Nov 16, 2006 05:55:44 PM by
flynote 
Not yet rated
hi,
this is the first posting by the creator of flynote.
here's a bit of the story
first had the idea for flynote way back in 2002, during a class I was taking in asp.net programming.
I was facing the basic dilemma of needing to constantly send myself emails.
and so, Boom!, how 'bout a simple web-based program that lets me save stuff for myself, a me-mail, as it were.
so I built an early version of flynote, way back then, which started blossoming into a full-blown personal information manager, complete with contacts, lists, files storage, and drawing.
this version of the app ran for a couple of years, gained about 1500 users, and yet, there was something kind of stale about it.
what seemed to be missing was the kind of dynamism that we've come to expect from the web. with the old flynote, you could sign in, plug in your personal stuff, and that would be it. unless you were there for that, to see or edit your own stuff, there wouldn't be much to see.
it was an empty site, for all but the participants.
which led me to a now kind of obvious conclusion, which was to default all the notes to public, thus populating the site with a plethora of interesting, or not interesting personal notes (lists and other features to be reintroduced later, perhaps).
now of course, as soon as you do that, you have a completely different vibe and purpose to the site, at least compared to the personal information manager design of before. now you had a kind of blog. so, was I really just reinventing the blog? well, not quite really.
because by defaulting all notes to public, the site is flush with the content of all users, interwoven, and constantly refreshed by new posts.
now the challenge became organizing this pool of content, making it searchable, creating mechanism for users to connect and interact with other's notes, etc.
which leads us to here, the newest version of flynote.
play with it. post your notes. even if you think they're junky, and uninteresting, you might be surprised to see people commenting on it, rating it, even saving it to their favorites.
flynote is meant to be a chaotic little world of notes interwoven, lighter than blog.
