Forty years in the making.

Wideview started 40 years ago with a basic question: what if I could scale all biographies by age instead of by year. I wasn't so interested in when Einstein came up with his E=mc², but how old he was and what was going on in his life at the time. It was 1986, I was 23, and I got an editor at publishing company A&M (they did "The Far Side" books) interested in this unusual project, which I called "Lifetime". But she said I needed to flesh it out more. By 1989 she liked my pitch and introduced me to an agent (at ICM) who also loved the idea.

What we each concluded was that it couldn't be done. They told me to keep in touch.

Every few years, as new technology came along, I re-evaluated Lifetime to see if it was possible. First I figured the new CD-ROM could make it possible. Nope. Then CD-I. Then the Web was invented. Still no. Then wikis came around, but I couldn't pull it together.

I gave up for a long while, but in the early 2000s my pal Michael Hawley urged me to revisit it. By then it was "The Department of Comparative Biography" but still too much work, even with Mike's introductions, I was too busy with other things.

A year ago, when AI was surfacing for the public, I wondered if it changed the game. I ran some tests. Not quite. But last week I was introduced to vibecoding, and in a fit of activity I built the thing I had long envisioned. 40 years of planning. A week of work.

Seemingly unrelated, but at the same time, I created a weird document where I just summed up my year every year in a very concise way. It was the first text document on my first Macintosh, and in one form or another the document has been maintained ever since. It's my oldest computer file. It was so inexplicably useful it allowed me to remember and manage a weird aggregation of data.

Also in that era I didn't want my resume to look like every other resume, and I considered myself eclectic, so I presented my career as a series of vertical timelines, an idea years later I made more graphical. It was a fun way for me to visualize my weird career and the fun way things connect.

I've always encouraged my (now adult) children to maintain this sort of data, not as a chore but as a practice of reflection and of personal data management. It was more like scrapbooking. It's not everyone's disposition, but it's a labor that's pretty rewarding.

So this week I decided to revisit my issues with LinkedIn, which never struck me as having achieved the dream we had for it when it launched (I was probably in the first few hundred users on it). I had presumed that LinkedIn would become a sort of career CRM, but it never became that tool. I was aware that people ("resume data") were important in networking, but so was context. LinkedIn had no context.

As I started evolving this vision of a "better LinkedIn," I intended to rebuild my resume tool and my annual journaling tool with some cool visualizations. But the AI tools were so powerful that the thing I was building for my kids started getting overlayed with these other ideas — I mean, once you're willing to do the work to input your data, I felt a responsibility to do all kinds of cool things with the data. So this is a data visualization tool — and because your data is private and important, it's not a social tool, it needs to be sequestered from casual glances. And most importantly, it grows in value the more you use it.

So this is what is here, a rapidly evolving visualization tool that has a daily role in your networking and life, but has longer-range benefits that aren't immediately obvious.