Welcome to all our Trails Network beta testers, and thanks for agreeing to help us out! We’ve been working in a bubble of enthusiasm for over a year now and it’s time to see whether anyone else shares our excitement about the potential of Memex Trails…

Of course, we want you to spot and report any bugs that we haven’t found yet, but equally important is to find out whether Memex Trails could play any part in your work and life.

We first came up with the idea in late 2006 sitting around my kitchen table, and we’ve both been using variants of Memex Trails ever since Ben built the first primitive prototype a few weeks later.

One problem we’ve had right from the beginning is how to describe Memex Trails. Somehow “a working environment and a set of tools to enable people to invent their own ways of managing, organising and searching their digital stuff” didn’t seem to communicate much. Particularly since we were both were finding that, despite the frustrations of bugs and things that didn’t work as we thought they should, we were continually inventing ways to use it to make our own lives easier.

Now the desktop application, online storage and the web application are (fairly) stable, we are enlisting your help to explore the potential of what we have created. The key word here is “invent”.

Memex Trails allows you to place Documents, Events, Notes, Tasks, Pictures and URLs on a horizontal timeline, move them around, search for particular items, and see what was happening on a particular set of dates. We think this basic set of features opens up all sorts of possibilities for doing useful things. (The more adventurous can create their own specialised data types, which makes it even more powerful!) So, rather than giving you a list of possible applications, we would rather that you played with it, used your imagination and invented ways of using it that you found useful and fitted in with the way that you work and live.

If you find that you can do things with Memex Trails that you can’t easily do any other way, we will know we have succeeded. If you find that Memex Trails becomes an important part of how you run your work and life we will have accomplished what we set out to do.

So, in the conversations we hope will follow both here on this blog and in the forums we would like to find out:

• Do you find Memex Trails engaging?
• Is it useful?
• What do you use it for?
• Are there any frustrations and things you would like it to do that it doesn’t?
• And, of course, have you found any bugs?

Once again, thanks agreeing to participate in our adventure, and we hope that you enjoy using Memex Trails and the Trails Network as much as we do.