Hi, funny Iâm in here making product suggestions. Iâm not a regular community forum poster, and I havenât even put this product through its paces. But Iâll start using it in the next few days.
But I am excited to talk about my âdreamâ product:
- Client-side (eg, browser plugin / http proxy) for capturing and searching / viewing on macos / linux desktop / android. (at least, those are my priorities). Sounds like memex is well on itâs way with this part.
- 100% effective HTML replay. Thereâs open source out there thatâs âpretty goodâ already
- Everything is captured. If I see it, itâs in my index. Itâs 2021, I donât want to even click on âbookmark thisâ and figure out how to organize it etc. Perhaps a blacklist for a handful of things, but⊠the more I think about it, I have a hard time coming up with anything that absolutely shouldnât be in the index. DRM would be a pain, but⊠that could be tuned over time I guess. Just skip content that is protected at the widevine level, having a youtube link instead of the video is better than nothing. Also since the content is immutable, something that was captured might not initially be viewable / indexable but could become viewable after an update comes out to the scraper component.
- Search experience is important, weighting recent data etc. At least, not the default lucene experience
- The above parts are free and open source.
Hereâs what I would pay for, and could be customer-only source:
- Well-tuned server side setup delivered as CDK or terraform or whatever, to fire up a private server, with proper key management and cert rotation. Choice of cloud provider would be nice, but optimizing on one cloud probably more important, since I have to pay the cloud bill as well. Just a few knobs for like how to age things out of the index, things that are cost related, the rest would be settings with the âappâ or browser plugin or whatever it is⊠Personally I could deal with a cloudformation zip, but most customers probably canât or wouldnât want to⊠so maybe it has to be one of those cross-account setups where I give memex the IAM perms and DNS access. Memex boots everything and keeps it running, but you canât get at my KMS keys that encrypt the index. When I think about it, everyone who has an amazon account also has an AWS account with a credit card setup. Also, 10 years ago, my mom setup a backup service for her Mac which involved creating an s3 bucket and issuing keys. And sheâs not particularly âtechnicalâ. So the private cloud hosting part of this may not be that âfar outâ there
- hmm, I think there are papers about search technology where the index and the search term and both encrypted and unknown to the DB, but is it actually usable tech? Maybe instead, focus initially on keeping the content size small enough that you can keep the last 15 days on each client. When you take out video / voice, the amount of data goes down fast right?
- Repeatable builds that checksum and do some kind of self attestation that the source I see is what is running for every component involved . With build logs I could review etc. Per-customer private IOS and android builds that have embedded certs to connect to my server env? I donât know why that would be better, but it sounds neat.
I think I used to pay $99/year for evernote. I could see paying something in that range. Itâs the lets encrypt model⊠if you strictly only ship after the operations are automated, you can take on a huge number of clients.
Possible to build iteratively and quickly and without taking VC money? That is a tough questionâŠ
One last thing, the premise of âthe content is strictly privateâ has an impact on this from top to bottom. Personally, I would be happy with that. But I donât know how many of me there are. Journalist types, data hoarders⊠students? Everybody would like having it though. Like, I always intend to download PDF statements for dozens of paperless bank accounts, but never do it. This service would just about automate that problem. That hunky guy who hid his account on dating.com? Youâve got his content to obsess over as long as you like. (Letâs not make this too weird thoughâŠ)
Want to âshareâ something? Copy and paste the link or the content. When âshare thisâ was added to evernote was around the time it started feeling bloated.
Thanks for reading, now I have to go actually launch the product that already exists, heh.
Ethan