(2020-05-08) Wagstaff How A Twitter Scrap And Covid19 Reveal A Disruption In Process

Jeremy Wagstaff: How A Twitter Scrap, and Covid-19, Reveal a Disruption In Process. When is innovation just another stab at the past, and when is it revolutionary? When it becomes a bit of a Twitter storm in a teacup, is possibly when.

My thoughts were nudged by a post at Amplenote, an online note-taking and note-sharing app that is worth a look. Like a lot of these players, they’ve been forced into offering features by the new kid on the block, namely Roam Research

The post was written by Bill Harding, founder of Alloy, the company behind Amplenote. They’re old style, by internet terms and their own words, not relying on VC funding, freemium models etc. You can tell by the product that it’s neat, robust and reliable.

That’s mostly what people interested in this kind of tool are looking for.

But it’s taken Covid-19 to make me realise this is changing. And (note-taking) apps like Amplenote — or ones more familiar to you, like Evernote, are getting caught up in it.

Roam Research has given us a glimpse of what note-taking — the simple act of reading, hearing, thinking or seeing something, and storing that somewhere — is ripe for disruption, and he’s going for it. It’s early days, but lockdown may be the jolt that propels this genre into the mainstream

A day ago Conor White-Sullivan posted to Roam’s Reddit group that 10,000 new users signed up to the app over the weekend

the key to all the excitement, I believe, is a key formula, which I think is the basic currency of software success: you get more out of it than you put in. Put simply, this means, for example, that if you linked one page to another page, that second page would update itself so you can see that link. This is what they mean by bi-directional links, or backlinks.

And this is where we come back to Bill Harding. And his screed. His point is a fair one: that all this talk of bidirectional linking is deja vu for many of us

how different are today’s opportunities than what came before? To technologists of a certain age, the groundswell for a better connected network of ideas hearkens back to the halcyon days of 2005, when wikis were The Next Big Thing.

What we’re really seeing, I believe, is a new player come in and bring the necessary tweaks and rethink to an existing technology — in this case, personal databases — by taking the best bits from each, adding a few new ones, and stealing the show to create a following and a buzz.

This is good, and classic Christensen disruption. It might not be Roam that ends up winning this, but they’ve shaken up the market.

But what market? Is there really one for this kind of thing? Back in the early 2000s I would have said yes

all the smart money ended up going to using the internet to create more passive experiences

I’m not saying that’s necessarily changed. But Covid-19 has helped crystallise something that was already happening, namely that smart people are exploring how to leverage their knowledge and knowledge of software to solve the unsolved problems of the past, or to reconsider tools that had been largely forgotten

Bill’s error is a generational one: what was once ‘business knowledge’ is now something else entirely

The other mistake is to think of this as ‘productivity’. This is not about that. This is not just a better task manager. I believe we’ve moved on from that — or at least recognised its limits. Now the thinking is, as Tiago Forte, one of Bill’s ‘elite cadre’, has mentioned, about acquiring and processing knowledge in a way that our brain retains it. (Thinking Tool)

But with a couple major exceptions, wikis fizzled out, never catching on for personal use.

If you sniff a little snarkiness in the tone ‘elite cadre’, you might be right.

To me it’s a rising tide and I’m pleased to see there are boats paying attention. After 20 years of focus on either ‘Getting Things Done’ or on the cuteness/elegance of interface, we’re entering a much larger ocean, which has the potential to bring these cutters, sloops and yawls into the slipstream of the incumbent tankers.