory by clicking the “#Robin” button that now appeared on the home page. So after a few days, there were dozens of these tags — #Robin, #PHP, #self, and so on.
At some point — I can’t recall when — it occurred to me that the site would be faster and more brain-like if you could select multiple tags at once. Like if you clicked “#NYC” and then “#diner”, it would show you all the names of diners in NYC … like in your head, if you think about two concepts, your memory gives you the overlap, like a venn diagram.
Around this time, I started admitting to myself that although Membox was very useful to me, it would probably have little or no value to other people. I mean, nobody is going to tag their own thoughts. It’s a crazy person tool for loony nutballs. But the interface seemed very useful, if it were applied to data that’s already tagged. Like an ecommerce site.
I build a generalized platform for these buttons and called it Kwisi, short for “Know When I See It”, and started testing on some friends’ sites (like the Photojojo Store). The name referred to the idea that sometimes you don’t know exactly what you want — you just have to look around and see what catches your eye. When you do a Google Search, for example, you have some word in mind, and you’re attempting to go directly to it. But what if you’re just in the mood to shop? What if you want to see something new, something innovative, or strange, or obscure, or foreign? Traditional web search isn’t that helpful. So I thought I would install this platform on other sites, who would change their whole webstore around to accommodate me.
But the more I thought about it, the more sense it made to just build a standalone site. For one, it’s must easier because you don’t have to ask anyone’s permission — because a lot of modern websites have something called an “API”, which lets you grab data right off their servers. It’s like a secret computer program that other servers can talk to. Whenever you see Flickr photos on some other website, they’re probably using Flickr’s API to retrieve the photos. Etsy has an API, so I started pulling their data off and applying my browse system to it.
I registered a new domain, Hybrowse.com, and hacked together a little prototype. And dammit, it worked — by putting every Etsy item’s tags (and “materials”) into a big database and letting you browse them venn diagram-style, you can find some really unusual products. I already linked to Octopus Necklaces, but here are some more:
Pink + Green + Beads
Clothing + Men + 80s
Taxidermy + Shadowbox
Sparrow + Pendant
And so on and so on, forever! You can combine the tags any way you like. You’re not stuck in a rigid tree of categories, like on most ecommerce sites, where you can only move backwards or forwards. With Hybrowse you can go from A to A + B to B.
(IT’S KIND OF HARD TO EXPLAIN WITH LETTERS SO MAYBE YOU CAN JUST TRY IT YOURSELF!)
My philosophy here is that search engines are 20-year-old technology and we need new ways of navigating the endless data that is piling up every day. To that end, I have committed to Hybrowse as a four-month project. I will continue working full-time on it until May 1st (at the very least). This is not a startup company, it is my attempt to make life more manageable for anyone who feels overwhelmed with data. If you feel that is a noble goal then please play with the site and let me know how I can improve it. Very few things are “locked in” and it’s very easy to make changes, so if you have any opinions, please send them to me at jake@hybrowse.com. I want to know your thoughts; it’s hard for me to see the site very clearly anymore, by myself.
But before I go, I will make this more interesting and supply some new ammunition for anyone who thinks I am crazy. The crazy thing is this. By May 1st I will have 1,000 services on Hybrowse. Yes, that’s 998 more than I have right now (Netflix and Etsy). I consider this goal “impossible” and will, by any rational calculation, fail hilariously, but I don’t care — I need an audacious goal that gets my adrenaline pumping, and 100 doesn’t do it. 1000 sites. I’m like a local car salesman on tv. “THESE GOALS ARE INSANE!!!”
I genuinely think the site would be profoundly useful if it had 1,000 services. Picture it. You land on the home page and use the same “overlapping tags” mechanism to discover, say, Swedish housewares stores, then pick one, then browse their overpriced euroshit. Or you sort through Match.com profiles and try to find ones that don’t look like monsters. I don’t know how it will work. But I’m going to do it and I want your suggestions … and this is going to be a very busy couple months and I have to go now, because I suddenly realized I have a lot of effing work to do.
jake@hybrowse.com
(ps: Peter Vidani did the site’s visual design)

Excited to see this grow! So far I am really enjoying the simplified browsing experience it offers over using the actual sites. While not a replacement for these sites, it definitely catches that easy going shopping/browsing vibe he is shooting for. If I had an ecommerce site I’d look in to working with these guys.

What have you been up to, Jake?

In July 2009 I started a video project called Odwick.com, where I directed a new (weird) video every week for ten weeks. This was very ambitious, because I’d been languishing for a long time, unable to get into a productive groove. When I announced the project, I felt a rush of adrenaline — how the hell could I count on myself to work on a project for ten straight weeks? Normally I lose interest after a few days. But, thanks to my Standards system, I was able to monitor myself and keep a disciplined schedule. And I did it! Ten videos, some of them watchable, each posted within a few hours of the Wednesday deadline. When I finished the last one, I felt like I’d built a house with my bare hands. And I was tired, so I took a vacation. I went to Australia for three weeks.

While there, all I could think about was Odwick Season Two. I would start it the day I got back. I would produce a video every two weeks, each one ten minutes long, each delving into some creative dungeon of my brain, exploring sex, philosophy, rhythm, and color. I wrote pages and pages of ideas.

But when I got home, and tried to start making stuff, nothing came out. It was like I’d expelled all the backed-up creative energy into Season One, and there was no fuel for Season Two. I had nothing left to say.

Unwilling to go back to purposelessness, something told me that I like making websites. Oh yeah, I used to spend 12 hours a day programming sites. Maybe I should try that again — it’s creative, but in a much different way than directing art videos. So, for the pure enjoyment of doing quality work, I started fleshing out an idea that had been in my head for years: a memory tool called “Membox”. It’s a simple concept: a site that lets you store and retrieve private bits of text, like if you wanted to remember someone’s favorite meal or the steps for configuring a new server. Zach Klein and I maintained something like this at CollegeHumor called “Jotter” as an internal company tool, but Jotter was long-gone and I wanted something even more bare-bones. So I started working, evolving the project bit-by-bit every day.

From the start, I gave myself two “design principles” for Membox: It must be fast, and it must be brain-like. Any change I made to the site had to make it faster or more brain-like. The first version was just an “Add Note” box, a “Search” box, and a list of memories. Next I added a hashtag system (like on Twitter) — if you saved the memory “Pistachio ice cream #Robin”, you could access that memory by clicking the “#Robin” button that now appeared on the home page. So after a few days, there were dozens of these tags — #Robin, #PHP, #self, and so on.

At some point — I can’t recall when — it occurred to me that the site would be faster and more brain-like if you could select multiple tags at once. Like if you clicked “#NYC” and then “#diner”, it would show you all the names of diners in NYC … like in your head, if you think about two concepts, your memory gives you the overlap, like a venn diagram.

Around this time, I started admitting to myself that although Membox was very useful to me, it would probably have little or no value to other people. I mean, nobody is going to tag their own thoughts. It’s a crazy person tool for loony nutballs. But the interface seemed very useful, if it were applied to data that’s already tagged. Like an ecommerce site.

I build a generalized platform for these buttons and called it Kwisi, short for “Know When I See It”, and started testing on some friends’ sites (like the Photojojo Store). The name referred to the idea that sometimes you don’t know exactly what you want — you just have to look around and see what catches your eye. When you do a Google Search, for example, you have some word in mind, and you’re attempting to go directly to it. But what if you’re just in the mood to shop? What if you want to see something new, something innovative, or strange, or obscure, or foreign? Traditional web search isn’t that helpful. So I thought I would install this platform on other sites, who would change their whole webstore around to accommodate me.

But the more I thought about it, the more sense it made to just build a standalone site. For one, it’s must easier because you don’t have to ask anyone’s permission — because a lot of modern websites have something called an “API”, which lets you grab data right off their servers. It’s like a secret computer program that other servers can talk to. Whenever you see Flickr photos on some other website, they’re probably using Flickr’s API to retrieve the photos. Etsy has an API, so I started pulling their data off and applying my browse system to it.

I registered a new domain, Hybrowse.com, and hacked together a little prototype. And dammit, it worked — by putting every Etsy item’s tags (and “materials”) into a big database and letting you browse them venn diagram-style, you can find some really unusual products. I already linked to Octopus Necklaces, but here are some more:

Pink + Green + Beads

Clothing + Men + 80s

Taxidermy + Shadowbox

Sparrow + Pendant

And so on and so on, forever! You can combine the tags any way you like. You’re not stuck in a rigid tree of categories, like on most ecommerce sites, where you can only move backwards or forwards. With Hybrowse you can go from A to A + B to B.

(IT’S KIND OF HARD TO EXPLAIN WITH LETTERS SO MAYBE YOU CAN JUST TRY IT YOURSELF!)

My philosophy here is that search engines are 20-year-old technology and we need new ways of navigating the endless data that is piling up every day. To that end, I have committed to Hybrowse as a four-month project. I will continue working full-time on it until May 1st (at the very least). This is not a startup company, it is my attempt to make life more manageable for anyone who feels overwhelmed with data. If you feel that is a noble goal then please play with the site and let me know how I can improve it. Very few things are “locked in” and it’s very easy to make changes, so if you have any opinions, please send them to me at jake@hybrowse.com. I want to know your thoughts; it’s hard for me to see the site very clearly anymore, by myself.

But before I go, I will make this more interesting and supply some new ammunition for anyone who thinks I am crazy. The crazy thing is this. By May 1st I will have 1,000 services on Hybrowse. Yes, that’s 998 more than I have right now (Netflix and Etsy). I consider this goal “impossible” and will, by any rational calculation, fail hilariously, but I don’t care — I need an audacious goal that gets my adrenaline pumping, and 100 doesn’t do it. 1000 sites. I’m like a local car salesman on tv. “THESE GOALS ARE INSANE!!!”

I genuinely think the site would be profoundly useful if it had 1,000 services. Picture it. You land on the home page and use the same “overlapping tags” mechanism to discover, say, Swedish housewares stores, then pick one, then browse their overpriced euroshit. Or you sort through Match.com profiles and try to find ones that don’t look like monsters. I don’t know how it will work. But I’m going to do it and I want your suggestions … and this is going to be a very busy couple months and I have to go now, because I suddenly realized I have a lot of effing work to do.

jake@hybrowse.com

(ps: Peter Vidani did the site’s visual design)

Excited to see this grow! So far I am really enjoying the simplified browsing experience it offers over using the actual sites. While not a replacement for these sites, it definitely catches that easy going shopping/browsing vibe he is shooting for. If I had an ecommerce site I’d look in to working with these guys.

Source: jakelodwick