TiddlySpace

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

~ the eulogy ~

TiddlyWiki came out in September 2004 and weighed 52 kilobytes. Jeremy Ruston had written a wiki that was one HTML file: you opened it in a browser and typed into it, and the whole notebook including the software that ran it was that single file sitting on your disk. You could put it on a floppy. You could mail it to yourself. There was no server anywhere in the picture, which was the entire idea and also the entire limitation.

BT bought Ruston's company in 2007 and turned the team into Osmosoft, its open-source group. What Osmosoft spent the following years on was the obvious missing half: TiddlyWeb, a server that could hold tiddlers properly, and then TiddlySpace, which packaged TiddlyWeb into something a person could actually sign up for. TiddlySpace went live in 2010. Its GitHub repository, opened on 15 March that year, describes itself as "a discoursive social model for tiddlers".

Everyone got a space. A space held your tiddlers, it could be public or private, and the interesting part was that one space could include another, so you could pull a block of somebody else's notes into your own wiki and keep them updated from the source. That is a strange and good idea, and it is the thing that no single HTML file could ever do.

~ the dossier ~

~ what a tiddler was ~

A tiddler is a note: the smallest piece of writing you would want to link to, which in TiddlyWiki doubles as the unit of storage. You write it once and show it in four places, and editing the original updates all four. The vocabulary sounds twee until you have used it, and then the words most software uses instead start to look too big.

This was never a mass-market product and nobody pretended otherwise. It was a tool for the kind of person who already knew what they wanted their notes to do and had decided that every commercial note app was wrong about it. That population is small and very hard to charge money to.

~ a telephone company's open source department ~

The sponsorship arrangement is the part worth stopping on. BT is a telecom. It had no product strategy that ran through free wiki hosting for a few thousand enthusiasts, and no plausible route to revenue from it. Osmosoft existed because BT wanted a credible open-source presence in the late 2000s, and TiddlySpace existed because Osmosoft wanted somewhere to put the thing it had built. For six years that was enough to keep a service running.

It is also exactly as durable as it sounds. Osmosoft people left, BT's appetite changed, and what remained was a hosting bill attached to no department's goals. The phrase used on the TiddlyWiki site is that the service was operated "by them and their successors", which is a polite way of saying it was handed down until there was nobody left to hand it to.

~ the three notices ~

The end came with more warning than most services give. A service update dated 12 January 2016 outlined a change of service and said the thing might be terminated within the year. On 26 August 2016 a second notice named the termination date. A third went up on 5 December, four days before the lights went out, with instructions for exporting a space pointing at a Google Group thread. The service stopped on 9 December 2016.

What died with it was mostly documentation. The TiddlyWiki community had moved its Community Documentation onto TiddlySpace in 2011, along with a separate developer documentation space, and both stopped being maintained when the host went away. tiddlyspace.com does not answer at all now.

The project itself was never in danger, and that is an unusual thing to be able to write about a dead service. The code had been on GitHub the whole time, so anyone who needed TiddlySpace could stand one up. TiddlyWiki is still maintained today and still ships as one file, which is 2004's idea unchanged. The server was the part that depended on a telephone company's goodwill. The file never did.

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