Preserving magic with Akord notes

We've just deployed a new feature I’m particularly excited about: Akord Notes.

With Akord Notes, you can create beautifully styled notes directly in the secure, end-to-end encrypted context of Akord.

Your note is stored on Arweave, living permanently on the blockchain. It is accessible only by you and whoever you decide to share it with in your vault.

We’ve been talking about Akord Notes on and off for quite a while now. A recent article in the Guardian, Why did I send emails to my 2-year-old daughter?, was some particularly inspiring validation for the feature.

In the article, the author talks about her quest to preserve all the precious memories of raising her child:

I could completely empathise with the author’s objective. But storing precious data on an email thread is clearly not a good long-term option. What if you change email and your old account gets deleted? What if your email address gets hacked and you can’t get access or it needs to be closed down? What if you were to die suddenly, how would that email thread be accessed? What if the email provider no longer exists in 10 years? It wasn’t too long ago everyone had AOL and MSN Hotmail accounts, and gmail didn’t even exist.

I used to have a Dropbox Paper entitled, Esme’s Sayings, which listed all the funny things my daughter would periodically come out with. It included sayings such as, “My little tummy says he likes it!” And, "Papa likes hotty days, Esme likes sunny days."

Needless to say, I recreated the file as an Akord Note and I’ve deleted the Dropbox Paper.

Now my note is in a secure context, and stored permanently for my daughter to look back on when she’s older (and maybe one day share with her own children). Because of this, I’m positive I will contribute to it more; confident that it won’t ever be lost I’m inspired to devote more effort to it.

I’m also positive I will make other types of notes in this vein, like writing out some of the made-up bedtime stories I tell my daughter. I’ve begun building quite the epic saga around the fictional adventures of Flimbimbam the Flamingo of Fontainebleau Forest.

By storing them on Akord Notes I can capture the magic of these precious moments from my daughter’s childhood, providing our family with a secure and simple way to preserve them for generations.

There’s something about the temporary nature of cloud-based services that discourages you from making the effort to record these types of things: what’s the point when I assume at some point I will lose it?

Asides from capturing these sentimental memories in a note form, we already know from our recent product survey that people are using Akord to store sensitive data such as passwords, backup phrases, and other business and legal related notes.

Now these highly sensitive notes can be made directly within Akord, removing the need to rely on any other service or product to create, store or transfer these notes over to Akord. This eliminates complexity as well as removing potential points of failure or attack vectors where data can be lost, leaked or hacked.

I also want to highlight that Akord Notes is intended to be super simple.

We’re not trying to compete with all the functionality of the big document creation tools out there. Partly because most of the features in those tools are never really used, or needed, anyway. Having said that, this is just version 1 and we do plan to develop Akord Notes further.

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We believe in true community and collaboration with the people using our product. If you have feedback on Akord Notes, or any other part of Akord, the best place to reach us is by becoming part of the community on Discord.