We’re excited to share koodos labs. Our team is building an internet that centers on what you love by providing compasses and tools that make good on the Internet's original promise of personal empowerment, peer-to-peer exchange and networks based on mutual interests rather than algorithmic nudging.

A shared repository of digital culture should be a public good and a treasure we owe to future generations. The challenge of our generation is to keep the pathways to digital culture open.

Today, koodos labs is building an app, koodos, your library of what you love, and stewarding a protocol, Mediagraph, the internet’s shared library.

koodos is a place for the things that you love

We started by building koodos, our flagship app. It’s our take on a media ‘wallet.’ It’s a place for you to collect digital content you love from across the web. As of today, the app centers on music, and thousands of people have built collections filled with the music they love.

Think of when you walk into your bedroom and see all the things that you’ve collected, from your posters to your collection of vinyl or books — and that feeling that it’s your sanctuary, with all your favorite things. Or when you walk into another person's room and their artifacts resonate with you or spark a shared memory, there’s an instant feeling of belonging.

As we wander through the digital world, we’re constantly seeking our place within it. It’s human nature to search for a spark 💥 — that koodos moment — when we feel grateful, amazed, intrigued, excited — even just a little. When that happens online, you put it on a card on koodos and make it yours. As your cards gather in your library, they help you visualize how your taste is evolving. More profoundly, those cards help you understand yourself better and even connect you with others. Since you own your data on koodos — your tastes, interests and context — you’ll be able to take that context with you to other compatible apps and, in a privacy-preserving way, get a personalized experience from day one. 

Our ambition is to see people all over the world constructing their identity, card by card on koodos and beyond, with hundreds of millions of people collecting billions of things they’re drawn to — moving us towards an internet that centers on what you love.

Stewarding the Mediagraph

Mediagraph will let developers build on decentralized media metadata and, eventually, become infrastructure for user-provisioned portable interest and taste graphs. Today, koodos is the first app to write to and read from the Mediagraph to generate, store and retrieve media metadata.

Mediagraph was born out of necessity while building koodos. We were initially inspired by the prospect of culture that is readily available for anyone to annotate, remix or link together in archives and an alternative future where people have control over their interest graphs, instead of being exploited for their data. Part of the challenge was that there was no standard, decentralized repository for online media and its derivatives. 

Core to the functioning of the internet today is that facts are copyright-free, and so factual references are considered communal property. This notion underlies the function of hyperlinks (this link takes you to this URL), or retrieving metadata around a URL to understand what it’s referencing — for example, what song or artist is referenced within a specific link. Despite that, hundreds of thousands of apps rely on closed APIs for simple metadata queries, and remain at the whim of these gatekeepers — living with the fear that their access might be throttled or shut off. 

We believe it’s important to build an adaptive system that runs with open content, on open protocols and that’s available to the largest possible range of modifications from people who can themselves determine the development of the technology. With that, koodos labs is initiating Mediagraph and will steward it, but we can’t build this alone.

We certainly haven’t figured everything out yet, but we know that we need Mediagraph to be a cooperative project and the hope is to move forward with a small number of developer groups, platforms and cultural institutions. If this is you or you’re interested in learning more:

Join the consortium

From the very start, we’ve been maniacal about building based on human needs and have never seen technology as the goal. Technology is simply a tool to help people grow, discover themselves, and live a more fulfilling life.

Interested in joining our team? Reach out to us team@koodos.com or apply here:

We're hiring!

We are grateful to be building with a community of amazing supporters and we’ll be sharing more soon, but until then follow along by subscribing here or following us on Twitter.

koodos to you.