First Post
I had the idea for butterf.ly, a website that shows you how the world is different because you exist, three or four months ago, in August, maybe. I have a lot of website ideas, but this one has been impossible to shake. Despite my overwhelming responsibilities at The Point, I am compelled to give butterf.ly a shot and see where it goes. I’m hopeful that spending an hour or so every day on something other than The Point will force a discipline and provide a distance that benefits both projects.
About a month ago, I asked The Point’s CTO, Ken Pelletier, if he’d like to work on butterf.ly with me. I knew he was as busy as I was, but I also knew the project aligned with many of his interests. Thankfully, Ken is on board. Neither of us really know if we’ll be able to balance both projects, and of course, The Point is a priority, but we couldn’t help but give butterf.ly a try.
For both of us, butterf.ly is a passion project. Making money won’t be a consideration in decisions we make. Aside from the joyful freedom that a total lack of financial expectations provides, it will allow us to experiment with a freer implementation of the Web as we - not users - believe it should be. That doesn’t mean butterf.ly will be anti-user, we’ll just have a little more freedom to “skate where the puck is going.” For example, with butterf.ly’s complexly interrelated human cause-effect network, that experimentation will likely manifest in the form of content privacy and ownership permissions.
Friends and family have expressed a lot of interest in butterf.ly, and I’d like to keep them as involved in its development as possible. Hence, this blog. We hope it will generate feedback on the decisions we’re making. Posts here will generally be lightweight. Screen captures, meeting notes, that sort of thing. Apologies in advance if posts are at times lingo-heavy and lacking of context. This blog is more like a documentary of butterf.ly’s creation than a typical public-facing company blog that’s designed to be consumed in individual posts.
Here’s where things stand.
We have a basic structure and syntax for entering events. Now the challenge is building an interface that makes it fast, easy, and fun to enter an event tree. Getting this right is crucial to butterf.ly’s success.
We’re at a crucial stage in development, because we have no preconceived notions about what this thing should be. As soon as the first interface is proposed, it will become a baseline against which we measure and compare all future ideas.
I took a stab at the interface last week, and I’ve asked Ken to do the same - without seeing mine. We’re meeting on Friday, and hopefully we’ll have ideas to compare by then.
