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Status: Draft
The idea
So, in the posts Attention Follows Meaning and Whitepaper: Why Attention Functions make ideas flourish I explained why I think it would be a great idea to build a universal Attention Manager, a tool that let’s you build a personal recommendation system for what you should pay attention to. I believe, that having such a system would make myself and others way better at achieving goals and it is therefore a hypothesis worth testing.
But how?
In this post I propose an overview of different projects:
This structure is inspired by the Matrix protocol and Beeper: a public good is provided by unifying the vast landscape of productivity tools and content providers. A for profit enterprise offers a customized solution to customers who are willing to pay for ease of use and more, which in turn makes the provision of the public good sustainable.
Layer 1: Open Source Community
For Naext.one to work as it’s best, as many things as possible should be represented in your system. Remember that one of the core benefits proposed is to get rid of recommendation silos. Currently the decision between watching YouTube or calling a friend is left to you, only once you enter a silo will you be shown recommendations. This leads to many suboptimal decisions and leaves you open to possible exploits (you are not comparing “watch next video” to all possible options, only to other videos).
To solve this, all your options must first
- Be digitally represented
- Be in a shared and comparable format
- Be visible
Naext.one is proposing a universal, sharable open source format for this: .aimm. The technical details besides, the aim of .aimm (not sorry for the pun) is to make it a lot easier for your calendar to be in Notion, your tweets in Obsidian, your Anki cards in RemNote or your emails on your television (even though I am not sure why one wants that), The point is:
.aimm allows for the comparison between all experiences you could spend your attention on.
Integrations
As there are already a huge number of services that take experiences from the real world and represent them digitally, there is no need for reinvention. Your calendar already knows where you could be, your streaming service what you could watch next and your chat history with whom you have been in contact. The fact is, we have already digitally represented most experiences, including ones in the physical world.
All one needs to do then is to build a large, but manageable set of anything2aimm converters. Given the abundance of API’s I expect the most important integrations to be build relatively quickly, and with good open source documentation even niche products will eventually have services for them too.
Interfaces
The number of “productivity tools” is skyrocketing, and every single one tries to bring a unique aspect to the market. Trying to compete with what people use as their daily “Tool for Thought” is therefore an uphill battle. The solution again is to build open source plugins, that allow other tools to read .aimm files.
If successful in one product, feature parity amongst many different platforms could be reached shortly thereafter, as .aimm is designed to be integrated easily. The Naext.one team will itself build multiple first versions, and will provide support to other developers.
The file format
What is left then, is the design, specification and testing of the .aimm file format. This will be the main focus for Naext.one in the coming months.
Layer 2 and 3: For-profits to finance the continued development of Layer 1
to be continued …