Day One recognizes that many people struggle with journaling not because they can’t write, but because they don’t know how to begin or what a “good” journal entry about their day looks like. That’s why we built Daily Chat, a guided reflection experience that helps you talk through your day, organize your thoughts, and shape them into a journal entry.

Early testers commented: “Day One’s new Daily Chat is a true game changer for my daily journaling. The AI-powered chat makes capturing thoughts effortless and inspires creativity like never before. Writing my diary has never been this intuitive and fun!”

Try it for yourself, it will change the way you think about journalling.

My thanks to WorkOS for sponsoring DF last week to promote Auth.md, their new open protocol for AI agent registration. (Who’d have thunk that I’d be getting paid to promote new uses for Markdown 22 years after releasing it?)

Sign-up forms were built for humans in browsers, so how do AI agents programmatically register with services? That’s the question Auth.md aims to answer. It’s a single Markdown file you host at your domain that tells agents how to register your users, which flows you support, what scopes you expose, and how credentials get issued. It’s like robots.txt but for agent registration.

Cloudflare, Firecrawl, and Resend have already adopted it.

An open protocol authored by WorkOS. Read the spec.

Daniel Agee, an early member of the team at Glass, writing on the Glass blog:

It’s not lost on us that Om’s photography, often taken in frozen lands in or around the arctic circle, was the polar opposite of his personality. While he focused on subtle shapes and hidden landscapes, he was the sun of any group he was in. Folks just naturally fell into his orbit.

Agee’s lovely piece is replete with photos by Om.

A veteran of the internet publishing space, he was one of the first to take the now well-worn path of technology writing into venture capital. When we briefly explored raising a small round of VC funding after our launch to support our growth, Om was our first call. He answered and immediately said, “I love you guys, I’ll invest the money if you want it, but don’t fucking do it. What you have is special. Don’t fucking ruin it.”

That’s Om. Simple and to the point. That simplicity showed up in his photography practice. Strip away everything from a photograph, down to the bare minimum of contrast or shadow. What do you focus on? What do you see? How can something so simple be so fulfilling?

That is exactly how Om spoke. Always. To the point. Why waste time? Why mince words? Why make someone guess what you really think? Our instincts say otherwise, but it’s not rude to be blunt. Unmoderated honesty is a profound courtesy.

Matt Mullenweg:

Fundamentally, Om was a lover of humanity. He became a fast “regular” everywhere he went. He wouldn’t just buy coffee, he would also learn the name and story of every barista, the dogs and people in South Park. His deep curiosity and respect weren’t just for the fine and famous. It extended to every soul that crossed his path. His encyclopedic knowledge and photographic memory created connections not just in San Francisco, but all around the world wherever we traveled. (I need to pull the stats, but we went to five continents together, including Antarctica.)

He loved people and their stories.

And:

One of the biggest lessons I learned from Om is the deep appreciation of craft. When he took an interest in photography or pens, he would somehow find his way to the most obscure, highest-quality expression of that form. “What Would Om Want?” is a question I will always ponder. I want to craft products that would make Om proud.

If you’re going to get into something, you ought to pursue it to its full extent. If you’re not interested enough to do that, don’t bother getting into it. Find the few things you love; don’t waste your time on the many things you merely like.

Matt is keeping a wonderful list of links to other remembrances and tributes to Om.

Clay Risen, writing for The New York Times (gift link):

Mr. Malik started his blog just as the dot-com bubble burst, leading to a recession that also took down many of the journalism start-ups that wrote about tech, like The Industry Standard and Inside.com. He was among the most prominent of the writers who quickly filled the gap, covering Silicon Valley with a mixture of hot scoops and sharp opinions that quickly made Gigaom a must-read.

“The Android OS leaves me feeling like one feels three hours after having Chinese food: a tad empty,” he wrote in a 2010 post that neatly summarized Google’s struggles to move beyond its roots as a search platform. “Google has to learn the art of engagement — something particularly challenging.”

Lovely, warm, accurate and fair obituary. This pulled snippet is a great one. Early Android as Chinese takeout is such a deft analogy, and the piece really isn’t about Android specifically but Google institutionally. Not speeds and feeds, but can they make products with a soul? With heart? Om’s pessimism was obvious, and I’d say, prescient.

He had a rare ability to see around corners, and to pick out from the horde of new companies the ones that were going to make real change. He was an early champion of Slack, the workplace messaging service, and in 2006 he was the first blogger to write extensively about Twitter. He was not a fan.

Back in the day Letterman had a recurring bit called “Is This Anything?” They’d bring someone or something on stage and then Dave and Paul would render their up/down judgment: was that anything? The answer, more often than not, was no. The Letterman bit was a gag. But that’s basically what tech journalism is — especially back in the heyday of startups. Every startup believes it’s something and wants the press to think it’s something. Most of the time, it’s not something. Once in a while it is. Om was so goddamn good at identifying the somethings.

Long before Facebook came in for attacks from both the political left and right, he called out, during a 2013 interview with Bloomberg TV, what he said was “absolutely an air of amorality” on the part of its founder and chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg. In the same interview, he criticized the venture capitalist John Doerr for “patently trying to hijack the political process.”

He was right early, and right often. You can say now that everyone knows there’s “an air of amorality” at Facebook institutionally and with Zuckerberg personally. In 2013 that was not a common refrain. Just a year earlier, Apple had added Facebook account integration at the system level in iOS 6.