Saq: And the formatters and Wikifier are the part of the TiddlyWiki core that determine how the TiddlyWiki text is processed and presented.
Jeremy: Right. They implement the TiddlyWiki format text, so all the kind of conventions about camel case meaning a link and so on come out of the formatters. And they’re pluggable so that we can plug in a media Wiki formatter, for instance, or a share point Wiki formatters to make it display Wiki text that came from somewhere else.
Saq: So as the creator of TiddlyWiki, a lot of us are very curious as to how you use it yourself.
Jeremy: Yeah, so, I largely use it to demonstrate TiddlyWiki to people. <laughs> The main work I do with TiddlyWiki is updating TiddlyWiki.com, and so it’s a kind of self-serving, recursive thing. Occasionally I set it up for one-off things, but I don’t use it in a long-term way, I’m afraid. Isn’t this awful but <holds up notebook> I’m a pencil-and-paper man. Sorry. <grins>
Saq: So were you ever tempted to turn TiddlyWiki into a proprietary product?
Jeremy: Yes, very tempted. Early on, it’s the dream that we all share; you come up with some fantastic idea because we’re all technologists and we all like inventing things, you go to VC’s and they say ‘yes, that’s a great idea!’ and they give you the money and you start your business. And I started to say this earlier; it became clear very early on that TiddlyWiki is completely the wrong shape for conventional VC’s so there’s no obvious choke point. And in fact, these are the very advanced uses of TiddlyWiki, that it’s impossible for me to count the number of users of TiddlyWiki. I don’t even know when people have downloaded it, because from the point of view of my server, there’s no difference between downloading TiddlyWiki and just viewing it in a browser. So it’s a completely uncountable number, and yet the first question a VC would ask is ‘how many users have you got?’ And so I’d explain why I couldn’t know that, and they would immediately start trying to explore technical ways that you could force that – making TiddlyWiki phone home and stuff. And the more you talk about it, the more you realise that that would actually deflect any .. well, I mean, a lot of users of TiddlyWiki would be repelled by such a feature.
So I spent a lot of time in pubs talking to people, the entrepreneurs who do that kind of thing, trying to figure out a path. I eventually concluded that it wasn’t going to work, and started to think in my head of TiddlyWiki as a kind of free loss leader for something else that I would need to do. There was a time in the middle of TiddlyWiki when I was looking around for something else, using TiddlyWiki as a stepping stone to something else. And again, I was too close to it, and didn’t realise that TiddlyWiki was the point. And now I realise that one of the fantastic things about TiddlyWiki is that people can use it freely, knowing that its commercial entanglements are completely open because of the IPR and UnaMesa, but its nature means that you can never have the rug pulled out from under you. So when we use GMail, or any online service, we’re completely at the mercy of the people operating that service. And that’s fine, most of the time, but there are situations and there are people for whom that matters. You can pretty quickly see that that’s the case with TiddlyWiki, because I can give you a TiddlyWiki on a USB stick. You know where it is, you know who else can see it, so it’s sort of transparent, whereas a lot of online services are around assembling a virtual desktop in the sky or something, where you have no control over the underlying infrastructure.
Saq: With such a large community, and perhaps a passionate one, was there ever a sense of loyalty – that you didn’t want to turn TiddlyWiki into a proprietary product.
Jeremy: Yes. I got very positive feedback early on, but as soon as the community came into existence, I mean, you can immediately see that I can’t claim ownership or control or anything like that of the community, and it’s a glorious thing to have grown up around me. So I would treat it as – and I think this is someone else’s metaphor – but a flock of useful birds on your lawn. You’re lucky to have them on your lawn, but you know that if you made a loud noise, you know that you might scare them away, and then someone else might move in next door with better grass. And so I feel that I want to do everything I can to get the most out of the community. I mean, even that sounds the wrong way around, but fundamentally, to recognise that the community is a spontaneous thing that happened independently of me. I have a role in the community, but I see it as an independent thing.