Graphed knowledge

Most of the note-taking apps that we can find out there are designed around the same organization principle: notes are linearly organized and grouped into higher-lever abstractions that are folders.

Unfortunately, our knowledge is not linear, hence using those apps to dump our brain into the cloud requires a pre-conversion, which takes you away from your root thought and perhaps the opportunity to connect it with other thoughts and ideas.

Some people might not find this annoying, but I certainly do. The way I think is pretty much like Internet and many things in this planet work: as a network of interconnected thoughts where the close ones have something in common.

What I would expect from an app where I can dump my thoughts an ideas is therefore a simple interface to build a graph where the nodes are units of knowledge or ideas.

There are apps like Notion that make that possible with the use of hyperlinks but the interface is fairly overwhelming. Moreover, the experience in mobile is terrible as a consequence of using a webviews.

There are also apps around the concept of mind-mapping. They provide a visual interface to modify the graph. Although that might be handy for short-term graphs, I don’t think it’s the most suitable interface for quick brain-dumps. I think the graph must exist, but it should be an implementation detail.

How do I imagine the app then? I imagine a native mobile app, meaning by native that it uses native primitives and patterns. Most of the time I’ll be in brain-dump mode, so as soon as I open it, I get a form. Moreover, I’d get a default list of labels and other ideas to connect them with.

The other mode the app would have is journey. I could get lost in the graph and revisit those notes that I left for my future self. Pretty much like Pinterest but most knowledge and ideas oriented. Isn’t it beautiful?

I started building it with my wife and sister-in-law. My wife will focus on envisioning and designing the product. My sister-in-law and I will do the coding part. All the projects will be open source in the GitHub organization logosapp.