Saq: So you mentioned having less to do, so I imagine in the beginning there must have been a lot of late nights. How did the missus react to being told that the reason you were up at 5 in the morning still was because you were working on something called TiddlyWiki?
Jeremy: Yes, well early on I wouldn’t necessarily tell people it was called TiddlyWiki, because yes, that joke did stop being funny quite soon afterwards. <laughs> But although I was spending a lot of time on it, I always spend a lot of time on computers, so I didn’t really realise that it was taking over my life until it already had, kind of thing. And then it was too late. <laughs>
Saq: With it being so demanding on your time and everything, did you ever come close to abandoning the project?
Jeremy: I never felt like abandoning it in the sense of abandoning the technology of TiddlyWiki, but there were definitely times when I might’ve had to take a job, and I’m naturally a fairly optimistic and reckless man so I managed to kinda ignore the financial pressures for a long time, and I had some help. But yeah, there were lots of times when I might’ve had to take a programming job or something just to keep up on the mortgage.
Saq: You mentioned having some help to keep things going; would you like to tell us a bit about that?
Jeremy: One of the most decisive contributions to TiddlyWiki is a man called Greg Wolf at Ricoh Innovations, which is Ricoh’s research division in Silicon Valley. And Greg called me out of the blue in November, 2005, so TiddlyWiki was about a year old, and by that time, GTDTiddlyWiki was quite well established, and there was a pretty strong community. And Greg emailed me out of the blue and said, ‘we’re loving TiddlyWiki at Ricoh, we’re using it in a couple projects, would you consider accepting money for what you’re doing?’ And I fell of my chair with amazement.
And at first, I didn’t really understand their motivations, but it turns out that Greg’s a man who has a very deep understanding of community projects, and this comes partly from the social entrepreneurship which is quite well established in California. He saw echoes in the nature of TiddlyWiki of the kinds of structures he feels are effective ways of solving certain kinds of social problems. He’d made an association that hadn’t really been explicit to me, realized that TiddlyWiki’s independence was a key part of that – the fact that TiddlyWiki wasn’t part of, y’know, Yahoo’s product strategy or something, and I mean no disrespect to Yahoo, it just would’ve made it less appropriate for those kinds of projects. So what Greg managed to do was to pay me just enough money to make a huge difference. I mean, I essentially had no money coming in, and was living off that, and he managed to get some money in to me, but also he helped me work on the community as a whole, to find ways not just to help Jeremy stay alive so I didn’t have to go and get a job, but also helping to foster the community and providing some of the resources that we needed. So for instance, TiddlyWiki.org, the servers and everything, and the management of those servers, that was all an initiative started by Greg.
The work with Greg culminated in the creation of UnaMesa, which is the non-profit foundation we set up to own the TiddlyWiki IPR.
Saq: Alright, perhaps you’d like to tell us about some of the big break-throughs you’ve had. I mean, you mentioned saving as one of them and implementing the saving features in TiddlyWiki; what else do you think is worth mentioning in that same breath?
Jeremy: The UI. And something that I think has turned out to be really cool about TiddlyWiki is that everything is a Tiddler. So I see this with a lot of products.. I think a good strong product has a small number of new concepts that you have to learn, that are very simple, and that allow themselves to be recombined in lots of ways. The strongest products, those concepts that you have to learn are sometimes embarrassingly simple, much simpler than you think. So Twitter would be a great example to me of something that, from the perspective of us lot, building IT stuff, it’s got such a small set of features, that it seems like it’s .. I heard a lot of IT people making this point before Twitter got popular, that it’s too trivial. And similarly, the data model in TiddlyWiki – the idea that having a name and a chunk of text, referred to as a Tiddler, which is like the simplest possible structure that you can think of, but by rigorously applying that, and making everything in the TiddlyWiki universe a Tiddler, you get this fantastic commonality, that once you know how to edit the main menu, you know how to edit the side bar, and you apply that simple concept to all over the place to achieve a number of things.
So at that level, I hope and I’m sort of proud that TiddlyWiki’s kinda coherent and tasteful. Those kind of very soft adjectives. Then in the kind of techy stuff, yeah, there’s cool stuff we do with stylesheets and templates that I’ve not seen done elsewhere. The saving stuff is neat, and yeah, the formatters and the Wikifier are obviously a neat piece of work because that makes pluggable in a pretty efficient way, something that’s pretty intricate and normally rather tightly coupled.