This reminds me of Apple's OpenDoc. It will probably suffer the same fate. OpenDoc had some adopters, then Apple abruptly dropped it, and those companies were screwed royally. The amount of code that is underneath this very fancy product - which is way beyond what Apple's product tried to do - must be stupendous. And therein lies the problem, anything built on top of it has millions of lines in a layer below. I would be very curious to know how big the team is behind this project.

This sounds like a good idea. I'll be taking a closer look once it's open-sourced.

OpenDoc? Oh hell! They mention Google Wave too. With these pluggable component systems, it seems that you ultimately want more than you have and less than you would think. Makes one wonder whether there's a systematic reason why component systems aren't so much a thing. Consider also browser and text editor plugins.

Reminds me of OLE (Object Linking And Embedding). That was the promise of the tech IIRC.

@Edward de Jong / Beads Project It mentions a team of about 140 employees working for 18 months to get it to where it is.

This seems very similar to Notion to me, to the point where I’d consider it a knockoff. I’d love to hear from anyone people who disagrees. E.g., Fluid Components seem analogous to Notion's Blocks? (I wish I could provide a good hyperlink to describe Notion's Blocks here, how Notion gets away with not having easily accessible documentation for its most basic concepts is bewildering to me 🤷‍♂️).

I generally like the idea of moving away from silo-ed apps to a more open model remixable objects, which is what I like about the motivation here. Of course instead of 'word silo' and 'excel silo' we now may have a slightly bigger 'fluid' silo, but still. I'm bothered that typical links (e.g. into a google doc) jump into a completely different context rather than pulling in the relevant slice of information into the current context. Now it's hard to say in practice how fluid this will feel. I'm not that familiar with Notion blocks, but this idea has been around (Chris mentioned OLE).

Here's an example of a Notion Block for embedding a diagram (from Whimsical) into a document https://mobile.twitter.com/NotionHQ/status/1229907609970331648

No question that it is in Microsoft's DNA to copy an existing product, and go one step further, and crush them (or fail miserably). Some of MS's products are copies of things now forgotten because they were so roundly beaten (can you remember Borland Quattro, Lotus 1-2-3, or WordPerfect or WordStar?). I can only think of one invention, Hololens, to emerge from MS's huge research division. They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, so Notion must be pretty good. 140 people for 2 years is 70 million in R&D, which is comparable to one of the larger startup efforts in SV.

Yeah, it's huge validation for Notion's approach (also excellent side-point about the sheer scale of the resources it took to create Notion). I don't particularly like Notion as a solution for me personally, because I'm not a Cloud guy (I prefer to own my data). But my whole career I've struggled with a problem: How do you make a document for others to read, that contains embedded media that was made in other programs, and then share that document in a manner where others can then edit both the document, and the embedded media? And when I saw that little movie of embedding a Whimsical diagram into a Notion document, I was like "that's it, that's the solution".

Side note: Notion recently went free for personal use. Just before that happened, I believe Roam Research announced they would be going non-free.

Yeah, that's my understanding too, everything is a block in Notion, including text.

Use case? - Am guessing this is more than Notion blocks/OLE, .. the whole pitch is more "separate apps" that link together on the web. Would be interesting to understand the rules for the bolts. The bolts that link the apps together. Things like edit rights, events, server side code.

The Whimsical+Notion example I linked to above is separate apps linked together? Is there something special I'm missing about Fluid's approach?