Anonymise shared link
The id of the public thought plan makes it easy to index with abit - could we use a longer hash for this?
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Great points, Ferenc, thanks for commenting on this. I agree that longer hashes are much better for the use case you're describing. They would only not make sense if I wanted to make public thought plans something to discover, like public GitHub repos. In that case, hashes wouldn't be any worse than the current system with ids though.
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Ferenc Huszar commented
Hi Max,
This is a good example of something in the lower right corner of this graph :) http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-iCTqu4NnvUY/TsWYHikfcXI/AAAAAAAABck/8GzlJFYD8gc/s1600/matrix.png
Simply making the hash slightly longer is almost trivial (use UUID), yet it offers a reasonable level of private sharing functionality. Just make sure that the links are a long and so there is no way to systematically guess them and that they are not linked to from any public page so you can't crawl or index them.
For example I use TP to take notes which are not super-secret but I wouldn't want to make it 100% public and easily discoverable either. A longer hash or 'anyone with a link can see' functionality would allow me to share these notes with a trusted group of friends or colleagues, thereby implicitly spreading the word about ThoughtPlan before the complicated collaborative features are introduced.
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Hi Matt, thanks for posting this here.
This is definitely something I am considering, though I wonder if there is a more robust solution to your need.
In the long term, I could imagine public thought plans being something like public GitHub-repos or websites – something that you want people to read and discover (some people have already started using thought plans for blogging).
With the collaboration features that are planned, it will be possible to privately share thought plans. With that in place, you would simply invite the people who you want to have access.
Would that solve your problem or would you still want "easy private sharing" à la YouTube or Google Docs, where anybody with a link can view the thought plan, but the link is hard to guess?