the ripple is an idea for the core user experience.
I haven't quite figured out the user experience yet. It's gone through a few iterations. Currently I'm using something like a "stack of cards" like a combination of a group chat on the top half of the screen and a twitter thread on the bottom half. There's currently a text box in the middle for writing your own thoughts.
The ripple is an alternative user experience. When you're in ripple mode, a new thought ripples into 10-30 new thoughts that you may choose to link to. You can select from any of these to navigate around, or you can simply enter your response into the think box.
These thoughts from the ripple have suggestions, denoted with [brackets]. A suggestion is a link to what comind thinks it knows about the text. [bryan] above might tell you upcoming plans with bryan, tell you that his birthday is coming soon, or that bryan has nice taste in slacks.
The ripple is not an MVP product. It is expensive, and it is hard to do correctly. I suspect I would need a lot of implementation time, experimentation, etc. So – consider this a design document of sorts.
Here's a few examples of suggestions you might get from a ripple. They are links but they don't do anything – you can click them if you want, I guess. Anyway here's some examples of thoughts from a ripple:
Suggested concepts, i.e. "this seems to be about [concept]"
Related melds, which are something like active forums of similar thought.
Users can share a meld with any number of people, and they function essentially like a group chat on steroids.
Melds have their own contexts, rules, set of cominds, etc. Think a "work" meld for your work or a "friends" meld for you and your friends.
There will likely be public melds organized around concepts (as in Reddit). These will resemble a large forum or twitter feed for people only thinking thoughts that seem to be about the concept.
You should be able to make melds and share them with whoever you want, and everyone can contribute thoughts to the meld for sharing. Your knowledge graph will absorb the knowledge from the meld for use elsewhere.
You can use melds like a simple message app (SMS/WhatsApp/etc.) with any number of people. In principle they can replicate email/texting/etc but in a more interesting package.
Thoughts that are parents or children of this thought, historically – this will draw you towards thoughts you have explicilty linked to before, or thoughts you attached to this one.
Descriptions of things you currently know about what you just thought, i.e. "you and [bryan] work at [the mall]. he is not good at his job." might be generated from the thought "bryan was kind of interesting at the happy hour last night".
Show you potential avenues of thought, [research mode]
Suggested communications, i.e. "[sarah] might think that's funny, do you want to [send it to her]?"
Similar thoughts, by embedding. This is a "direct link"
Messages from the various cominds. {void} might commend you on your recent scream into the void, or {wiki} might provide some information from Wikipedia about the text. {image} might auto-generate an image related to your thought.
Suggestions are a way to point people towards action or further insight. The ideal way you interact with comind is just typing new things or clicking from thought to thought, and having a convenient navigating interface can help the users get around more easily.
I'm working on it – at current it feels super fucking cool. I would love to experience this as a user, and as a nerd clicking around WikiPedia for hours on end.
Thoughts and suggestions to [email protected], at least until Comind is actually working. Then you can send it to me with @cameron.
– Cameron