1. That vision still holds. It is a secure forum where you can keep your thoughts, ideas, things-to-do, brainstorms all in one place. Srini likens it to a date-stamped stack of index cards which can be catalogued according to subject through tagging.

2. We’ve been using it as such, and perhaps others will as well. If you’re in the Time Log and you want to let somebody know about something, it’s easier to log it than to go to your email and write a separate message – there’s no subject line to worry about, just the one prompt. You can tag the log with a subject if you’re so inclined. In the future, you will also be able to include an email address in the tag to have it sent to an email account. That said, that’s not the primary function but just an ancillary one. Since it’s web-based, it’s the perfect portal for taking notes on the fly from a mobile device and having them appear on any PC with no syncing involved. Likewise, you can enter logs at any PC that you might want to reference on your mobile device while on the go (shopping lists, to-do lists, notes for a meeting, etc).

3. More of a private Twitter – do you necessarily want to tweet everything all the time? If you’re in the bookstore and you see some books you’d lke to investigate later do you want to tweet that so that everybody sees it? Do your friends really care? Would you even be able to find that tweet again since you can’t tag tweets?

4. It’s descriptive, albeit sterile. Do you have any alternate ideas? We can transfer the site format to any other domains that we register for segmentation purposes, so that’s not a problem.

5. We are releasing this prior to MetaNotes and promoting it separately until MetaNotes has a chance to be more fully developed. As such, we’ve given Time Log its own URL to promote it as a singular application and get users used to the idea of logging their thoughts, ideas, etc. When MetaNotes is ready to go, users of Time Log will already have a MetaNotes log-in and can be informed that they can now use this notetaking platform which syncs perfectly with Time Log (there will be functionality where individual logs can be transferred to a MN workspace).

The longer-term vision is that Time Log will bring added value to MN via the interactivity between the two platforms. For now, we just want to get users on the Time Log. Promoting it as a ‘private Twitter’ is the easiest analogy for a tech-savvy crowd, and we can position it in a more generic, descriptive way for target segments that may not understand that analogy.

Emery

it’s meant to keep a small team cohesive as long as everyone’s using it. like a perma-chat. sort of right between chat, twitter, email and delicious (tagging and links auto-clickable).

people never go back to old chats.

people rarely go back to old emails.

after we add search and improve the tagging interface, i believe that one’s time-log will provide an excellent resource for efficient recall.

it’s more like a phone i never owned, those nextel walkie talkie things, it’s meant to keep a small team cohesive as long as everyone’s using it. like a perma-chat. sort of right between chat, twitter, email and delicious (tagging and links auto-clickable).

i must have made a requirements error with john back in january. i want to own up to that.

i don’t know how he could have possibly gotten the idea that metanotes should be totally open, without privacy.

i had assumed that b/c he made emery & me private accounts on kicks-ass, that would be togglable on the real app. i was wrong, and as a result, even my own usage of metanotes is crippled.

i must have not made that clear. perhaps it was me vacillating on charging for privacy on the business model part of the plan.

i don’t think it is john’s fault if he made that assumption. to me, this was a critical flaw that harmed our launch at south by southwest, and i know it will take time to handle this clearly. believe john when he says there is deep database monkeying to be done to properly deliver privacy.

not to mention: this is the kind of thing that constitutes hacker bait, right ? we need to be tested and bulletproof which is hopefully where @OverDose and other hackers we know fit in.

in order to address this situation it was necessary to view our product portfolio from the lens of the (typical) person who considers their notes PRIVATE.

since the-time-log was private and for that matter embeddable, plus it was simple and almost done, it made me think, hm, what else is out there like this ?

and i found: NOTHING AT ALL THAT WORKS LIKE TWITTER… in fact a relative void in the application space for personal privacy.

yes, that is what it sounds like :)

as emery said earlier, we will deploy the time log on many different sites; think of them as “skins”.

a good idea he had was to apply the time log to some kind of “personal training” portal, you know, for jocks.

that is a good way of describing it !!!!!!! i have been using the Violent Femmes’ line “i hope you know that this will go down on your permanent record” to describe twitter as contrasted with us.

Very soon, the time log will be a bookmarklet and hopefully a facebook/opensocial widget. the bookmarklet will at least partially address the “work over other web pages” problem.

we mba’s just have to figure out a way to sell it; there is more product development too of course, but it is useful right now because of privacy. that seemed to me to be the #1 most requested feature with METANOTES, but John created the time log from the ground up as a private application.

i think your vision about working over web pages could use a screenshot or two. that seems pretty much “not in the spec right now” but i would love to understand it further – i am not sure i would make use of such a feature personally…. but the timelog-bookmarklet gets us somewhere at least.

at the same time, is what you’re talking about easy ? like super easy?

would it just be a manner of entering a URL in as the “background” of a space ? how would the browser distinguish when you wanted to click to add a note vs. clicking in the page ? i don’t use these other services.

you recall third voice ? i tried that a bit back in the day but commenting on other ppl’s pages just wasn’t my thing… nor reading others’ comments

a major bottleneck a few weeks ago was the fact that most of the nifty “hi! welcome to metanotes! here’s a bunch of help!” stuff we wanted to do for new users on metanotes HAD to go through john.

with http://the-time-log.com, this is no longer the case – I can add helpdocs, welcome stuff, and even new apps to it, plus i’m learning adsense a wee bit to boot.

with john able to simply focus on the core application for timelog, we got to a completion milestone (well almost – that certificate is still not working) much faster plus we got an extra product inside it

one which will segue naturally with metanotes in the future (VERY EXCITED ABOUT THIS)

i call this a “punchline” strategy

i have a couple ideas but i’d love to hear yours.

Srini and Emery,

I’m still not clear—what is our vision for Time Log?

The original vision seemed to be of a journal, where you might log everything you did or thought as you went about your day.

1. We’ve been using it as an alternative email.
2. We’ve been describing it as Twitter for non-narcissists.
3. The name sounds like something a consultant would use to log billable hours.
4. And what’s the goal of our separate the-time-log.com?

Matt