Hey everyone 😸 My name is Ryan, and I'm excited to share a project I've been working on called Recall. Recall is a Chrome extension that allows you drop comments onto any website and tag others to join the discussion. Think of it as a social post-it note that you can leave anywhere on the internet. I've been fascinated by the idea of a commenting layer on top of the internet. Today, when you want to discuss something you find online, you have two options - you can post to social media, where you have little control over the resulting discussion, or you can post privately in a group chat, where the discussion quickly gets buried. On top of that, many online publications have disabled comment sections on their articles, which used to be the most interesting place to understand diverse perspectives. Recall makes it easy to start meaningful conversations with whoever you choose right in the margins or any webpage. This has been a night and weekend project, and is very much a v1! For now, Recall relies on your Google contacts to let you tag others in your notes (you can also share a link to your note with anyone). I can imagine Recall eventually working with your other social graphs to enable you to tag your Twitter/X followers or newsletter subscribers, for example. Please give Recall a try and post your candid feedback.

@rrhoover Thanks! It's a great question. I think there are a few factors that make this hard to nail. First is the limitation of the browser. If you want to create a place for conversation that truly operates across all of the spaces on the internet, you need to go to the browser level. Inherent in that are just a ton of constraints on how and what you can build. FWIW, I think Arc is in a great position to make the experience of cohabitating and conversing on the internet more exciting, because they own the browser! Second is the use case - I've seen a lot of note taking extensions that have a collaboration component, but they are productivity oriented rather than socially oriented. So they stay relatively niche. I also haven't seen these tools make it simple to leverage an existing social graph, which in 2024 feels pretty important given how mature these graphs have become. Ultimately, we all concurrently spend a ton of time on this thing called the internet, but the experience of being there can still feel very isolating and single player. I hope to see more attempts to create a sense of collective presence on the web - be that with Recall or anything else :)

Ryan Cooley

Recall

Maker

📌