Is anyone using Comet?
Hi @AlexHough
I would like but I use Linux
Waiting for a Linux release 
How is your experience with it?
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My experience so far is great excitment. I con’t quite get over the experience. I reminds me of when Firefox came out with tabbed browsing.
In have WhatsApp web in one tab, TW on node on another and then Perplexity in Comet.
There are three of us with Perplexity Pro accounts who are looking into how Perplexity Spaces can be used in collaboration in the context of arts practice and world building.
Using Node, I can have multipole tabs with my TW open. I can use my CometTW along with WhatsApp and Perplexity as a tool set.
I have WhatsApp and Perplexity apps on my phone. They both have capacity to share and store files.
One thing I havin been wanting to try is to take a WhatsApp chat archive and create a TW from it. Perplexity could make this quite simple.
Experience with TW has help me think about Perplexity. I found myself thinking back to the early wiki culture and pattern languages. I then realised that Perpexity could be used to create wiki text.
I am confused.
This is an example from https://www.perplexity.ai/comet : https://framerusercontent.com/images/VBG1Y2K2cgJOIqjj2WUTRMrw.png?scale-down-to=1024
If I just watched a video, why would I need a summary of it to be made for me? Isn’t this like the built-in ability of my mind that just works? 
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I’m using Perplexity in a different way. It has the power to read hand drawn text in diagrams. I can draw something by hand and upload it to Perplexity and it can work a bit like a TiddlyWiki filter:
All the text surrounded by a yellow shape are organisations
All the text surrounded by green a green shape are people
Create a list if all people and organisations, list in alphabetical order.
Perplexity could be used to create a something like WikiText. I’ve don’t some experiments with Pattern Languages and the culture of Ward Cunninghams original wiki. For people who have difficulty with reading code then Perplexity offers a way of manipulating text and hypertext.
I’m also using WhatsApp to communicate with a team which is researching the used of Perplexity in community creativity projects. It enables people who can’t write very well a mechanism to create intelligent texts to share without taking a long time to do so. Its a boost and not as obtrusive as Google’s eco system
As far as I can tell, it seems anyone using this is necessarily granting for-profit corporate access to the contents of all their work, thought, ideas…
This video’s title is clickbait, but it does express my concern:
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We’re about 20 years too late for that argument.
Tilt at enough windmills and you’re sure to come across a dragon.
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Given that TiddlyWiki resides on my own machine, with code that is transparent to inspection, and does not require signing over my data, I don’t think it’s too late at all.
Certainly I’m not entirely able to control whether corporations or governments (or corporations beholden to governments, or governents beholden to corporations) are spying on me without my permission. But I can certainly notice whether I’m rolling over and agreeing that everything I write will be siphoned up into their big-data archive.
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Would you please elaborate? I am confused because I can interpret this in more than one way, and I find one partiular interpretation funny (albeit not sure if appropriate for this forum, because it’s quite offtopic TiddlyWiki-wise)
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Perhaps raise it for discussion in the Cafe Forum here?
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I can see there being ethical issues with using Perplexity but I am having some interesting results with Comet, Perplexity and TW under Node.js
The first things that stuck me was when I prompted Perplexity to gather all missing tiddlers, put them in a tiddler and then create links to them then tag the tiddler. It did it!
It can also work like a text editor and create wikitext. Combined with WhatsApp and TW on Node.js Perplexity Comet becomes a very powerful tool
Perplexity can not access files on your machine directly. TW offers an easy way to store texts locally and to integrate with Perplexity Pro.
My plan is to use TW as an index card tool which can index my hand drawn diagrams. Perplexity can read my writing and understand that some phrases are surrounded my shapes of different colours and can tag them appropriately. For example “people”, “organisation” , “place”
Comet is built on Chrome (the open source version) and the Perplexity guy seems lest inclined to follow Facebook, Google and Apple in the love in with Trump’s vision for the USA.
Alex
I’ve asked Comet to add a local file to my TW: it won’t do it. It doesn’t have access to local files. And – for any spies looking in – I’ve got nothing to hide!
TW offers a way to get text out of Perplexity and into TW. My plan is to index Perplelxity Threads and Spaces. Comet seems like the best way to integrate TW with WhatsApp which is the main form or communication I am using. The project is in the context of community art.
The Open Source ethos is great for community projects. Over the years I have found that conversations and disputes about technology can derail projects right from the start. My previous TW project was similar: people could not get over the fact that TW used cookies to store state data - they didn’t want to use it and were soon sending Powerpoint, Word and spreadsheet files around
Everyone seems to have preferences for technology and its really hard to get going sometimes. I’m going for a “move slowly, repair things” approach.
Alex
it can but does not out of the box.
however I feel for you having to deal with people who are inflexible.
it is interesting your cross platform ideas here and you seem to be promoting “automatic” intergration, when often manual intergration may be sufficent, or a good start.
I think if you were a little less general we could support some of these efforts.
Specific Goals
Here are some specific things I want to be able to do
- Get information from hand drawn diagrams into TW
- Explore how Perplexity Pro can be used a team of three in a in a neurodivergent context: ADHD, ASD, Dyslexia
- Research how Comet browser can work with TiddlyWiki on Node.js
Approach
My approach is informed by a few ideas:
Practice as Research is a paradigm in arts practice where you do things then evaluate them later.
Praxis - doing something and finding out why later.
Recommendation - I was recommended Perplexity by a long time friend whose judgement I respect. I started a project to explore how Perplexity might work in a team of creatives working within a network of IT specialists.
Pragmatism
I am aware of potential ethical concerns with using products and different people make different choices. For example members of the team of three use Facebook and Google products as part of their everyday life where as I don’t. In the past I have seen projects derail or fail to take off due to concerns about what technology to use. In the past I tried to get people into TiddlyWiki and had very little success.
I feel that a series of circumstances has lead me here – contemplating Comet and TW in the TiddlyWiki community. I thought I’d share my process and experiment to see what other people are doing with AI and TW.
I want to be adaptable so that I can collaborate with a diverse set of people. This involves some compromises on what technology to use.
It seems like everyone is using Chat GPT: I’ve decided not use it but to try Perplexity. I have found it very useful as a tool for someone who is a visual thinker. It recognises my hand writing and formatting on my diagrams in such a way that I can now bring them into a laptop and create an index card system to keep track of prompts, threads of prompts and various other things that a traditional TW might do.
Similar feeling to using AI as when I first discovered TW
When I first discovered TW (probably around 2005) I was a student in a new media suite. We were being taught about webpages and web design. The speed in which TW could turn wikitext into HTML was very satisfying. I was addictive and deeply pleasurable to use.
I started to experiment with writing prompts for AI images (Adobe Firefly). I found it similar to playing with TW in that you write something, press a button and can see the result nearly right away. (I think this has something to do with variable reward and its role in addiction.) However having an image in your mind, then describing it then seeing the image is much more of a profound experience in 2025. It’s new, exciting and a global development which changing the landscape of creative endeavour, especially in digital arts and creative processes. Seeing video produced from prompts seems miraculous.
Using TV on Node with Comet browsers seems more exciting than anything else for me at the moment. Tool making these days seems to be about choosing already existing tool to do things and not buying into one system like Microsoft or Google Docs.
TiddlyWiki’s name comes from small and fast. It is grounded in wiki culture which is in turn grounded in the application and development of Pattern Languages to software development. WikiText was a development to make writing HTML easier.
After many years trying to do everything with TW, I discovered that hand drawing works the best for me. And now I have a phone with a decent camera I can take photos of snippet of text I want to reuse. My phones Photos app works like a TV. I can put images in libraries. I realised i have a preference for visual thinking rather than the written word.
In summary: Comet with TW and WhatsApp seems very exciting for me at the moment. I am one month into a six month period of research and at the movement the discoveries I am coming accross are very interesting and motivate me to continue on this path. It’s something I’d like to collaborate on with TW users
Alex
back in 2008 there were fewer options and people were just getting scared about cookies. the first wave of a Wired-style hippyish tech utopia was nearly over.
A good point.
My use case is very simple. WhatsApp in the middle tab and TW to the left. It feels like a powerful tool for collaboration and as we progress as a team including TW is opening up new branches.
Too good to be true? Maybe. Almost certainly. I miss the days when TW ran in Firefox with no concerns about getting hacked.
TW runs in FireFox with no concerns about getting hacked. FF is my main browser, since the days where it was Netscape browser and AltaVista search was killed by Google search. I did never regret it. (…Just reminds me of my age 
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