Late to this party… (Been using Memex on and off for a while… Exploring it again because it might fit better with my work.)
Chatted with @BlackForestBoi, earlier, and my feature wishlist was unstructured. (That’s how my brain works. Call it “divergent thinking”, if you must.) Part of the reason it’s a difficult exercise to think through amazing new features is that there are several painpoints affecting my experience with Memex.
Besides, I’m not even that sure what’s available or not, since the product/service equation has changed a lot.
Something which would greatly improve my work is if I could use it to “ingest” RSS feeds, process the information (tagging, adding to spaces, annotating, commenting…), and then share well-organized content based on the items present in these feeds. In a way, an improved version of Feedly. Also, given the push for AI, it could relate to Waverly (mywaverly.com) (built by someone in my circle who co-founded Element AI with Yoshua Bengio).
Speaking of that AI push… I’m rather ambivalent about it. Yes, the auto-summarization feature is convenient. It’d fit especially well in bulk-processing workflows. It could justify the cost of the paid plans, for certain people.
At the same time, many of us have significant concerns with the OpenAI approach and funding. Surely, there are other ways to get automatic summaries without “betting the farm” on this specific organization.
Also related to “practical uses of AI”, a (modest) “quality of life” feature would be to guess which spaces/tags I’m likely to use for a given piece (link, highligted segment…).
Some of my feature requests would relate to the Fediverse, particularly Mastodon. The simplest one would be to share directly to a Mastodon account, the way it’s probably been planned for Twitter (before it became unusable). More interesting, though, would be to “ingest” Mastodon posts related to a given link or segment. Plus, the whole idea of federating across instances could apply in interesting ways. For instance, Matrix conversations could access Memex annotations about Peertube videos by establishing “strong metadata practices”. Or not. While the technical details can be interesting, it’s more about dreaming in different sizes.
A couple of simple features would help me replace OneTab. And they’re almost silly. Maybe they exist in Memex and I’ve yet to find them.
One example is adding multiple tabs to the same space at the click of a button. With OneTab, I often accumulate a bunch of tabs and, after navigating them, I add them all to a given category.
Similarly, I can click on a link to restore all the tabs in a category. In this sense, it’s almost like “spaces” in a desktop sense.
Also, because of the way OneTab keeps everything in one simple list, I can easily browse the 100k+ links I’ve collected in the past year or so without getting entangled in a specific search feature.
Besides those ideas, as mentioned, most of what would improve the Memex experience has to do with basic painpoints. Documentation being scattered through different sites and tools, the shifts between domain names (worldbrain.io to memex.social to memex.garden to some new clever name?)…
A big one, though, is that I use Safari on my personal devices. Maybe there’s a Memex extension now… Haven’t heard of it. It’d help a lot.
To this day, I keep using Diigo. With a paid account. Despite all sorts of issues with the service. The Safari support is really subpar (a bookmarklet which requires an unsecure setting). Yet it’s the best way I found to keep collecting pieces of web content.
If there is a Memex extension for Safari, maybe I can leave Diigo behind after so many years…
Oh, and some features that I’m unlikely to use…
- Conversational AI: a curation/annotation is “neither the time nor the place” for that. (Conversely, a chatbot could become a powerful tool for curation/annotation.)
- Discord: for a large number of reasons, that approach to human interactions really doesn’t work for me at this point in my professional development.
- Any blockchain-based feature: there’s some room for trustless ledgers elsewhere (say, in microcredentials). Not in a tool that I use for curation, annotation, knowledge management, or organic collaboration.
- Another backup system: I get why it’d work for Obsidian yet my “subscription fatigue” is particularly strong when it comes to backup/sync systems.
- Any kind of gamification/competition: while it might make sense to rate pieces of content (especially if we do it on several dimensions, as was the case with Slashdot), there’s a large risk surrounding Memex if it adopts those modes of extrinsic motivation from that era of social networking platforms.
So… All this to say…
I do perceive potential in Memex becoming several times better than it currently is. I’ll probably focus on a few feature requests in the forum meant for that.
