Aaron Swartz's Jottit has been officially released

by rob • 19 years ago

51 87 19 years ago

"Hi there. Sorry to bother you, but you asked me to send you an email when Jottit was out for you to take a look at. Well, after a lot of hard work by my creators, Simon Carstensen and Aaron Swartz, I'm happy to say that things are finally ready.

Take a look at

http://jottit.com/

and let me know what you think. (Just reply to this email!)

Thanks so much, - Jottit.com"

forgotmylastone• 19 years ago

Now maybe his co-founder will leave, and the founders of Digg will be so impressed that they invite him to be a co-founder--on equal terms.

palish6• 19 years ago

Oh, give it a rest. At least Aaron's still creating value even though he's already rich. He could just sit by the pool all day.

bluishgreen• 19 years ago

He could have or he could waste his time. He chose the later and why is that impressive?

electric3• 19 years ago

That really was the deal of a lifetime. No vesting needed -- here's a third of the equity upfront.

w00t!

pg3• 19 years ago

That's how any merger works.

henning• 19 years ago

Allows links, doesn't have nofollow or CAPTCHAs in place. Anyone wanna take bets on how long before it turns into a giant cesspool of spam?

pg3• 19 years ago

I'm sure they'll make links nofollow. It's not hard.

sverrejoh2• 19 years ago

It's very easy, but doing so degrades the value of the site for honest users.

mojuba6• 19 years ago

Since Jottit doesn't link to its users' pages, their rank in the beginning is 0, and so is their attractiveness for spammers. Once Jottit builds a catalogue of user pages, it's dead.

mojuba6• 19 years ago

If the site grows big enough, some significant part of spam would be easy to filter out statistically.

nickb• 19 years ago

Easy? Please enlighten me what's so easy about filtering spam these days...

collision• 19 years ago

Who cares on a site like this? You only see pages entering their specific url - nobody will actually see spam pages.

rms3• 19 years ago

Well, there's two separate philosophies -- one says that enabling SEO is bad because it distracts from the legitimate use of the site and the other is Squidoo.

pygy• 19 years ago

They have at least two negative CAPTCHA already set up: an hidden submit button, and a ROT13 copy of the submitted data.

thomasptacek13• 19 years ago

Why is this interesting?

irrelative2• 19 years ago

Because it is probably the easiest site to test out that I've encountered. I've never demoed a site and had it be so easy to get up and running. It should be a model in user interface.

The reason it's interesting here is that it was partially made by a well known y-combinator person (who also worked on reddit).

thomasptacek13• 19 years ago

I'm not being clear. What does this site actually do? All I saw it do was echo the text I entered back at me, and store it the equivalent of a tinyurl.

axod4• 19 years ago

easy to test because it doesn't do much...

mojuba6• 19 years ago

In the first place it shows how user registration should look like.

thomasptacek13• 19 years ago

You mean, like Mediawiki?

axod4• 19 years ago

Saying the user registration is good speaks volumes :) No real product or reason to use it, but at least it's easy to sign up!

sverrejoh2• 19 years ago

It seems like a relaunch of Infogami.com, but with a really clever entry point. Infogami had a couple of cool ideas, like "we'll release one new feature every day" and optional commercials (support us if you want). I liked Infogami, but I stopped using it when Aaron stopped doing any development on it.

thomasptacek13• 19 years ago

I guess I never really understood Infogami either. What's the market opportunity for Wikipedia without any of the content, controls, or attention? If it's a blogging tool, why is it better than Typepad, Blogger, or Wordpress? I'm not trying to be a jerk, I'd just really like someone to give me their take on why this is a good business idea, and how it could possibly be defensible.

The "feature-a-day" thing was a clever marketing idea; it did keep me coming back. But where was it going? Where is this going?

gojomo• 19 years ago

One of the lessons of the net so far is that there's always opportunity in making web authoring & self-expression easier: HTML, FrontPage, Geocities, blogs, wikis, friend-linked profile pages. Jottit looks like another point on that curve.

dfranke2• 19 years ago

Dangit, Aaron beat me to the punch with the idea of creating a globally-modifiable page and then later creating an account to claim ownership. The demo I'm working on right now works the same way. I'm still one-uping him, though -- just a button on the front page, no text box.

mynameishere• 19 years ago

Really? I'm doing the same thing, except it's just a button. When you click the button, a page comes up and says, "You have clicked the button. To click the button again, click the button" When you click the button again, it says, "You have clicked the button again. To click the button again, click the button again."

I'm trying to get it down to the absolute minimum of annoying configuration and deployment options. I don't think I'll ever match the masters though:

http://www.zombo.com/

dfranke2• 19 years ago

You have way too much text on your front page. It should just say, "Button clicked. Click again to click again." Better yet, why not just click it for them automatically? If they intended to do something else they'd have already gone to another page.

tocomment• 19 years ago

It just keeps saying "welcome to zombo.com"

Tichy• 19 years ago

Also try this: www.holdthebutton.com

mojuba6• 19 years ago

I'm missing the comment functionality here though. Jottit may become a perfect semi-blogging platform once they add commenting. "Semi" is because articles won't be linked to the date of publishing - something that always annoyed me on all other blogging platforms.

garbowza• 19 years ago

I too am struggling with the value of this site. However, I think the minimalist design is very compelling.

crxnamja• 19 years ago

another pointless project. yawn.

tx• 19 years ago

Awesome. A Web 2.0 version of 'echo'! My old joke about Web 2.0 version of "hello world" is not funny anymore.

dhbradshaw• 19 years ago

What tx says is funny. The site is absolutely simple.

I love it though. I just started learning html and javascript last week and now this thing provides an instant compiler. I change the border size on a table and, BOOM! Right when I finish typing the border shows up with the correct size. I see what it looks like instantly and can change what I want when I want. There isn't any clicking, switching windows, sftp-ing, downloading software, or anything.

It's simple and I love it. Since it handles Javascript I now have an instant way to deploy simple functions and tables. I can figure some useful relation, put it up using html and Javascript, and suddenly anyone anywhere has easy access to my results.

This thing also provides an instant way to write and test content for Google Gadgets, something even more useful than the editor Google provides.

And I think the design is clean, nice, and simple.

palish6• 19 years ago

Woah, you're right. http://jottit.com/s2r9f/

Fun!

axod4• 19 years ago

If all you want is a preview functionality, how about

Hardly rocketscience is it...

imp• 19 years ago

I like the user interface a lot. The color scheme picker is sweet, and it's fun to see changes in real time. Since it's so easy to use, I'm sure there will be people who find it useful.

gustaf• 19 years ago

So nice and so simple. I'm amazed

cstejerean• 19 years ago

Wow, I'm quite surprised that so few of the people that have commented see the value in this. I just took a look at the site and I have to say it looks awesome and I can definitely see exactly what it was trying to address. It's not a blogging tool and it's not anything like Wikipedia. IMO it's simply a place to take notes, have them be available from anywhere else and I'm guessing to share them with others. As the name implies you simply jot something down. I love the fact that you can do that right on the home page, no annoying clicks. It reminds me of OneNote which I used to use on Windows or Google Notebook.

dallasrpi• 19 years ago

I'm reminded of the story "The Emperor's New Clothes". Jottit is the emperors invisible clothes.

kcl• 19 years ago

Hey, Google has this same layout but when I click the button it gives me back something useful

Kaizyn• 19 years ago

This site is neat in that it works simply. However, since this site is largely geared to hackers AND startup founders, what is its target market and how can they make money off of it? Or is the object here to be purchased by Google or one of the other sites that have bad HTML editors as their default?

rob2• 19 years ago

I don't think Aaron started it with the idea of how to make money from it.

tiswaldo• 19 years ago

Anyone know what they've written it with?

rob2• 19 years ago

Probably Python and web.py.

amix• 19 years ago

And AJS JavaScript library ;)

ptn• 19 years ago

What's the point of Jottit? I don't get it...

create_account• 19 years ago

At least you guys got to see it.

Right now, this is what http://jottit.com/ says:

500 - Internal Server Error

What, no customized error page?

jamongkad• 19 years ago

I checked it it's up again. Tried using it but I can't seem to find the value in it....

electric3• 19 years ago

I actually like the simplicity and usefulness of this website. Congratulations Aaron -- well done!!

brlewis• 19 years ago

It's a good site in its own subtle way, but where's the purple cow?

Aaron Swartz's Jottit has been officially released

Related Stories