True, maybe one of the distinctions is that self-generated “casual todos” (e.g. background tabs of stuff you want to read but don’t want to bookmark) may lend themselves to self organization vs. “external todos” like email where other people are effectively dropping tasks on you.
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I think the social norms are just different here — not reading something that randomly got your interest does not feel nearly as bad as not responding to someone's email. Correspondence might not really fit the same model here.
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You archive everything in Gmail into one place instead of some elaborate filing system b/c the search is good — but you don't archive an email you actually want to follow up on yet just b/c you will be able to find it again once you remember to actually do so
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Where I see great potential for something passive is tracking content you encounter as you browse the web (or even your local files) — essentially a second layer of really good search on top of web search that treats anything you've seen before preferentially
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An example of this I saw is someone in a HN thread who set up his browser to download every paper he opened even just briefly to some folder, in which he had a nice CLI for fuzzy search. Passive capture & trust in the search system gives you peace of mind and enables rediscovery
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Most stock browser history search, on the other hand, barely works well if you remember half the page title almost correctly (add to this that page titles can often differ from what is written above the content *on* the page... etc.).
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Yeah these are great ideas. I covered some similar thoughts in the talk below. Generally speaking, it’s mind boggling that we need tools like Roam research at all — browsers are information SYSTEMS, auto-organization should be table stakes and built-in, not a “mode” you pay for.
Quote Tweet
My talk on HyperCard, TI83, Cooking & why the Browser Isn't Feature Complete: The Internet as an Incremental Skill: youtube.com/watch?v=NBFlyG
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Thanks, will give that a listen! There's def. still a lot of overhead to organizing the information that's relevant to you and dealing with content FOMO even though there would be enough background info through your behavior to make that easier (back to the irony you mentioned!)
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And also agree that for all the advances in what kind of applications can run inside them, browsers as a layer are extremely thin and "dumb" about what you do — even though they might be the logical part of the stack to put some smarts in without giving up ownership & agency!
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Selfishly I'd love to see more even-semi-illegible work-in-progress sketches and scribblings from them. Lots we can learn from all that process, I'm sure, even if it doesn't end up in whatever they ship.
Great feedback! DM me the Extensions you *need* and we'll give you the browser!
In meantime, here's screen grab of an old prototype we built. Auto-Tags websites based on heuristics ("Shopping") + can manually add Tags too.
Found too blunt but still riffing on similar themes...
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Interesting. Thanks for sharing! I don’t know the extensions I need—I’m hoping you’ll discover them. :)
Selfishly, what I’d love to see is regular tweets of exactly this kind. The philosophy:
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