Introducing AquaMinds NoteSharePssst--Hey buddy, can I share something with you?

Let’s just pretend I’m not really here--okay?

As you may have noted, this blog has been on extended hiatus. But also understand that for weeks now I’ve been preparing for my Big Return: One of those swelling-soundtrack moments, where I do my best Gloria Swanson/Sunset Boulevard impression: It was the blogs that got smaller. . . That sort of thing.

However, events have transpired to upstage my usual, appalling self-indulgence. Just as I was getting ready to once again talk about, well, me (we all have to have a hobby), I find myself obliged to address much larger, more important news.

My old buddies over at AquaMinds have let the cat out of the bag regarding a new, genuinely jaw-dropping product. (I call them “buddies;” they, on the other hand, usually refer to me as “stalker” or, more charitably, as “Cease-and-Desist Boy.”) Where was I? Oh yeah--I opened my Sunday New York Times in an attempt to ignore the biochemical and neural havoc from New Year’s Eve and there it was, this article by Jim Fallows about the Next Big Thing from AquaMinds. And until I carefully reviewed what I could recall from the previous evening--who I might have talked to and even how I managed to misplace my underwear while still wearing my tux--I was profoundly afraid.

Technorati Tags: Collaboration, NoteShare, NoteTaker, Web20

I was fearful of a tech version of Plamegate because, Dear Reader, I was one of the only micropundits who had luxuriously played with the Next Big Thing for months leading up to The New York Times spilling the proverbial beans. You see, deep down AquaMinds does not hate me as much as it sees me as a nuclear reactor--bad news when left unintended, but beneficial when closely monitored. And so they sent succeeding alpha versions of the Next Big Thing just to see how I would repurpose it.

However, on the other side of my less-than-total recall of the previous evening, I was certain that I had not spoken with either Karl Rove or John Dvorak--and so I simultaneously started to feel better and annoyed. When not on hiatus, I write almost exclusively about NoteTaker at least once a week--so what’s with The New York Times getting the scoop? Hello? Remember Citizen Journalism? Remember me--Chopped Liver? Thus, I’ve resolved to claw my way to the front of this parade, even if it means ruining my Big Entrance.

Mr. Fallows is a respected journalist who has done excellent work for both The New York Times and Atlantic Monthly. I, on the other hand, am a hack. So what I propose to do is catch the spirit and wide-ranging implications of AquaMinds’ Next Big Thing in the hope of complimenting Fallows’ exemplary, factual article. Which suits me just fine because, as Hunter Thompson once observed, sometimes the facts can get in the way of the Truth--and I’m here to get to the heart of NoteShare . . .

NoteShare--that’s the name of AquaMinds’ Next Big Thing. From a marketing standpoint, the name is real De Niro/Deer Hunter, echoing the Zen-like This is This line. The new product is about notes and, yes, it’s about sharing.

I bring this up at the outset because many of those who have already weighed-in regarding NoteShare--because they’ve yet to lay hands on it--are riffing away about collaboration, wikis and absolute gauges for measuring new technologies. Hack that I am, can I make a suggestion? Er, you might actually want to play around with a new product before rushing for your computers to instantly categorize both it and its Place In the Scheme of Things. Informed punditry is good; blind, knee-jerk responses, not so much . . . So allow me to suggest how I’ve personally interacted with NoteShare over the past six months or so:

Don’t think about a new product at this point. Just close your eyes and assume that you have the latest copy of NoteTaker on your laptop. And further, that you’re reveling in all that NT Goodness, Flexibility and Power. The whole schmeer--all the features, plus the spiral notebook metaphor for those among you who embrace Simulacra and Simulation. Everybody still with me? Good.

Now imagine that you’ve just created a notebook dedicated to the Jenkins Project. Embedded in it are text, spreadsheets, voice annotations, live websites and video. Everything you need to wow Old Man Jenkins, brilliantly structured by sections. Still pretty much NT business-as-usual, no? Damn fine work living happily on your hard drive.

But you know what’s missing? Input from Fred. Fred’s a master of the fine-tune. He makes good, salient comments and sometimes he even tweaks your prose for greater effect. And, conveniently for our little fantasy, Fred’s sitting five tables away in the company lunch room, surfing with his laptop.

Now we come to the good part--the thing that raises our little story to the level of Tech Porn: Imagine that NoteTaker had an extra function way up there on the menu bar. Imagine it said Sharing. Hell, let’s go all the way--imagine that all you had to do was have your notebook on the screen and then select Share Notebook. You could then choose to give it a password (or not) and couple of other things we’ll get to later. And, wham, your notebook was being shared. No configuring anything, no conversion to a website or anything ending in “XML.” You simply select Share Notebook and--if you choose--dick around with three or four check boxes. And you’re sharing. There ain’t no Step Three, Baby! To be clear, this is not a copy of your notebook, not an HTML conversion, not a PDF--this is your live, throbbing aggregation of structured ideas--the one you’re still looking at on your screen.

Let’s play out the rest of this fantasy. What if this magic version of NoteTaker also allowed you to email a pagemark from the shared notebook? What if clicking on a menu option instantly pulled up an email form with the pagemark already attached to it? The next thing you’d do would be to send the thing to Fred, right? And sure enough, you can tell from Fred’s body language over there that he’s opened his mail. All Fred has to do is double-click the pagemark and he’s taken to your shared notebook--if you’ve specified a password, he’ll need to enter that too. But basically Fred is sharing your notebook with you in the space of one click.

Let’s hunker down for moment: Fred and you are simultaneously stomping around your actual, live notebook. You can be in one part of it and Fred can be somewhere else, maybe in the very cool section 10. If you chose, you can each see where the other is and even meet up on a certain page. And with a strong ego, you can watch Fred revise the timeless prose on your computer from five lunchroom tables away.

I don’t know about you, but just thinking about this gets the inner-geek in me all hot and bothered.

End of fantasy. Open your eyes. Guess what--it’s real and it’s called NoteShare.

Let’s review: Notebook. Share. Email. Hi Fred, I’ll just watch as you do your thing. No server was used, your data wasn’t housed anywhere except your hard drive. You could have thrown security at the notebook if you chose. And, oh yeah, Fred could have been anywhere in the world--his office, off-site or out of the country--and you’d still be thanking him for his real-time or later-date input. End of story. One other thing: Remember all that NoteTaker Goodness--the multimedia, the embedded websites, the AppleScripts? All of the other technically “impossible” stuff I amuse myself making NT do? Well, all this can also be shared live. Hey Fred, please see if the embedded screencast works for you, okay?

To be sure, the implications of NoteShare are enormous--collaboration, serial editing, commentary, swapping recipes, even writing pop songs with someone on the other side of the globe spring to mind. But at its heart, NoteShare is about instant, seamless, just-works sharing of notebooks. And if you choose to leave your laptop on or opt for a Mac Mini set to never sleep, you’re sharing a live notebook 24/7. Not a website--a live notebook residing on your computer.

Therefore, the essence of NoteShare isn’t really about the Web or Web 2.x. More accurately, it’s about Networking 2.0 or Interaction 2.0 in all sense of those words. It’s also about creating and maintaining your own Personal Cloud.

That dull thud you hear is the folks over at AquaMinds fainting. First, because, like Christopher Lee in a Dracula sequel, I’m once again stirring and, second, because I’ve just massively oversimplified their Next Big Thing. Except I haven’t. If you grasp what I’ve described here, then you’ve understood the quintessence of NoteShare--or, at least, it’s point of departure. Because the possibilities downstream of sharing are infinite and limited only by a user’s imagination.

Something else must also be noted. The sheer ease and seamlessness of sharing is mindbendingly hard to implement. Beneath the still, shared surface, all sorts of esoteric technologies are grinding away--sort of like the underpark at Disneyland. Ports are being used and hitherto under-utilized networking protocols are being commandeered. I wanna say more, but I’m uncertain if (a) AquaMinds has a private force of ninja assassins and (b) I unknowingly agreed to be terminated if I broke certain uber-sections of the NDA. Should I find myself around to welcome this coming Saturday, I may be braver and more explicit in the future.

But I also gotta be honest--I’m saving all the really good stuff about NoteShare for later posts. For one thing, I think carefully pondering all the aforementioned implications in detail will be enlightening. For another thing, I haven’t just been testing NoteShare all these months--I’ve been blowing-up the damn thing and making it do stuff that may be illegal in select Southern states. So if you’re intrigued, it’d be wise to check back here occasionally to see what’s shaking, because going forward, this blog will be dedicated to exploring both NoteTaker and NoteShare.

And now it’s probably time to vanish. My job here seems to be done--I’ve done my best to annotate the NYT scoop, I’ve taken full advantage of a loosened tongue because nondisclosure agreements seem to have gone the way of, well, yesterday’s news, and the AquaMinds folks have realized that I’m off my meds and have managed to escape by tying the bed sheets together. I look forward to greeting all you soon in my now-anticlimatic Official Return Post. But until then, can we pretend that I wasn’t here--sort of like what happens to citizens after the Men In Black do that red-blinky-pen thing? Thanks, I knew I could depend on you. And if anyone was in vicinity of me seemingly removing my underwear in spite of my tuxedo, could you get in touch with me? I want to buy any original prints that may exist . . .

The composition of this entry was made possible in part by Beethoven (I Love To Listen To) from the album "Savage • 2005" by Eurythmics

Monday, January 3, 2006 06:15:22 PM

Comments

[zo]

he's back? he's almost back? i thought this place got awful damn gorgeous all of a sudden. so, you a pawn in their game now? (ask 'em if they want another one.) it looks great. now woudja write somethin'? jesus it's been lonesome. love the shadows. send template.

zo

[Kevin Sheridan]

Phillip:

Thanks for the questions. At the outset, remember that I'm not part of the AquaMinds team and that my whole purpose in life is, seemingly, to make their products do undocumented things. Thus, if answers to your question will drive some kind of mission-critical project, I strongly suggest you contact AquaMinds directly.

Having clarified this, here's my run at your questions:

NoteShare is currently an late alpha/early beta release, and it's important to understand that the current feature set is not necessarily what will eventually be shipped.

Security. The shared connection is currently secure and uses three levels of security; encryption at the messaging level for all communications, and password security for spaces and notebooks.

Version-Tracking. Currently, NoteShare is not intended as a document management system or word processor, but you can track who has edited an entry and when they edited it.

I hope this information helps. Once again, features are subject to change. Over the course of the alpha program, I witnessed a breathtaking evolution in functionality. So the operational word here is currently.

[Philip Trauring]

I have only two questions about NoteShare - is the connection when sharing secure, and is there a way to track changes among multiple users (i.e. version tracking)?

[Roland Dobbins]

Great weblog, good stuff - but would you please enable full-text feeds? Many thanks~

[Dan Shafer]

Kevin.....

Good piece on NoteShare. I, too, have been beta testing it. I'll have some thoughts on my blog tomorrow. NoteTaker is the only app that auto-launches on my system every day. Now it's NoteShare. I think these guys are onto something huge.

[SlimPknz]

Kevin,

Great to see new work in your realm, and thanks for gleam session (as in cube). After reading your entry, I gotta wonder if your blog is not really going to get revamped, so much as it is, redefined. All of the readers here are NT users, right? You have spent oodles of time sharing with us how you funnel all of this blog's managerial tasks (i.e. its research, its editing, and posting, and its backing up) through the pipes of NT, right? And you select now to make mention of ethereally interwingled NT notebooks? Well, you got my attention, and my hopes up. Mainly about some type of upcoming collaborative odyssey; and I hope you've left room on the guest list. The kind of odyssey that before it has reached full realization, has given mucho techno-mystics the reason to smuggly grin, and bluster about the inherent faults and predictable demise of the Internet's broadcasting fads... "those blogs, as they were called." But no pressure.

Later,
Slim