If you’re looking for a lightweight version of über note taking app Evernote, you might want to take a look at Life Note, a quirky, Twitter-esque web application developed by Cape Town-based web entrepreneur Ian Whiteley.
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Whiteley thinks of Life Note as “your brain online,” useful for storing information you may want to recall later. The service focuses on notes and tasks currently, and although it doesn’t have video and image upload functionality, it does support links to files stored on services such as Dropbox, Google Docs and SkyDrive.
Whiteley, who worked as product manager at Vodacom and Virgin Mobile, developed Life Note as a way to organise his thoughts, to do lists, and store interesting web articles or links online. He wanted one place that he could store and recall things that affected his daily life; a type of private knowledge base, or personal wiki.
“Twitter is for your fans, Facebook is for your friends, Life Note is just for you, your thoughts, and memories,” says Whitely. Squint your eyes a bit and Life Note starts looking like a social network for one.
“There are roughly three types of information sharing – public, personal and private. Public, and personal information is the cornerstone of social networks such and Twitter and Facebook, and online resources like Wikipedia. Private information, or personal wikis, are the third wave, and there is as yet no globally dominant player. That is the aim of Life Note,” he says.
How does it work? Inspired by the simplicity of Twitter, the notes can be thought of as tweets, which are then posted to, and grouped into pages. The platform has few rules, and allows users to create and rework their own structure — you can use hashtags to tag and search your posts.
Life Note is jQuery driven, can run on either a MySQL or NoSQL (MongoDB) implementation, and can be converted from one to the other automatically. Whitely also built in some intelligent SQL caching to ensure the service has room to grow.
What’s next for Life Note? For starters, a mobile friendly version and then an HTML5 mobile version as well as a developer API.
Life note was launched in August 2012 and is fully functional.
