Stikkit

» see stikkit.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

in 2006 the anglophone web had a small productivity religion called getting things done, and it produced an app a week. stikkit was one of the good ones. it was a sticky note you typed plain english into, and it read what you wrote. put a date in a note and it became a reminder. put a name in and it became a contact. no forms to fill in, just text that parsed itself.

it came from values of n, a one-man company run by rael dornfest. dornfest was not a random developer. he had been cto at o'reilly and helped write the rss 1.0 spec, so when he built a notes tool it carried real ideas about how software should read human input. stikkit had a sibling, i want sandy, an assistant you emailed and it emailed you back with your schedule. both had a small, devoted following in the american tech-blog world. neither crossed into my world, where a note was a text file and lifehacker was something you read, not a place you lived.

then twitter bought it. on the twenty-fourth of november 2008 twitter acquired the assets of values of n, mostly to hire dornfest. it did not want the products. two weeks later, on the eighth of december 2008, stikkit and i want sandy were switched off. users got a window to export, and then the smart sticky note was gone, its parser folded into a company built on the shortest text there was.

~ the dossier ~

~ the acquihire ~

this was one of the early acquihires, the deal where the company is bought so the people can be hired and the product is allowed to die. twitter said the technology might re-emerge inside its systems. it mostly did not. dornfest stayed at twitter for a few years. stikkit and sandy became a line in a list of twitter acquisitions, remembered by the small number of people who had wired their week into them.

~ what it predicted ~

the idea outlived the app. text that parses itself, a note that knows a date is a date, was exactly what phones would do a few years later when calendars started reading your emails. stikkit was doing it in a browser in 2006 with no ai behind it, just careful pattern matching. it was early and small, and it was owned by the wrong buyer at the wrong moment.

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