Day 24 of #productidea — Personal Wiki

This is part of my #productidea 30 day challenge on which each day I write about a new product idea.

Several weeks ago I proposed a better way to save quotes from articles I‘ve found interesting. It represented the first step for this idea. I found myself everyday reading interesting articles, papers or books, obtaining great feedback from colleagues, listening to great quotes and ideas, discovering tasty restaurants or enjoyable pubs, glancing over gorgeous photos at amazing destinations, being recommended products to buy, books to read or films to watch, etc.

It’s an ocean of ideas, products and places to remember. Even if you have a great memory, you will forget about them. Most people do nothing about it or use specific apps or websites for a specific type of content like Yelp, Foursquare, TripAdvisor, Amazon or IMDb. If they have used a small website, the content will plausibly be lost sometime in the future.

Some of the most organized people currently use Evernote or Microsoft OneNote, others carry paper agendas and the most advance have their own wiki. All of them need to proactively save the information they desire to remember in the future. If they are on the go, they depend on writing the current thought somewhere and migrate it later. If not, they won’t save it.

I’ve looked at this problem for some time because I want to discover a solution for myself. I currently utilize Evernote but I’m not happy about it. I’ve thought on building my own wiki, but I don’t see myself proactively adding info everyday. The people who have it, don’t seem to use it a lot (am I right Álvaro Ortiz? 😁).

What do I imagine using for myself?

• A platform to save all kind of content in a semi-structured way.
• I can import a URL and it will structure its content.
• It will automatically be listening to my actions in other websites and reacting to them. For example: saving a restaurant in the wiki if I save that place on Foursquare or Yelp, importing an article if I tweet or retweet its link, saving destinations of photos I’ve liked in Instagram, etc.
• I can send voice notes and it will convert them to text.
• The platform could apply machine learning/AI to infer the context of each piece of information and categorize it correctly. The most users and usage, the better for all.

It’s probably too complex and it could be enough with current solutions, but I wonder if there is a better way of organizing our mind. What do you think? Have you found a solution similar to the one I’m proposing?