We’ve built something very cool. They’re called Fractal Conversations. Fractal Conversations help you and your closest collaborators think better, together. Using them has changed the way our team works: we are more effective, more connected, and less frustrated than ever before. As an added bonus we have dramatically fewer meetings, and they’re shorter.
We designed Fractal Conversations around the idea that conversations should have no bounds beyond what you are capable of thinking. Natural, spoken conversations branch and split constantly, loop back, repeat. They can go in any direction without constraint. We wanted a written conversation tool with those same capabilities, but with the additional structure and permanence that software can offer.
As we prepare to launch Fractal Conversations, we’re looking for a few brave souls to try it out and give feedback. You will be our pioneers.
To pioneer Fractal Conversations, please do the following:
- Find at least one other person (or a group) who wants to use it with you.
- Send an email to try-conversations@workflowy.com
- In the email, CC the other people who’ll use it with you
- Tell us who you all are (briefly)
- Tell us what you want to use it for (briefly)
In the next few weeks, we will start turning on Fractal Conversations for select groups, and asking for targeted feedback. We hope you’ll join us, and if you do, we hope it will transform your work in the same way it has ours.
Important Notes:
1. Fractal Conversations are built into Workflowy. You can have them on any content inside a shared node. They are not a new product.
2. This post is intentionally mysterious. We don’t want pioneers to know anything concrete about it before trying it, because we want to also test how we introduce it to people. The actual product isn’t some futuristic thing. It’s just a better UI for complex conversations. If you aren’t interested in trying something you know nothing about, for fun, this isn’t for you.
Hi. Are fractal comments turned on for everyone now? I’m not seeing them. Thanks.
Hey Amy, they’re currently only on for users that have requested to try them out.
How about now? Can find it in your knowledge base but not use (in desktop app).
amaizing
Would love to betatest for the plexus.earth team.
Looking for a partner.
I am doing some research on Normal Pressure Hydrocephalus (NPH), MOTOR AND SENSORY AXONAL NEUROPATHY and then possibly Parkinson’s for my family.
Looking for a partner!
Background: I’m a Corporate Trainer for Ms Excel and I build dashboards and tracking systems for organizations. Over the past decade of searching, I have settled on Workflowy for it’s simplicity and flexibility. Would love to contribute to making every new feature as simple and useful as possible withing this framework!
Just found one. I am a Knowledge Manager exploring Workflowy for collaboration, education, and personal knowledge management. How can we organize that?
Hi, I have done work on workflow, document, knowledge management, auto classification text similarity, search, mindmaps, etc and would love to collaborate with you. 🤗
this sounds amazing please give it
I mandlebrot my own conversations. No, I don’t. Yes, I am. Stop contradicting me. I didn’t say anything. Yes, you did. Oh tell me what… why would I do that…
I would love to test this but sadly no work partner to try it. :(. Anyone who wants to rando partner, ping me here.
https://workflowy.com/s/fractal-conversatio/bZqhRTlb9o0HNill
I’m mostly a longtime paid personal user who uses WF somewhat for professional items.
Jim, I would love to join – pls see your post…
Same here
Let’s go! I love a good mystery, particularly when it involves the word fractal! Looking forward to seeing what that mind of Jesse’s and the team have come up with!
ooh this looks interesting, going to ask my partners if they’d like to try that out
Espero que sean muchos los que se sumen, aunque – lamentablemente – no podré participar porque no hablo ni escribo en inglés. Sólo español.
La idea de un lanzamiento de prueba previa me parece interesante y apropiada `para quienes son usuarios activos de Workflowy y a ellos les pido el mejor de sus esfuerzos para que cuando sea abierta a todos los usuarios venga con una importante dósis de retroalimentación y energía de los usuarios de WF
Abrazos y mis mejores deseos
Hola, Carlos:
Si quieres participar, y el inglés es un impedimento, estoy dispuesto a ello.
En un principio no pensaba hacerlo, pero ultimamente me ha picado la curiosidad.
Hi, Carlos:
If you want to participate, and English is an impediment, I am willing to do it. At first I wasn’t planning to do it, but lately I’ve been curious.
I am curious about this feature and the cryptic message. I understand some people’s frustrations, but honestly Workflowy has excellent credibility for me these days. It is the best software tool I have found in years. Community and customer service still feels personal and high-quality. They add features strategically but keep the spririt of the original, no clutter UI. I don’t know anyone else who uses workflowy so I’ll wait till the release to try Fractal Conversations, but yea overall just a note of encouragement to the workflowy team and community. And yea, the Dates release crushes. Next I would like some a way to index and get more metrics on my tags (frequency, occurences, locations) stuff like that more along the lines of a 3D constellation view like Obsidian or just a spreadsheet list of tags, occurences, dates, co-occurences with other tags.
also, would be nice to manually get those daily workflowy reports.
But honestly, less is more and I’d rather keep the UI uncluttered. so few other tools offer that simplicity, elegance and respect for the workflower. Workflowy is a breath of fresh air. keep it up!
“only drug dealers and software companies call their customers “users” – Edward Tufte
I share your sentiment…W/F is the only tool I’ve found that puts me in charge of how I want to use the tool, with few if any limits. The simplicity IS the key, and the rich features allow me to make it as complex as I need it to be. Its been a godsend to organize my thinking the way that makes sense to ME. And I use it to help all aspects of my life, not just what I want to “get done”. T R U L Y marvelous, kudos to the Team at W/F!
I’m piping up because theres a few comments that make me raise an eye brow. I love the mystique and method going on here and I’ll be emailing you!
Thanks! Look forward to working with you 🤝
The title of this blog post literally says that it is “new”. At the bottom of the post it says that it is “not a new product”.
what that means is that it is a new feature. It is not a new product. It is built into WorkFlowy as a new feature and you don’t have to buy another (new) product.
Thanks Chuck!
a new… thing? version updates are new as well, but not new products
SWEET! I think Workflowy can help facilitate multi-threaded meetings. Often a person sets an agenda and they talk about only a few aspects of the topic, where a threaded approach can introduce other facets of a topic that weren’t initially scheduled to be discussed and discourse via typing can be less intimidating for the quiet yet brilliant ideas that wouldn’t have otherwise been shared. Eventually, I want to equalize a particular Planning Committee by having some non-workflowy users join a meeting from their laptops, but then click a WF shared link to the meeting agenda where they can add topic threads and comment on them all so we can hear everyone’s point of view and ideas…instead of the loud few who dominate the meeting.
Yaz. That’s one of the big reasons this is better than meetings in some situations. Or rather, a powerful complement to meetings. It lets the quiet smarties be heard. Their ideas then end up being raised in meetings later, because they’re in people’s minds already.
That should be at the top of this article
Honestly, I love Workflowy but this is just not good. Developers should have come up with a more intuitive way to test this. Even a basic video intro would do wonders to explain what this is.
You know nothing about the feature, their process, or the feedback they are seeking. How are you in a position to criticize what they’re doing?
You’re right, we don’t. Maybe the post should explain those things?
Agreed. I’m not going to reach out to a colleague to say ‘hey let’s try this new feature’, email workflowy about it with some personal details, etc, when I have zero idea about what it does
I’m surprised I even bothered to comment! Maybe feeling generous after that awesome dates update
Sorry for frustrating you. Added some explanation.
Dates update did crush.
Thanks for the feedback. I added an explanation at the bottom of the post.
What if I would like to see and test it and hasn’t anyone to collaborate with?
🙁
I guess this is me, too. Maybe we’ll have to wait until developers unveil more of it…
well… its a chat feature…? You can only test a conversation feature by having conversations with others?
We’ll be sharing more of it super soon, with demos and whatnot. Part of what we’re going to try to learn with our pioneers is how to effectively show the product to people.
I like the concept of ‘super soon’!
I’d love to help but don’t have an immediate team/partner (I’m sure I’m not the first to say this.). Let me know if I can be useful. Love this product and all the innovations .
Me too! If my brain works this way… and frequently has internal conversations that loop and split and branch… can I count as a fractal conversationalist myself? 🙂