Here's how Jottit originally got started.
In April 2007, Aaron Swartz sent me an email asking what I was up to. I told him I wasn't really up to any exciting projects and suggested that perhaps we build something together. Aaron was already busy on other projects, but was willing to offer his remaining bandwidth advising me.
He also had an idea. He called it createapage.com: you go to the site, there's a text box, you type stuff in, hit save, and you get a page at a random URL.
The radical simplicity instantly got me excited.
"The cognitive load is so tiny that you just go ahead and use it without even thinking about whether you should or not," Aaron wrote.
We built it and called it Jottit.