For the past two years I've had the pleasure of being involved in creating something of substance and integrity and now I have the opportunity to start talking about it.  Two years ago, my brother Bill began talking about an idea for online collaborative writing that he called MillionsofMinds.  I was immediately captured by the idea.  I thought of the hypertext fiction movement and people working together on ever expanding stories.  I thought also of the fun of working with strangers on fiction and how computers can enable such a thing.  But as often happens, Bill and I could not halt our flow of ideas and MillionsofMinds started to refer to something different - a company whose products make the internet simpler and more humane in the sense of properly considering human intuition and constraints when designing programs.  In the meantime, Bill sourced our snazzy and talented web/design team, Hustlewood, and our other partner Ryan and we began collaborating.  After some months of deliberation Clay, of Hustlewood, came back to us with a simpler (or maybe not) proposal to just design a better writing system for computers.  In retrospect, I think this proposal meshed with the general direction of our overall thought, which was beginning to address the clumsiness of many common activities on computers.  So now we had a product, WriteMinds.

Most of our conceptual work occurred in one eight hour explosion a creative generation based on one and only one principle: "account for the core behaviors of writers."  The simplicity of WriteMinds, as you will all see soon, reflects the simple inspiration of its design.  It addresses a common predicament in a way that has not yet been adequately addressed on computers.  Written word is very old.  Make no mistake, computers and then the internet are only two adaptations of the mediums available to write.  They are unique adaptations in their own right, but as two mediums in a history of many, computers and the internet are just two more options.  The question for WriteMinds was how to preserve the principle elements of the writing process while seizing the potential of the computer and internet as unique mediums.