Second Brains and Blockchains

Second Brains

At dubdubdub, we are obsessed with how we improve how people interact with the Internet. In order to do so, we needed to deeply understand the browser interaction layer to the Internet and its shortcomings. So last week, I started by researching why and how people use chrome extensions: the current way to supercharge your browsing experience. Crypto Wallets also superpower the Internet through chrome extensions, unlocking web3 functionality for creating, buying, and selling digital-native items.

From a bird’s eye on the research, chrome extensions generally fit into user-specific experiences or a mental model shift. User-specific experiences give momentary upgrades to the browsing experience. For example, UBlock origin blocks ads on websites or Honey, which surfaces the best coupons on a given website. Mental model shifts on the other hand redefine how core parts of the browsing experience work (i.e. tabs, bookmarks, accounts, and multiplayer). An example of this is 1password, which redefines accounts across the Internet as one central account system, or Moonsift, which makes bookmarking for shopping more powerful with rich data collection.

People are choosing to explore and categorize the Internet by redefining primitives to work to mimic the synapses of our brain through computing.

dubdubdub’s first users are people who take advantage of these upgrades on the Internet and have been searching for the right mental models for their “second brain” browsing experience. This week, we set out to dive deeper how people alter mental models for their internet experience, if that can tell us anything about the emerging internet user, and if both second brains and web3 could go hand-in-hand.

What is a Second Brain:

The principle of the second brain is to offload as much as the memory and scheduling part of your brain into digital sources so that you can use your brain on creativity as much as possible.

There are two primary structures for the second brain:

Nested structures: your data lives in categories like a folder structure.
Interconnected Structures (Zettlekasten): Zettelkasten’s core idea is to create atomic notes, where each note is about exactly one topic (not more than a few paragraphs tops) and nothing more. Then you file the away in your system by linking that note to other notes that seem most relevant. All the notes are written in your own words, so you’re really writing down your own thoughts here. The key here is that the linking process groups relevant notes together. Now when you’re interested in browsing your notes on a given topic, you’ll easily find them. You get to see how your ideas relate to each other and discover interesting ways they may play off against or contradict one another.

Popular Products:

Many popular products web products have adopted the essence of second brains.

The core features across the board are easy capture, smart organization, and lazy search.

Toby: A chrome extension that enhances tab experiences. You add new tabs by dragging and dropping your browser tabs into collections or save a whole session in just one-click.

The most fundamental unit of the browsing experience is the tab. Browsers have skewmorphically related to folders in a drawer. Toby continues that metaphor. You can launch a folder of tabs into your browser, or store them for later within Toby.
It also compartmentalizes your activities into sessions. Each session has tabs that serve as activities to do, reducing context switching and cognitive load.

Mem.ai: Mem is a AI-powered workspace that’s personalized to you. Amplify your creativity, automate the mundane, and stay organized automatically.

A page of information is a called mem. You can store text, files, and tasks in a mem. You can create a mem in the mem.ai app. Mem spotlight let’s you turn files and websites into mems. Mems are organized in two spaces. 1) Timeline: a home for your mems in chronological order, 2) Inbox: a self-curated list of mems meant as surface for collaboration. You can remove from, add to, or snooze inbox. People can also create side mem to your mems, similar to comments on Google Docs. Mems can also link to each other as bidirectional information. And you can find mems using lazy search (command k)

Obsidian: An implementation of Zettelkasten. Interconnected embedded blocks of data. Uses a mix of nested and interconnected data.

SigmaOS, Arc, and Beam:

SigmaOS: Sigma OS groups tabs into workspaces. It’s really a just more structured implementation of Toby.

Arc: Arc Profiles on the surface might seem similar to SigmaOS’s workspaces; however, Profiles serve as lenses for how you see the internet and the internet sees you. You can have a website open, but as you swipe through the profiles, you get a new account or profile related settings applied to the website.

Beam: Beam layers a journal on top of browser. You can capture text and photos into the Beam journal. The journals also lets users connect data via interconnected backlinking.

Beam also groups similar tabs and allows you to minimize them in the tab row.

What this means for dubdubdub’s browser:

Where should the wallet live?

Beam does a great job of interfacing browsing and capturing into a overall. It’s the right spatial model. We want the blockchain part of the experience to feel immersive with the browsing experience, not feel like a widget or plugin where you are focused on two contexts side-by-side.

Spatial Metaphors

One of the shortcomings of the second brain apps is showing the act of interconnecting data. It requires users to use complicated markdown to do the most basic connection. Instead, using connection visual metaphors would help users understand what will be the result of their action.

Thinking further: Second Brains x Wallets

While second brains are a form of knowledge-based identity, wallets are ownership-based identity.

Now what if a wallet could hold a public version of your second brain? What would it unlock?

Every wallet can be a source of curation and interconnected nodes. People could monetize their curated rabbitholes: explore things on the web, mint it, people pay you to connect that rabithole into their second brain. Your contribution to the internet, pointed back to you.