Article
Why Build Flojourn
Toby Lewis the creator of Flojourn looks at his reasons and motivations for the app.
I have personally wanted something like Flojourn for a long time.
In 1987 Nobel Laureate Robert Solow stated the the Solow Productivity Paradox. This simply noted that despite huge spending on computers and IT, there had not been a huge increase in productivity. However, as the internet came of age in the 1990s, this change dramatically. The ability for people to communicate and share information so easily changed the situation completely.
When facebook first arrived, I thought it was going to be like a personal library of thoughts and links to share with friends and family. But facebook evolved quickly and as the volume of people and posts increased, the algorithm arrived. It was clear that it was not showing me the things I wanted to see, but rather a selection of things it wanted to show me. So the incentive to post things also fell as I knew the people I wanted to share with probably would not see them.
I have also tried lots of bookmarking and note taking apps because I like keeping track of things I find on the web and find browser bookmarks are too limited. Some were news aggregators. Some were reading list managers to queue up articles to "read later". Others are more note taking apps that can hold links but that is not the main function. And with all these it's fine for personal collection and consumption of content but not very good for passing on, sharing or collaborating.
So two years ago I felt compelled to start building what has become Flojourn. There are a number of things I wanted to achieve:
Journal based not person based
Social media has become a popularity contest and often algorithms reward behaviours that are not always the best for the people using the platform. I have also found personally using social media that since I have many interests, it feels odd to subject everyone to both the things they might like to see and other things they are not interested in. Managing multiple profiles on a platform is hard work.
So the idea of following journals rather than a person makes perfect sense. Journals can focus on particular topics or interests and people only need to follow the journals they want.
User driven activity
We are inundated with inputs, from phone notifications to endless feeds from social media or the news updates from the legacy media, the overflowing email inbox and the the pinging of direct messaging.
Flojourn does not have an algorithm to force feed you content. You have to go looking for journals to follow and you actively let you contacts know about your journals. There is no direct messaging in Flojourn*. It is not meant to be a place to handle day to day communication. It gently shows you which journals have got new entries, and there is a special section to help you keep track of people interacting with your journals. This helps you decide what you are going to look at. You can turn on notifications for interactions but that is entirely optional. Flojourn only sends out emails as part of the sign-in process.
Even the help system does not do anything for you with wizards. It simply highlights controls and lets you use them. Wizards may help people do things but if they don't understand what happened then they are mode even more helpless.
Collaboration rather than project management
Most collaboration software is targeted at businesses, because that's more lucrative. Not only does that set the prices high, but many of the team communication features are of less use in other sectors. And that has left a big gap for smaller or less commercial organisations that need to share information in a way that is easy to manage for both creators and receivers of the information.
One of the key things with Flojourn is the fine grained control over who can see, react to, or edit content. By allowing public content to be viewed by anyone using a web browser means at one end it functions as an easy to update website with no barriers to very occasional users. At the other end, a journal may have multiple users who can add entries and they can comment on the entries with replies and use attachments to make collections of entries for display or discussion. This can al be done with a private journal, that is hidden form those not involved. Other people may be invited to view but not given access to add new entries or comments. This is not complex and does not take an IT department to set up.