The challenge, for me, with a service like this is security. To effectively search all of my personal information, this service will need creds to see all of my personal data.<p>That makes this service a tempting target for attackers.<p>From an initial read through the ToS and Privacy Policy I don't get the impression that they're going for a zero-knowledge model where data is processed on a client, so that means that their server-side apps will need to access/process my personal data as part of provision of the service.<p>Now I have no reason to doubt their committment to security, however I also don't have a great deal of information that would allow me to say "yep this looks like somewhere I want to trust with all my personal details"<p>One recommendation I would make to the team, is provide a bit more information about the steps you're taking to secure data processed on this service and also talk about the third party assurance that you're getting over those controls.<p>Also (personal peeve perhaps) but that bit on the front page about "industry standard encryption" isn't really useful. TLS won't save me if the web app. has SQL Injection :)
Hi guys,<p>Samiur from Journal here (<a href="https://usejournal.com" rel="nofollow">https://usejournal.com</a>). We started Journal with the goal of reducing information overload, and to see what would be possible if our knowledge - about people, projects, and ideas - was connected and easily accessible.<p>We think of what we're building as a new kind of journal. You write notes in it, save interesting links, and drop in important documents and messages for later. When you need something, ask Journal, and it helps you find it.<p>Eventually, we see it becoming a connected home to gather and share knowledge. You use the best services for issues, documents, messaging and more — and Journal ties them all together. We currently support integrations to Google (Gmail, Calendar, Drive) Slack, Dropbox (Files and Paper), Evernote, Pocket, and Atlassian (Jira and Confluence).<p>We're coming out of community beta today, and would love to hear your feedback!<p>If you'd like an early access code, please reply to this comment.
Reminds me of the original version of greplin, which became cue, which shutdown [1] after failure to acquire funding/achieve profit:<p>> Cue started out as Greplin, a search startup that indexed all of a person’s online social content off Facebook, Gmail and Twitter. Last year they pivoted and launched a personal assistant app called Cue, that turned a person’s e-mails, contacts and files into a daily agenda with key items like restaurant reservations and flight confirmations.<p>- [1] <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2013/10/02/cue-greplin/" rel="nofollow">https://techcrunch.com/2013/10/02/cue-greplin/</a>
I like the idea of this, but having so many integral services in one silo scares me a bit. Recent security disclosures by FB, etc. also make breaches feel more like an inevitability, not just a possibility.<p>How do you plan to hold yourselves accountable in the event of a massive data breach? Everyone seems to take security "very seriously" after they're forced to make a disclosure, but few companies make concrete assertions regarding security before a breach.
This is great, and it solves a problem of having all your public and semi-public information in one place, under one search interface.<p>But, of course, it effectively shares all this info with the search service, just a different search service.<p>I still hope that a similar but self-hosted tool emerges that would let you unite your public <i>and</i> private information, without having to share the latter with anyone. (A business model for such a tool could be support for corporate on-premises installations; not huge but at least not pure open-source contributors' goodwill.)
Sounds exactly like Atlas. If Atlas failed with $21M, I'm doubtful that journal will be able to do it with $1M.<p><a href="https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/18/atlas-informatics-calls-it-quits-after-less-than-a-year/" rel="nofollow">https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/18/atlas-informatics-calls-it...</a>
>Right now, advertising is not part of Journal’s revenue plans, but that could change.<p>That's unfortunate, but at least it's honest. Looks neat otherwise. I can get Google-like search to my personal life right now using, well, Google. Is an option for an individual subscription based service an option being considered?
> Well, Journal uses zero-knowledge encryption that ensures Journal employees can’t read or decrypt the information of the user.
This isn't an actual zero-knowledge proof, just regular encryption as the image below describes. Not sure why it is described as 'zero-knowledge' in the article.
Nice idea for a product and the security looks OK.<p>A good alternative would be a combined macOS and iOS open source project that used a Mac laptop as a base station and shared search indices, etc. over a local network or Bluetooth connection. Then a user would control everything.<p>Baring that, a commercial version of above, or the Journal service in the article sounds good and fills a need I have.
I might be missing it, but what "integration" does Journal actually have with services like gmail/gdrive? Does it index all of my e-mails/documents and make them searchable? Or is it more like evernote where you can basically just link to documents and show some metadata?<p>Edit: Also, any plans for an Android client? I only see ios as coming soon.
I'll hope you add a "share" extension when the iOS app exists (i.e. share to Journal -- for text, links, tweets, etc). Especially tweets (would be great if it can archive the tweet / tweet thread, so that you can save it and not risk losing it if it is deleted)!
Looking forward to seeing where this goes. This is one of the primary reasons I use Google Keep for everything, which at least gives me Google search for all of my notes, todos, saved articles, etc. Of course, there's still a lot of room for improvement.
I really enjoyed Memex, which seems similar. It indexed all the pages I visited, and it was so much nicer finding that information again.<p><a href="https://worldbrain.io/" rel="nofollow">https://worldbrain.io/</a>