Use Cases

Each of these is a concrete usage pattern that appeared in the #explainingideaflow corpus. Not theoretical; someone actually did the thing or the thing was demoed.

Personal layer

Conversation notes → knowledge base

"I was just helping a guy at a Founder meetup import all of his conversation notes from Sublime Text into old IdeaFlow. And I realize that there's really no tool where you can take conversation notes naturally on one side, and it builds a knowledge base for you on the other side that's awesome." #mewUseCase #explainingIdeaflow

Contacts auto-populated from conversations

Jacob demo, 2024-03-28:

"Contacts + populating by taking notes on conversations." (Draft 1 · Clean version)

Meeting notes, well-organized for the first time

Jacob + Tejas, 2025-10-21:

"The first well-organized meeting notes that were ever taken in human history, because there was never a structure that could properly well-organize them before. Including connections added and citing exactly where relations were created from."

Quick capture, quick sort (mobile UX)

Jacob, 2024:

"Quick capture, quick sort … mock jack's UX idea for folders on mobile (can do with tags)."

Personal KG × world KG for fundraising (Laurel Touby, 2024)

"If you're fundraising for your company, it could intelligently suggest the top 3 people already in your network to reach out to — based on your own knowledge base × the world knowledge graph."

Team layer

Slack-bot idea harvester

"Our Slack bot listens to conversations and builds a database of ideas from across the company, and suggests connections to others who have related ideas. It also can harvest the unstructured Slack information as a knowledge base."

CEO dashboard / collective brain for a company

"We could call our app the ultimate CEO dashboard — and collective brain for a company."

Innovation management

Jacob, 2025 demo:

"For an investor who specializes in innovation management … Exploring the Innovation Management Solution: Mapping Ideas and Connections." #InnovationManagement #demovideo #usecase + auto-populate from meeting notes + Slack bot + personal notes app. Internal "mini-Twitter" surfaces relevant context.

Debate outlines as civic infrastructure

Jacob, 2024-12:

"Time sensitive use of Mew to make a debate outline! Let's track opposing points like in here." #explainingIdeaflow #debateoutlines

Collective layer

Public curated lists

"Creating a place where we curate public lists of information that are beneficial to the world."

Alliance graph across friends' networks

"Export all of your networks like LinkedIn data, text contacts and email, and search it all from one place. Also get your friends to do the same and form an alliance whereby you can easily query the best intro path to anyone."

Open Supply Chains

"Starting the open source movement for knowledge graphs, e.g. Open Supply Chains."

Water-contamination resources (community mutual aid)

October 2024 — Eden and others curating crisis-resource lists for hurricane-flooded Asheville, NC, using Mew as the data layer. Referenced in the same #explainingIdeaflow Slack window.

Adjacencies

Backend of every website

Jacob, 2025:

"Some vision for mew as a centralized organized database that hosts the backend of every website."

Hypergraph store for LLMs

Jacob, 2025-10 #paperidea:

"It helps language models … do this equipping them with a hypergraph store."

Memex / why-now

Jacob, 2025-06 #memex #ai:

"This obscure 80-year-old machine might be the key to unlocking the full potential of AI today." #cool #explainingideaflow

Rule of inclusion

A use case belongs here if (a) it was actually demoed or implemented somewhere in the corpus (Loom video, screenshot, prototype), or (b) Jacob or a co-worker wrote it with a concrete setup, not just as abstract ambition. Pure ambition lives in open-questions or in framings.