(2018-07-05) Introducing Tangle A Connected Notebook

Introducing Tangle: A Connected Notebook. Tiago Forte and his team.. developed RandomNote, an application that adds randomness into your workflow by retrieving, as its name suggests, a random note from Evernote when you click it.

The app “allows notes in different notebooks to encounter each other,” helping to shine light on unidentified connections and revealing new ideas

Why should we rely solely on serendipity and luck to inspire connections and resurface old thoughts? What if we could make connection more purposeful?

Tangle is a complete overhaul of traditional note-taking technology that puts principles of discoverability and connectivity first. Everything Is A Graph

The graph database enables Tangle to be a connection-first (associative) notebook that elevates idea generation and enhances the creative process.

Anytime you capture a thought or take a note in Tangle, it automatically shows you the connections to any of your related content.

As I capture different thoughts about the games, players, and my sadness at the United States’ failure to qualify, related captures I have written previously start to pop up.

Tangle allows me to visualize the graph of that content too. I click “visualize” and the graph appears. (Visualization)

Tangle analyzes the text using natural language processing.

The Knowledge Worker's Dilemma

Today’s knowledge workers need to be thinking and working like artists. Artists do not gain inspiration and begin creating from nothing. They are continually collecting tidbits from the world around them. These tidbits eventually become the catalyst for new artwork.

Creating knowledge is not an easy task for knowledge workers for a few reasons.

The modern knowledge worker does not have time for long-form note-taking

The modern knowledge worker is flummoxed by the paradox of choice when taking a note. Where should I write the note?

There is no connective tissue between the things one writes

The Knowledge Society and the Landmarks of Today

The realization that knowledge within a firm was the key driver for a firm’s growth gave rise to the need for new company cultures, taxonomies, content management, and ultimately technological systems to manage it all. Say hello to Salesforce and Atlassian.

Moving to Personal Knowledge Management

There are five primary reasons for the new interest in the space:

PKM: A Framework

David Allen's Getting Things Done is the original PKM manifesto, which has preceded many other productivity and PKM practitioners like Tiago Forte and Steven Johnson.

The Tools of The Trade

*the skeuomorphic design that has widely dominated PKM tools, particularly of the note-taking variety, has been a primary contributor to UX principles that, we believe, move the technologies further away from their goal.

The principle to which I am referring is linear organization.*

A fragmented landscape

You’ll notice that most tools fit on the left bottom half of the graph

Task managers, note-taking apps, and mind-mapping software as we know them all require organizational decisions. Tags, folders, labels, notebooks, projects; the list goes on.

There is a subset of note-taking applications out there that emphasize quick capture over general organizational capabilities

Mind-mapping tools are the only group that fits above the x-axis.

Finally, you will notice that the Tangle logo rests rather lonely in the top-right quadrant.

Instead of making the user responsible for organizing their content into linear hierarchies, Tangle connects what you are capturing now with your entire existing corpus of knowledge.

How Tangle Puts Connection First

The primary function of our mind we are focusing on is its ability to make connections between information, explicitly or implicitly related, old and new. Our ability to make connections is crucial to our analytical thinking, creativity, and general intelligence.

Tiago Forte, an expert in personal knowledge management and productivity, describes our very humanity as “the sum of our connectivity,” which rings true at even a physiological level. (Associative)

Instead of forcing organization on the user, Tangle creates automatic, visual connections between related information (e.g., meeting notes, an idea, or a to-do). These visual connections replace the need for manual organization. Tangle accomplishes this using something called entity extraction

Tangle doesn’t just surface connections when you capture new information, it also allows search. In traditional note-taking applications, a search will yield results that directly match the query. The issue here is that when we search for things, we often don’t know exactly what we are looking for, just directionally what we hope to find. So, rather than providing just traditional search results, Tangle surfaces a whole graph of visually contextualized connections including both direct and indirect matches.

Our mission is to empower everyone to capture and connect their thoughts to create big ideas.