Preview: MyHippocampus.com
I came across MyHippocampus.com in a post on the Google Widget Toolkit newsgroups. This is not your ordinary webapp - so let’s have a closer look:
The basic idea of myhippocampus is mindmapping; a way to dump everything you’ve ever seen, read, learned or thought about into a website, so that you can search through it, visualize the evolution of your experiences, yadayada. When you see or read something new, you add the info to the site, and you’ll get back related thoughts and materials you’ve entered before, to give you some perspective.
That’s a tough pill to swallow though; “everything ever seen, read, learned or thought about” covers rather a lot of material, and it’s rather a lot of work to write it all down, so the ‘payoff’ - the ability to visualize it all, has to be large to even try. With this much info its also difficult to come up with useful visualizations. Still a closed beta, but fortunately there are screencasts to gawk at.
Remember the xkcd comic with the map of web communities? That same kind of interface is what MyHippocampus uses to map your life:
Nifty, and on a technical note, impressively done without flash. You can zoom in and out as if it’s google maps; the more you zoom in, the more details appear. The basics of usability are there as well: simple full-text search at the bottom, and an index ‘glossary’ of sorts as well.
However, I wasn’t convinced this might just work until I saw the ways you can visualize your experiences. For example, I currently don’t track the books I’ve read nor the movies I’ve seen because writing it all down and coming up with interesting visualizations of the data is too much hassle. However, this timeline feature, which can handle as many ‘islands’ (like a tag, really) as you like, seems useful:
The app also tracks where and when entries are made, comes with bookmarklets (think del.icio.us but with a world map visualization representing your tags and your bookmarks), and automatically links any content you focus on by giving you ‘neighbours’ in the dimension of time, location (in real life), location (on the map), and stuff you manually linked.
It’s certainly hip, but will it catch on? I don’t know yet. The biggest problem as I see it is difficulty in importing stuff you’ve already written down; some import wizards to grab your delicious bookmarks and e.g. amazon book lists would be a big help. There’s also no social aspect to speak of; it would be interesting to browse mindmaps of friends or people with similar tastes, for example.
You can see some screencasts here.
Martijn Pillich http://martijnpillich.nl
May 12th, 2007I checked out the 5 minute tour and it looks promising. Yet I don’t understand why they target consumers. As you said already: why would I want to capture everything I read, see and think if there’s no clear purpose to it?
Business users on the other hand crave for a decent online mind mapping tool. MyHippocampus.com can help them document brainstorm results so they can be used later. I bet those business users wouldn’t mind paying for such a service either.
Anonymous
May 12th, 2007Hi Reinier,
Thanks for checking out the site, I’m glad that it’s piqued your interest. I think you’re right on track with your question of ‘why would I want to do this?’ We really don’t want to make just another website that is an opportunity to sink into cyberspace, never to return. To give you an example of this, when I started testing MyHippocampus I started putting in each bottle of wine that I drank. It was a good way to test all the features, a timeline of bottle drank, a map of their origins, text properties for price and varietal. Everything was fine expect for the fact that it wasn’t really worth it to me to put the time into entering things in. It turned out that this wasn’t information that I really wanted to store. Now let’s contrast that with movies. I’m absolutely delighted to see my movies on a timeline & the map. It’s really easy to pop them in and for most movies I don’t even write a description. If I don’t have anything worthwhile to say I say nothing. Of course when I do have interesting thoughts, those go right in. A far out idea for a company I’d like to start? Absolutely. My impressions of London? Yes. A little review of a book that says “decent book, a bit overwrought.” Not included. Only writing down things I’d like to read has made it a much better experience for me.
Read the blog for some more thoughts along this line, but this is why we’re hesitant to do too much sharing to start. Once you make things a social medium, users are forced to start ‘rating’ their movies and writing pithy little reviews. There’s already thousands of places for that on the Internet & we think it might be time for something that turns the focus away from the nameless hordes and back onto the user.
My main point is that with a system like this which can be very broad in scope, there exists an onus on the user to not get sucked in. I really hope that MyHippocampus users use the system as little as possible. Only turning to it when they have an idea that they really don’t want to lose. It’s a bit counterintuitive, but I think that the way out of this frenzied web 2.0 extraordinarily shallow networking & thought sharing is to go back to basics and really re-evaluate what the benefits of these systems are.
-Jeff
ps It’s not really a closed beta, just a ‘throttled’ release, so don’t hesitate to signup!
Cristiano Betta http://ibbydibby.com/
May 12th, 2007The tool looks very cool, but I think they went completely wrong with having users having to put in all the information. These days with all these social profiles that users are building online they could have easily integrated this with Plazes, Last.fm, Wakoopa, and maybe even just automatically visualizing what I am browsing.
The lack of a social factor really makes it a fairly useless tool. I want to actually explore similair islands from other people and so explore new data.
PS: The timeline is a OpenSource project that I have seen in many webapps. I think it is called SIMILE
Reinier http://zwitserloot.com
May 14th, 2007Thanks for your views Jeff.
The biggest (and very shallow) reason to add the social element is simply viral marketing. Without any way to share what I put in, there’s no reason for me to tell other people about this aside from mentioning how cool it is. While that can work (I posted this review, didn’t I?) - it’s asking rather a lot from your users. flickr didn’t grow into prominence because people talked about how easy it was to use. It grew into prominence because people mailed flickr.com links around, and the people receiving those links thought: Neat! I want that too! - and THEN asked the other guy who probably answered: it’s free, it’s great, it’s not that hard to use, go right ahead.
Here’s a minimal effort socialization technique: Allow me to stick one of my islands on my blog as a widget. I know alper (used to?) run a ‘movies I’ve seen’ byline on his blog; it would be much improved with a timeline and better automation.
oliver3 http://oliver3.nl/index.html
June 3rd, 2007MyHippocampus.com now supports OpenID