Roam Research as The Tesla of Note-taking Apps

Or what is the difference between a library and a forest

[…] does an incredible job as a note-taking, brainstorming, information-gathering tool, working much like your brain does to allow you to capture, link, and organize ideas in a flash. It really shines as an IA tool. It allows you to quickly prototype maps of information, establishing links between ideas (or pages or nodes), sites, or other files.*

Sounds good, right? Well, this description is not for Roam. It’s a review written in 2002 for a great app called Tinderbox. Yep, 2002. And everything in the review is true.

Roam Research is not the first app that tries to be the definitive note-taking app. Tinderbox is a very good app. I used it for some years.

Notion recently announced adding backlinks to its app. Does that make Notion like Roam Research? Of course not.

The old Tinderbox or the new Notion are tools, like many others, that try to be a combination of note-taking apps, personal content managers, or personal knowledge bases. And they can do a very good job at that.

The advantage of Roam is not the features it has. Those can change over time.

Backlinks or bidirectional links, for example, are not features added to Roam. They are at the core of Roam because it’s an app built on relationships. For that, Roam Research uses a graph database. That is the real game-changer.