Last Tuesday I sent my mate James a link to a restaurant review. On Wednesday I sent my wife an article about Japanese convenience stores. On Thursday I sent three different people the same podcast episode about retail design, each with a slightly different message explaining why I thought they specifically would care. On Friday I sent a group chat a link to a font I'd found that I thought was beautiful, and nobody replied, which is fine because I wasn't really expecting a reply. I was expecting the link to sit there, a small offering, until someone clicked it and felt something.
I am the person who sends you things. Every friend group has one. The person whose name appears on your phone attached to links you didn't ask for but are often glad you received. The person who reads something at 7am and immediately thinks of three people who need to see it. The person who keeps a mental map of everyone's interests and constantly matches articles to people like a human recommendation engine running on hot chocolate and insomnia. If this sounds exhausting, it is. If this sounds like it might be annoying, it sometimes is that too. But it's not a choice. It's a compulsion. It's the way my brain is wired, and it took me until about thirty-five to realise it was actually a skill.
The impulse
The impulse goes like this. I'm reading something - an article, a review, a thread, a random page I've ended up on through five links of increasingly unlikely provenance - and I hit a sentence or an idea or a detail that lights up a specific person in my brain. Not a vague "oh someone might like this." A specific person. Their face, their interests, the conversation we had two weeks ago where they mentioned that exact thing. The connection between the content and the person is instantaneous and physical, almost like a twitch. And if I don't send the link within about thirty seconds, the urge builds until it becomes uncomfortable, like an itch I can't reach.
I know this makes me sound unhinged. I promise it's gentler than it sounds. The sending itself is quick - copy link, open chat, paste, add a two-word note like "thought of you" or "this is so good" or sometimes just the link, naked, context-free, a small gift with no wrapping paper. The recipient can ignore it. Many do. The link sits in the chat like a book left on someone's doorstep. They'll get to it or they won't. The act of sending is the point. The matching of thing to person is where the satisfaction lives.
My wife has developed a tolerance for this. Her phone is a steady stream of links from me interspersed with the logistical messages of family life. "Can you pick up milk" followed by a link to a profile of a Japanese ceramicist. "Kid needs collecting at 3:30" followed by a link to an article about why certain restaurants feel better than others. She reads maybe a quarter of them. She tells me this honestly and without malice. I send them anyway. The sending isn't about the reading. The sending is about the noticing.
The algorithm inside my head
When people talk about algorithms, they mean the code that decides what you see on social media. The feed. The for-you page. The recommended section. These algorithms are built by engineers who have never met you, using data points that approximate your interests without understanding them. They know you clicked on a video about cooking, so they show you more cooking videos. They know you paused on a post about trainers, so they serve you trainer ads for six weeks. The algorithm is good at patterns but terrible at nuance. It can't tell the difference between a passing glance and a genuine passion.
I can. The algorithm in my head - the one that matches content to people - runs on a completely different kind of data. Not clicks and dwell time. Conversations. Tone of voice. The thing someone mentioned once at a dinner that they clearly cared about more than they let on. The fact that my friend Tom is going through something at work and might benefit from an article about career transitions, but only if I frame it casually, without making it about him. The fact that my sister likes food writing but only the kind that's funny, not the kind that's pretentious. This is information that no algorithm can access. It requires knowing people. Actually knowing them, over years, across contexts, with the accumulated understanding that only real relationships provide.
This is what I built Trove to do. Trove is a taste engine - a product that maps your interests over time and helps you understand your own patterns. It started because I wanted to automate the thing I do naturally: the matching, the noticing, the connecting of content to people based on deep understanding rather than shallow data. I haven't fully automated it because the human part is the valuable part. But Trove is the closest I've come to externalising the algorithm that's been running in my head since I started sending links to people in the early days of the internet.
The Delicious days
There was a time when the internet was built for people like me. The mid-2000s. Delicious, the bookmarking service that let you save and tag and share links. Peak-era Twitter, when the timeline was chronological and the currency was the link, not the take. Tumblr, where curation was the content. Google Reader, where RSS feeds let you subscribe to the world's output and sort through it like a morning newspaper you'd designed yourself. These tools understood that some people's primary relationship with the internet is not creation but curation. Not making things but finding things and routing them to the right people.
Those tools are mostly gone now. Delicious is dead. Google Reader is dead. Twitter became something else entirely. The internet moved from curation to creation, from sharing to performing, from "look what I found" to "look at me." And the people who were wired for curation - the senders, the connectors, the ones who found joy in the matching rather than the making - lost their natural habitat.
CultureTerminal is partly a response to that loss. So is Trove. So is, in a way, everything I build. The products are different on the surface - a culture aggregator, a taste engine, a Japanese restaurant guide - but underneath they're all the same impulse, scaled up. They're all me, standing in the group chat, saying: "you need to see this." Except now the group chat is a URL and the audience is anyone who cares about the same things I care about. The compulsion hasn't changed. The medium has.
I'll keep sending links. I'll keep being the person whose name appears on your phone attached to something you didn't know you needed. It's not a strategy. It's not a brand. It's a wiring. And the best thing I ever did was stop apologising for it and start building products that do the same thing at scale. The person who sends you things, it turns out, was a product builder the whole time. He just didn't have the tools yet.
