In 2007, Aaron Swartz and I built a small tool called Jottit. The idea was simple: make it as easy as possible to put a page on the web. You typed something, clicked a button, and got a page on a secret URL. You didn't need to create an account first. If you wanted to keep it, you claimed it with your email and put it on a subdomain.
Aaron had this phrase that stuck with me. He wanted the cognitive load to be so tiny that you just use it without even thinking about whether you should.
That was the web back then. It was small and personal and a little weird. People made pages because they had something to say, not because they were building an audience. The tools were simple because the ambitions were simple: put something out there, see what happens.
I was finishing my CS degree at the time and spent every free hour working on Jottit. I wanted to make it perfect. I would write code or improve the design and send it over to Aaron and he'd critique it down to the smallest detail. Eventually we met up in Somerville, MA in September 2007 and spent two weeks getting it ready for launch.
We launched and it clicked. People got it immediately. And then only a few months later my dad got diagnosed with cancer and died just a few weeks after that. I didn't want to work on Jottit again. I didn't want to do any programming again.
Then Aaron died in 2013.
I would think back on Aaron and those six months, creating Jottit together. I remembered the joy and the excitement of that time. But I never went back to it. It felt too heavy. And eventually the original Jottit went offline.
I spent the next fifteen years working as a developer, raising four kids with my wife, building other people's products.
Then last year something shifted. I kept seeing people express a longing for the old web. Before social media turned every thought into content and every person into a brand. Before the timeline replaced blogs. I felt it too. I started working on an open-source microblogging tool inspired by Jottit, but at some point I thought: why don't I just build Jottit instead?
I emailed Paul Graham about funding it and to my surprise he said yes. I quit my job.
Aaron believed the web should be easy enough that anyone could participate. Not just people who know how to code or who can afford a platform's cut. That idea hasn't aged. If anything it matters more now, when most people's only option for putting words online is to hand them to a corporation.
Jottit is back at jottit.org. Same idea, same name, rebuilt from scratch. You type, you publish, you have a page. No tracking, no followers, no algorithms.
It's a small project, not a startup. I just wanted it to exist again.
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