When someone stumbles onto the same idea you had years ago…

Just saw hashify.me and realized it was basically the same service I built and been using since over a year ago. I call it ‘Wysp’ and it’s a simple notepad which stores the entire document in the URL. If you use Chrome, you can even use the ‘Add custom search engine’ feature in Chrome to enter your notebook data even before hitting the site like in this shot…

That’s a nifty use of the ‘Add custom search engine’ feature even if I do say so myself. Once you hit enter/return, the ‘Wysp’ loads up with what you had typed and you see this…

Wysp comes with a bunch of features I needed, like a clean design, auto-save, word and char counts etc. But the best feature is the one that I saw today in hashify.me - storing the entire document in the URL itself. So the text you see there can all be got back from its URL: http://dffrnt.com/snippets/snippet.html#What%20I%20type%20here%20will%20show%20up%20in%20my%20notebook.&fs-36px&fc-rgb(51, 51, 51)&sp-0

I’m storing extra style and font information also in the URL, so technically anyone, anywhere can get back all the data from the URL just by parsing it. But storing data in a URL has lots of other benefits:

• Compression: You can use bit.ly or other URL shorteners to compress the URL, and since all the data is in the URL, this means the data is compressed. Hashify.me uses this, kudos to them. But the one downside is that this system doesn’t scale very well. The more people use the service, the longer the bit.ly URL gets and the less efficient the compression becomes. You could switch to a different service or build one yourself from the ground up to account for this shortcoming… just seems a bit messy to me.
• You can store your data client-side: Want to save the document? No need for a ‘save’ button, simply click the ‘bookmark’ button. Since the ‘bookmark’ button saves the URL and since all your data is in the URL itself, bookmarking = saving the data. I’ve been doing this for over a year now…
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  Bookmarks are saved back to the cloud if you use a bookmarking service, I’m using Google Bookmarks which comes by default with Google Chrome and I can also search for my documents from the default bookmark manager. I can even search for the content ‘inside’ my Wysp documents as the bookmark manager searches both the bookmark title and the URL for the search keywords. Handy.
• Versioning: Since the document is now a URL, and since ‘Wysp’ auto-saves, you can step backward and forward through every edit made to the document by simply using the back and forward button in the browser. I think this is simply the most useful feature of ‘Wysp’ - I just use it all the time while writing drafts and switch between edits to see how things are shaping up.

So, why didn’t I tell people about it? I did have a few beta testers but even after a year of using it I still don’t see a way to monetize it.
So, why am I posting about it now? Because hashify.me is public, and thus there is no sense in keeping my efforts to myself anymore - Wysp’s only plus point was that it was unique, but now that hashify.me is out, that plus point is negated and I am now free to talk about it.

The other thing why I’m writing this down is that it has happened many times before - someone else stumbles upon a idea and that becomes popular, but I had had the same idea over a year before but never posted it publicly. Like, my idea for ‘Single Input Logins’ that I posted about 2 years ago here went popular when someone else stumbled on the same idea just a few months back. Today’s hashify.me was the fifth such instance I know of, when someone has made popular an idea I had had first. 

The first time I saw someone had built a business out of my idea was in 2007 when Modu brought to market my 2005 idea for a modular cellphone. I was shattered then, but over time I’ve learnt the lesson that ideas are 0.002BTC-a-dozen and that the true value of an idea is exposed only when brought to the market in a scalable and profitable way.

But… since I don’t have much else to talk about on this blog (besides Apple and Science), the next time someone stumbles on one of the 1,816 (and growing) ideas that I have stored away in one of my wysps, you can expect to see a post on that here, along with whatever efforts I had been making to bring that idea to market. It pisses me off when people claim ideas as their own while offering no proof, as well as making no effort to realizing their ideas prior - I’ll be damned if I made that mistake myself.

Or maybe I’ll just post my ideas on here anyway even if no one stumbles on to it, like how I did with Gyrotasking.