Hello from Hyperlink :)
If a reminder is helpful — we're building Hyperlink to make spaces for small groups to learn and create together. A place to make microworlds for book clubs, writing groups, collaborative projects…and play learning games of our own invention.
We've been busy working on the alpha of our new app, and have shared a few dev updates to our (as yet very small) alpha group, but want to give you the overview!
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FIRST, though, a small surprise to share: threads.garden
This is a site for making threads, for weaving together hyperlinks into a sequence: think blogchains, prompts, lists, conversations…
It's simple, just start a thread with a single link, and share with anyone you'd like to reply. Part of the fun is you can mix links from across the web. Personal websites, Arena, Kinopio, mmm.page, tldraw, Buttondown, Substack, Twitter, Tumblr, Github gists, Figma, YouTube, Google docs, anywhere with a url.
There's no public directory; threads are mostly private by default. You can subscribe to threads to get a daily email with new replies. And threads end after seven days, so each one's kind of a pop-up!
We made a thread of threads as a temporary directory of examples. As you can see we've started a few, and invite you to reply:
- hello world!
- pondering pattern languages
- reading_retreat_rpg.txt
- weird ideas for the future of threads.garden
We also invite you to make threads of your own! We'd love to see examples. Feel free to link on twitter and tag us @hyperlink_a to retweet, otherwise we'll leave it up to you how and where to share. You can also add new threads to the meta-thread linked above.
Hyperlinks are sacred, the open web is a core public good, and writing online should feel fun and personal and alive. We hope threads.garden offers a nudge in the direction of a more thoughtful and intimate social internet.
We made this as a small experiment, not a long-term product priority, but may continue to explore microsite/app ideas that are both fun and aligned with our values.
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And now back to some Hyperlink news!—
We've spent most of the year building a new…app? tool? platform? game engine? for learning. It's far from complete, but close to being a thing you can fruitfully use.
In fact, it's pretty much at the point of good enough to play with, and we've spent the past couple months doing mostly-internal playtesting.
Recent things we've done on Hyperlink include:
- Team workshops exploring both particular features, and the design of learning games and workshops more broadly
- Structured social games, e.g. group reading, seltzer mixology, worldbuilding research, advent of code
- Working with Azlen Elza to explore game design ideas and interaction patterns for collaborative spaces
Our immediate goal for early 2023 is making the app solid enough to do more interesting and powerful things, and improve the onboarding experience to the point we can open the doors for you all to check it out!
HYPERLINK, THE PRODUCT AS IT STANDS TODAY:
- Create and join Spaces, small worlds for group activity
- In each Space, collect, organize, and do things together
- Cards represent important things like people, ideas, questions, artifacts
- Desktops give you workspaces to play with cards
- Highlights give you a place to view what's new in a Space
here's one example of what a Space looks like
Next up: new types of cards, more ways to make moves in a shared game, stronger affordances for async collaboration and presence…
Thanks as always for reading and following along; more in the new year!
—The Hyperlink Team