Joshua Bergen is a very productive person. His secret is the workspace app Notion. Bergen, a product manager living in Vancouver, uses it to plan trips abroad, with notes and timelines. He uses it to curate lists of the movies and TV shows he’s watched, and records what he thought of them. It’s also a handy way to keep tabs on his 3D-printing projects, map snowboarding runs, and quickly update his cute list of the funny things his kid has said.
Bergen is one of a growing number of people using Notion, software intended for work, to organize their personal lives. They’re using it in a myriad of different ways, from tracking their meditation habits and weekly schedules to logging their water intake and sharing grocery lists.
So why has a platform built to accommodate “better, faster work” struck such a chord when there are countless other planning apps out there? Read the full story.
—Rhiannon Williams
The inside story of New York City’s 34-year-old social network, ECHO
When ECHO was founded, the World Wide Web was still being invented, and browsers weren’t a thing. Its acronym stands for “East Coast Hang Out,” because its founder Stacy Horn wanted to create a digital space that was social and unequivocally New York.
What she ended up making was a hotbed of culturally minded early internet enthusiasts—a social network before there was a term for that. ECHO was a blueprint for the larger-scale social networks that we see today, and it serves as a reminder that behind all networks are people, with a lot of words to exchange. Read the full story.