Product Feedback Ref2

@jacobreal list public extra-exports jacobcole-net systematicawesome Updated 2026-04-10

Product Feedback Ref2

Thoughtstream: a smart notetaking app, the ideal software for keeping lists of ideas, and a commandline for the 21st century – Ideaflow Future
Updated: 2/20/2018
Jacob Cole <[email protected] > <[email protected]>
More Info: http://ideaflow.jacobcole.net ,  ideaflowplan.jacobcole.net

Alpha: Thoughtstream iOS app
Quick Start Guide
Fun Quickstart Guide: Ideaflow.app Draft 2020-12-15:
(Old) About Thoughtstreaming: Quick Intro
Lowest friction interface to your brain
Older Thoughts
Desktop Rough Thoughtstream Filtering Tool
Pre-alpha Prototype Demos
Features of a smart thoughtstreaming app
Mockup
Detailed UROP Proposal
Facebook and twitter as implementing pieces of the thought stream vision
Brainstorms on thoughtstreaming

Alpha: Thoughtstream iOS app

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/thoughtstream/id1330828366?mt=8

Quick Start Guide

Thoughtstream is a single, giant “text file” where you keep all your notes, always appending to the top.

Entries are separated by double line breaks. To create a new entry, you hit the plus button in the bottom right hand corner.

I recommend starting by playing with the hashtags feature. Hit Plus to create a new note. Now think of, say, a book you have been recommended recently. Write it down and add #Book to it, e.g.:
Tags:, Book, A, Fire, Upon, the, Deep

Now hit plus again.  Think of something else that you have come across recently you want to remember for the future. Perhaps a potential investor? A potential customer? A potential friend?

Now write, for instance, #Customer Acme Corp

(The ~ is shorthand for denoting authors of books, quotes, ideas etc)

Now hit plus again. Add another #book or another entity of the same type as your first hashtag.

Now, click on the tag of which there are two entries. In my case, #book

The result will be a filtered version of the giant text file that has only the notes (entries) with that hashtag!

You are Thoughtstreaming!

You can instantly bring up the list of all of your books, even though you put near zero effort into organizing them at the time you wrote them down.

If you want to share this list with a friend, click the share button in the upper right hand corner. This is a workflow impossible or very cumbersome to perform with any other notetaking tool on the marking.

Level 2: Relations
To be continued...
(Ping [email protected])

Fun Quickstart Guide: Ideaflow.app Draft 2020-12-15:

What is thought streaming about? Thought streaming is about never missing a delicate idea that pops into your head or the passing resource. never forgetting a passing Resource that may come in handy in the future and never missing a Beat as you do so stop streaming is about being able to take notes in a way that keeps up with your boundless curiosity it's the lowest friction interface between your mind and the Machine
 Is
thought streaming is about being able to instantly pop up your list of books and sending it to a friend without having to wait to fumble around for 2 minutes first. It is about  writing in a way that imposes no constraints on your mind and not being afraid of the challenge of having to look and feeling confident that I'm feeling reassured that you will be able to find and process your thoughts further in the future
So how do you thought stream
Maybe you can start simply delicately casually someone recommends you a book like stories of your life and others by Ted Chiang
Someone mentions a book that it sounds. They really enjoyed, let's say it's stories of your life and others by Ted Chiang

let's say it is moonwalking with Einstein.
Without missing a beat you reach down, Hit the plus button (or cmd+i), scribble it in your thoughtstream
Moonwalking with Einstein #book
boom, done, you are on to the next moment of conversation
Next and idea next a quote that really resonates with you comes up. You write it down and give it a tag
"The attention economy makes browsing the web like trying to eat healthy food when junk food is in front of you; both empty Calories; One food one information"  #quote

Boom. Done.

Then someone recommends you another book, Name of the Wind. So you say (because it doesn’t matter where you put the tag)
Tags:, book, Name, of, the, Wind

Try this now.

now, click on “#book”

suddenly It's going to filter your notes to only include those with a #book. Click the “share” button. It will copy all your notes. Open a text message. Send it to a friend. It’s never been faster :)

Level 2
Advanced tricks

by Patrick Rothfuss
~Patrick Rothfuss
Ok, So what just happened. We just introduced

(Old) About Thoughtstreaming[a]: Quick Intro

Many people keeps lists of ideas but right now, there is no standard, low-friction software for it. There is tremendous untapped potential here in multiple dimensions.

For those who haven't caught what Thoughtstreaming is yet, here's an email inducting you into it:

Try noting your thoughts in a certain format for a little while:
[[[[[[[I call it Thoughtstreaming[b]](#cmnt2)[c]](#cmnt3)[d]](#cmnt4)[e]](#cmnt5)[f]](#cmnt6)[g]](#cmnt7)[h]](#cmnt8)[i].
I keep a central WordPad document in which I write down all that I want to remember. Every day I write the date at the top of the doc and add new entries above it.
- When I have an idea, I hashtag the entry #idea. When I see a quote I want to remember, I add it and hashtag it #quote.  I create new hashtags on the fly.
- [[When I have a suggestion for some institution, I add it and mark it like: #suggestion @MIT. I wish these suggestions could automatically be added into a real suggestion box websites, like http://jcr.stcatz.ox.ac.uk/ideas/](http://jcr.stcatz.ox.ac.uk/ideas/).[j]](#cmnt10) This way, my thoughtstream would not just be a diary, but a new type of command line onto the Web, a new user interface for both computers and the world.[k]
- I also often write that an idea or quote RELATES TO another I’ve previously written. My shorthand for “RELATES TO” is “<>”.

Here's an excerpt from a thoughtstream using my syntax:
Tags:, ideamapping, graphcommons.com

Tags:, song, breezeblocks, alt-J, –, Breezeblocks

Tags:, sugg, @stcatz, fix, washing, machines

Tags:, idea, google, feedback, clone

Tags:, idea, platform, teach, others, things, for, small, amounts, of, money, <>, Eagerpanda.com

Eagerpanda.com Charlie Cheever [l]

5/29/14

Explanation:
@MIT is a suggestion to some group, specifically MIT
Hashtags are for denoting the type or category of the entity
<> Means relates to. To specify the nature of a relation (future) simply put it in the angle brackets. Eagerpanda.com Charlie Cheever  

So, I invite you right now to open up TextEdit or WordPad and create a file titled Thoughtstream.rtf,  and save it in your documents folder. Make a few line breaks at the top and then write the date. Go to the top of the file and write down a few ideas you've had that you've wanted to work on, or maybe a quote that you wanted to remember or maybe a song or maybe a book or anything, and apply the appropriate hashtags to the paragraphs.  

Lowest friction interface to your brain

One of the  most common reasons people claim they switch off of a given notetaking platform is that it gets “too full.”  What they really mean by this is that they’ve created so many separate iOS notes or Workflowy categories,  e.g. one for ideas, one for books, one for quotes,  that they have to think really hard about where they’re going to put a new note before they can even start to write it.  So they end up creating a bunch of uncategorized notes and never filing them. This isn’t their fault, these apps encourage bad cognitive economics!

[Your notes are a data structure and has properties like insertion time to create a new note. Just like any other  data structure you encounter in computer science, you need to think about how populating the data structure is going to affect that insertion time.  With the Thoughtstream approach (especially with the tools I intend to build on top of it[m]](#cmnt13)), it’s no harder to  scribble down a new note and tag it #idea  when you have 100 categories than 2  categories.[n] The experience doesn’t degrade over time.

@jenni #scratch
Firstly, please make this app your own medium, and get as clever and creative as you’d like. My personal workflow (which may not work for others):  I use ~ to denote authorship, like “Be the change you wish to see the the world” ~Gandhi, or something someone said in a conversation. I most use @ to denote things I want to say to someone next time I see them. Like @mom “what is that brand of yoga block you have at home”? Or @bat “I really appreciate how carefully you’ve thought through every permutation of design considerations”
In the future, we might support a “send” button or something that actually allows you to deliver these messages.
For people’s names, half the time I just end up using raw text, without an @ or anything, for people’s names. A future new version will support automatically recognizing them as entities

Older Thoughts

Desktop Rough Thoughtstream Filtering Tool

Use this tool to filter your notes by hashtags https://tmad4000.github.io/LiveLog/LiveLog1.5.htm
Download Raw file and open in browser locally, then copy-paste in your thoughtstream

Alpha: Thoughtstream mobile app.  Off-line only v0.1 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/thoughtstream/id1330828366?mt=8

Pre-alpha Prototype Demos

Web http://cortexel.us/thoughtstream/
iOS Smart notetaking app (under dev) app.thoughtstream.jacobcole.net

(related) Suggestions android app with @syntax); source code a smart notetaking app
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.JS.thoughtstream
https://github.com/flyingsilverfin/ThoughtStream

Features of a smart thoughtstreaming app

Even in just a plain text editor, I haven't found a more natural syntax for noting thoughts I want to remember, and I have converted many friends and advisers to it (e.g. finnergarden.wordpress.com; moreover, other friends and started logging the thoughts with similar syntax completely independent of me.
). However, thoughtstreaming could be much enhanced by a simple application.

Here are the very minimum features that thoughtstreaming app would benefit from. It's basically a smart text editor that:
a) recognizes @ signs and sends entries marked with them to the appropriate suggestion box on the ideajoin.comwebsite. (Future: @facebook would post your Facebook wall, @blog to your blog, etc. You could send information to any application. This way)
b) filters by hashtags like Workflowy
c) Autocompletes related ideas noted after <> (and, ultimately, suggests related ideas using my idea suggestion algorithm)
Text editors are largely trapped in the paradigm of paper; I'm trying to build smart paper.

Mockup

Detailed UROP Proposal

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JbTWT6YxGJeUHBF1FOwJMhr8GxGR_ambfSKiOrFJymQ/edit#

Facebook and twitter as implementing pieces of the thought stream vision

-

[You can interpret all kinds of existing websites as implementing pieces of the thoughtstreaming ideal. Twitter is a thoughtstream, your main page being a personal thoughtstream. When you say @AnotherPerson it sends a thought from your thoughtstream to appear in their thoughtstream. The same thing happens when you tag someone in a post to Facebook; The post appears on their timeline as well as yours.[o]](#cmnt15)[p]

Brainstorms on thoughtstreaming

How do you keep track of ideas/thoughts! How do you thoughtstream? What do you think is the ultimate way to thoughtstream? And what are your visions for a thoughtstreaming tool?

I keep track of my thoughts/ideas in 1) a journal, 2) computer, 3) mobile phone, or 4) napkin or whatever is around, 5) my brain. Brain ideas may be remembered with mneumonic devices, then are written down as soon as I find the means. Napkin ideas are transcribed to computer. Journals are transcribed to computer when they are filled, or sooner. Mobile phone ideas are typed in a note, then moved to computer, but that is an unnecessary step and really should already be a part of my thoughtstream as soon as I type it. On the computer I use a thoughtstream tool I built, and I'm excited to develop it further with you guys, and integrate it into the ultimate ideation platform.

Thoughtstreaming is for life's power users.

The thoughtstreaming tool captures ideas and launches them off. It sucks ideas out of your brain and out of your conversations. It keeps inspiration flowing. It is a command line. It executes decrees.

Thoughtstreaming with CJ (a history)---

( Pardon the prolixity of my writing, it could be a third the size. )

[[It starts with reading Lion Kimbro's "How to Make a Complete Map of Every Thought you Think" http://users.speakeasy .net/~lion/nb/](http://users.speakeasy.net/~lion/nb/)[q]](#cmnt17)[r]

The idea is compelling, but his system is awfully inefficient. It involves carrying around huge binders. I don't know why he didn't make a digital system, he worked for microsoft at the time.

I took what I liked about his system and set out to make my own superior system.

Version 1--

I wrote everything in etherpads like this http://sync.in/informationAgeExistentialist

I hashtagged categories.

I scraped all the etherpads and listed everything on a huge page:
http://imreallyawesome.com/thot/?cortexelus

It organized my thoughts nicely enough, such that if i wanted to work on a Cortexelation song, I could skip to #cortexelation and see my song ideas for the last year.

But:
- The idea list and the writing tool are totally separate
- I want to be inspired by old ideas as I type new ones.

Also with this method:
- it's hard to edit ideas, I need to go back in the etherpads and find them
- I can't connect ideas together, just ideas to hashtags
- hashtags get unwieldy the more you introduce
- I can't connect with other thoughtstreams
- can't search, just ctrl+f
- I can't share a nice list of filtered ideas

Version 2

http://cortexel.us/chaos/cj
- Submit ideas from a text area
- Autocomplete hashtags
- Ideas editable/deletable
- See list of relevant ideas as I type

Which is very similar to how http://hackathonideas.tk/ is set up at the moment

It was okay for transcribing notes, but killed flow for on-the-fly thoughtstreaming. Why?
- Small text area is very claustrophobic. I need a wide open space if my mind is to be wide open.  I need to leave some ideas unarticulated and come back to them.

  • Also typing in the textarea lags when it searches and refreshes the DOM. I still haven't seen a good solution to this. David mentioned React.js

Version 3

Here is what I'm using today, the current version was built at HackMIT:
http://cortexel.us/chaos/fire.lmao?cj

ChaosNotes version 3 uses a scratch/publish model.

  1. Write ideas down in a smart text editor, a scratch pad for incomplete ideas.
  2. Publish ideas to thoughtstream when they are ready.
    (3. At the moment of publishing, an idea is connected to related ideas.)

It has two parts. Simple text editor + the idea list.

  • Wide open space for me to type. I can leave an idea unarticulated and come back to it. I can leave notes for myself.
  • It's concurrent so I can ideate with people at the same time.
  • New Ideas are separated by triple line breaks (or hashtag after double line breaks). Ctrl+enter to publish an idea.
  • Turned off instant-search, because too much lag. Ctrl+? to search for related ideas.
  • Uses CodeMirror because it is the smallest, most extensible smart textarea for the web that supports mobile. Ace Editor is a close rival, also very extensible, but it is a larger file and doesn't support mobile.

What sucks about it?
The idea list sucks.
- blobs of ideas using isotope.js
- Not very readable. Eyes are not drawn to most significant information. Big text gets too much attention.
- Search sucks.
- Whatever we're building with Jacob to explore idea lists/graphs will replace it.

I want more power.
I want this to be more like a command line tool.
I want to be able to email, tweet.
I want to be able to send a command to my soundcloud bots to remix the song I'm hearing in the style of becawwrdsaekva.

I want more sociability.
I want to send ideas to other people.
I want my list of ideas to include others' ideas.
I want to share a static, filtered list.
Maybe I want people to comment.
Maybe I want some ideas private.

OK so....
This is just one incarnation of a thoughtstreaming tool.
It's cool in some ways and lacking in some ways.

I can imagine a few ways to build a thoughtstreaming tool.

It's not clear to me what the best tool is. We may have to try several methods, test them, and observe the strengths/weaknesses. Different people, different situations, slightly different tools. Customization.

What are the use cases?

  1. Thinking up new ideas.

The divergent cognition case. The strike of inspiration.

If I'm typing on a computer... the smart text editor has to suck ideas out of me. It should keep me in a state of psychological flow. There should be minimal distractions deterring my flow. Ideas just pour out.

Whenever inspiration strikes, I should be one key stroke away from entering the app. The second key stroke should be the beginning of my writing. If this is a mobile phone, perhaps a custom swipe opens up the text editor.

At some point I reach ideator's block. No more new ideas. Then what?

  1. Publishing ideas.

A convergent cognition case.

When I think up an idea, I don't always want to publish it immediately. Perhaps it's half articulated. Perhaps I got distracted mid-writing because I wished to write another idea. Perhaps it needs to be edited so others understand; so I understand. Perhaps I want to format it to have a title and bullet points? Good I finished editing it, now what? Publish. Join the thoughtstream. Join the graph. Join the hiearch(y|ies). Search for related ideas with which it will directly connect.

Or, if I'm using thoughtstreaming like a command line interface, perhaps I had a command half-written. Finished it. Now what? Execute.

Maybe unpublished ideas are public, maybe they're private, it's up to the user. They could be searchable, but have limited functionality. They aren't nodes in the graph yet. They're volatile, they can be extremely edited / split / deleted.

  1. Finding inspiration

I want to look through relevant old ideas for inspiration, or relevant others' ideas.
If inspiration strikes, I need to be one key stroke away from writing, and I need whatever inspired me to stay up on screen.

How to navigate relevant ideas?  A list? a graph? a game? Am I going on an adventure through relationships like an insomniac on Wikipedia? Breadcrumbs? How do we best filter ideas by relevance? By common hash tags? By common phrases/concepts? By common hypernyms of concepts? How would I want to adjust the filter to tune in to the ideastream that I want? Maybe I want to find people who think like I do. Maybe I want to find people who have thought about the current topic I'm writing about, but have the most divergence from it. Maybe when I find someone's related idea, I want to directly connect it to mine. Maybe I want some person/concept filter to appear in my searches more often; maybe I want it to pop up when others search me.

  1. Ideafeed.

Kind of like twitter. A feed of hashtags / people / concept filters. Get notification when new ideas published.

  1. Exploring thoughtstreams

When someone meets me, how do I want them to explore my thoughtstream?
When I meet someone, how do I want to explore theirs?

Perhaps I want to see a hashtag/concept cloud.
Perhaps I want to explore a nested hiearchy.
Perhaps I want to see topic clusters.
Perhaps I want to search filters.

Perhaps I want to see which ideas of theirs are relevant to ideas of mine.
Perhaps I want to see where we connect.
Perhaps I want to see where we totally disconnect.

  1. I'm chatting with someone online

Usually I copy ideas over from the chat/email/comments.
But that's an unnecessary step.
In a comment/chat, if I hashtag an idea (or otherwise make it clear something is thoughtstream-worthy), it should automatically copy the comment/chat over to my thoughtstream. In a post/email, it should copy over just the paragraph.

My pre-published text editor should take the copy, where I can edit it further. Maybe the user could set an option for instant-publish.

Perhaps the text editor should support multiple tabs.
The chat/email/comments editor should be its own tab, so as to not get messy with normal thought streaming.
New tabs could be set to private or concurrently shared with public or specific people.

But check this out. Using chat/email/comments is an unnecessary step.
We should just talk IN the tool!!!

And this is what my friends Sean Manton and LJ Rich have started doing. They use ChaosNotes to talk to each other as their primary form of communication. Fascinating! http://cortexel.us/chaos/?glitch I asked them to make a list of demands. They were:

  • separate idea-filter bar
  • highlight different users' text
  • highlight idea chunks separated by triple line breaks
  • send ideas to other friends' pages
  • better mobile/tablet support
  • include others' hashtags on my page
  • public/private
  • standalone app (chrome branch)
  • since last visit edit recap
  • filter by date
  • highlight recently typed text
  • fix double click feature
  • don't displace friends' cursor when you submit
  • highlight filtered word
  • option for concurrent filtering
  • custom, cross notepad filtering

Talking on a concurrent text editor is lovely. Giving users option for different color text is a good idea, a technique used by etherpad. One problem is that I don't always know where on the page my friend is typing. Highlighting recently typed text is good. A way to jump to their cursor is good. Another problem is that if I leave a page and come back, it is hard to tell what were the new additions. Perhaps highlighting is enough, perhaps some sort of diff.

Another idea I like is how Sublime Text gives you a zoom out version of all the text on the side. I love it! It's a superior way to scroll. Seeing the zoomed out version, with highlighting recently typed text, should give the user a better idea of current activity.

  1. I'm in a conversation

I'm talking to someone and I want to take notes. Usually I write down in my journal and transcribe later. But if I have my laptop around, I can use the tool. Perhaps I'm in a group. I can project it so others can see what I type and follow the conversation notes. I can search with filters relevant to the topic, and it can move the conversation forward. This is another reason to have thethoughtstream and idea list in one window. Also this is a reason to separate the thoughtstream from the idea list filter -- I may want to start typing off-topic ideas (ahead of topic) or edit old ideas, and I don't want the list to change.

But doing this manually during a conversation is an extra step, isn't it?
What if we had speech-to-text going?

Theres two things speech-to-text can give us (monologue or conversation)

  • Pulling up ideas relevant to conversation as ambient information

I want Mind Meld for thoughtstreams. I want to have a conversation with someone, and see our relevant ideas pull up from our thoughtstreams. Boom!
http://www.expectlabs.com/mindmeld/

  • Thoughtstreaming directly from a verbal conversation into the tool.

Either this means
    ~ the conversation is transcribed into a new text editor tab, edited later, and the best parts published, or
    ~ cues in conversation signify a group of words is a complete idea. Perhaps the commands "begin thought / end thought"? (But I think it's kludgy to use full words/phrases as punctuation in speech-to-text. Super kludgy period. Use beatbox sounds instead!) Perhaps dramatic changes in speech emotion/prosidy could signify.

  1. I have a recording of conversation or monologue (or speech-to-text isn't reliable in my environment)

I usually just listen through the whole thing and take notes. Ahh! What a time-waster. I only ever do this if the recording was really significant.

Could speech analysis point to the most exciting parts of a conversation, where the most interesting thoughtstreamable ideas exist? A great open question! I'd love to run a study on this! Can machine learning predict the presence of good ideas in conversation from speech quality?

  1. I have 20 untranscribed journals of ideas.

I transcribe them by hand. Unless you write copiously and neatly, no significant efficiency seems to be gained from scanning pages -> OCR -> fixing OCR errors.

  1. Discussion / conference call

Verbal discussion
- Many profound points are brought up, and not enough time to fully think about each other and respond.

Concurrent textpads
- No one has to take turns.
- Everyone is in ultimate flow mode.
- No one has to say what they're trying to say perfectly the first time. They can edit.

If you use speech-to-text with a concurrent text editor, everyone can talk at the same time, go on any tangent, no one is interrupted, and the topic elaborates nicely. This is significant. Perhaps more efficient than verbal discussion.

As I think through these use cases, scratch/publish appears to be a good model, and it is what I had begun to build, but it's not the best.

Can you think of any other thoughtstreaming models that satisfy use cases? Can you think of any missing use cases? How can we maximize efficiency?

Anything that breaks my flow, and I prefer to switch to a regular text editor instead. If I feel too constrained/claustrophobic, I switch to a text editor. But in a text editor, I don't have all the powers I want to have, and then I usually start thinking about what I wished the text editor could do, which will forever be distracting until I build it.

..more thoughts to come..

CJ Carr

[a]Been watching this app take form https://streams.supply/

Creator: https://twitter.com/vidythatte/status/1152404677197086721
[b]I've also been settling onto a personal convention of note taking where everything is a "log". Still exploring the full potential/realization of this idea, but it feels very similar to thoughtstreaming
[c]like for example, yesterday i made an "idea" log text file. I have logs for many things, including one main everything log dump for a day. I had not thought about using one file for all the logs tho!! Excited to play around with the idea
[d]i would like to try this with https://dat-tiddlywiki.glitch.me/
[e]tell me more!
[f]tw is by https://twitter.com/Jermolene and he calls it an "exoskeleton for your brain".  https://twitter.com/jimpick is working w/ the DAT project to make a multiwriter option, using tiddlywiki as a trial space, and I love the idea. there's a learning curve and the multiwriter is new, but just give it a try.

You can find me @ https://twitter.com/csageland or in the digital life collective member chat ($10/y to join us)...

https://diglife.com/join-us/?video=001
[g]if we could make tw easier for non-devs (like me) to use, it might be a wonderful back end for this project
[h]Marked as resolved
[i]Re-opened
[j]This is site blank for me
[k]something similar could be done with twitter!
[l]this is a future feature, inspired by the Gellish  formal language syntax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gellish and semantic web ideas like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtle_(syntax)
[m]Take a lot this app. [http://threadnote.com/
[n]So are you suggesting that the main difference is that with something like evernote you have to decide the category before you start writing the note, but that you don't with thought streaming? But don't most of your thought streams start with the "category"/hashtag right away (would be my guess)? [Just trying to probe to tease apart what's actually going on here. Agreed that there's a huge difference between something like thought streaming and something like evernoting]
[o]oh wow. the social aspect feels killer
[p]there could also be a #public hashtag for stuff to be filtered into a public version
[q]https://speakeasy.org/~lion/nb/book.pdf except that the link does not seem to work; other sites reference this.
[r]A reviewer of the book at GoodReads says the book covers a lot of the same materials in the book The Tinderbox Way