Last Tuesday, around half ten at night, I found a link. I don't even remember how I got there. Probably three or four clicks deep into some thread, following a trail that started with something about Japanese convenience stores and ended up at a small design studio in Porto that had rebuilt their entire website as a single scrolling timeline of their work. No navigation. No about page. No contact form tucked into a hamburger menu. Just the work, chronological, top to bottom. Brutal and beautiful.
Within about ninety seconds I had sent it to seven people. Not a group chat. Seven individual messages. My mate Dan who runs a studio. My old creative director. A friend who just started freelancing. My wife, who was sat in the next room. A designer I used to work with who moved to Amsterdam. A colleague from an agency three jobs ago. And my brother, who has absolutely nothing to do with design but would just get it.
Seven people. Seven slightly different messages. Each one calibrated, without thinking about it, to the specific reason that person needed to see this thing.
The compulsion
This is a thing I do. I have always done it. Before I had any language for it, before "curator" became a word people put in their Instagram bios, before anyone was building taste engines or recommendation algorithms, I was the bloke who sent you the link. The restaurant. The album. The article. The thing you didn't know you needed to see but absolutely did.
I used to think this was just being enthusiastic. Maybe a bit annoying. The friend who can't stop recommending things. But the older I get, the more I realise it's something else entirely. It's pattern recognition. When I see that design studio website, I'm not just seeing a nice website. I'm seeing the solution to a problem Dan mentioned three weeks ago. I'm seeing the reference my old CD would use in her next pitch. I'm seeing the thing that will make my brother ring me up and say "that was class."
The link isn't the point. The match is the point. The instant, automatic, completely involuntary connection between a thing and a person.
Seven people, seven reasons
Here's what nobody talks about when they talk about curation: it isn't one skill. It's two. The first is taste -- the ability to recognise that something is good, interesting, worthy of attention. Most people can do this, at least some of the time. You know a good restaurant when you eat there. You know a good album when you hear it. Taste is the filter.
The second skill is matching. Knowing who needs to see what, and why. This is the hard bit. This is the bit that separates sending a link in a group chat with "lol" from sending a specific link to a specific person with a specific reason. One is broadcasting. The other is recommending. They look similar but they are completely different activities.
When I built Trove, this was the instinct I was trying to capture. Not bookmarking -- I've used Delicious, Pocket, Raindrop, all of them, and they all miss the point. They treat saving as filing. Put it in a folder. Tag it. Organise it. Come back to it later. But I never come back to it later. Nobody does. The act of saving isn't about retrieval. It's about recognition. You save something because it sparked something. Trove is built to understand what that spark is. What patterns emerge across hundreds of saves. What your taste actually looks like when you lay it all out.
But even Trove doesn't fully capture the seven-people impulse. Because the impulse isn't just about knowing what you like. It's about knowing what other people need before they know they need it.
The friend who always knows
Everyone has a version of this person in their life. The one you text when you need a restaurant in a neighbourhood you don't know. The one who sends you an article on a Sunday night that changes how you think about something. The one who somehow always knows what's about to happen in music, or fashion, or tech, about three months before everyone else catches on.
I've been that person for most of my adult life, and I've spent fifteen years in advertising trying to turn that instinct into a professional skill. Strategy, at its best, is exactly this: matching the right message to the right person at the right time. The entire industry exists because of the gap between "this thing is good" and "this specific person needs to see this specific thing right now." Billions of pounds spent every year trying to do what I do on instinct at half ten on a Tuesday night.
That's not ego. It's observation. Every recommendation algorithm I've ever encountered -- Spotify Discover, YouTube suggestions, Amazon's "customers also bought" -- operates on correlation. People who liked X also liked Y. It's maths. It works, up to a point. But it can never do the thing that makes a personal recommendation feel like a gift: the knowledge that someone thought of you specifically. That they saw this thing and their first instinct was that you needed it. Not people like you. You.
Why it matters now
We are drowning in content and starving for recommendation. Every platform gives you more. More posts, more videos, more podcasts, more articles, more newsletters, more everything. The feed is infinite. The algorithm is optimised for engagement, not for the specific feeling of reading something and thinking "this was made for me."
The internet used to be better at this. I'm old enough to remember when StumbleUpon would throw a random website at you and half the time it was exactly what you didn't know you were looking for. When Delicious let you follow people whose bookmarks were better than any algorithm. When the blogroll in someone's sidebar was a map of their mind. When finding a good link felt like finding money on the pavement.
That serendipity hasn't disappeared. It's just moved. It lives in group chats and DMs now. In the person who sends you the link at half ten on a Tuesday. The infrastructure of discovery has gone from public to private, from platforms to people. And the people who are good at it -- the recommenders, the connectors, the ones with forty outbound links a week -- are more valuable than ever, precisely because the public feeds have become so noisy.
This is what I keep coming back to. In a world where everyone has access to the same tools, the same platforms, the same infinite content, the differentiator is taste. Not just having it. Deploying it. Knowing what to share, with whom, and when. Knowing that Dan needs to see the Porto studio but your brother needs to see it for completely different reasons. Knowing that the link isn't the product. The match is the product.
Seven people. Seven messages. One link. And every single one of them replied.
