Five habits for a map you can read

What keeps a map useful as it grows from dozens of people to thousands.

A map earns its keep when you can glance at it and see something: where your people cluster, who sits between two worlds, who you have let drift. That stops happening when everything is on it and everything points at you. These five habits keep it readable.

1. Connect only your closest people to yourself

A line to You should mean “close to me”. Keep it for the handful of people that is true of — up to about ten: a partner, family, a cofounder, the friends you would call first.

If everyone gets a line to you, the line stops meaning anything, and the map pulls into a starburst around your dot that hides the clusters worth seeing. Everyone else belongs next to where you know them from: a company, a community, the friend who introduced you.

• Tell Kith: “Mei is my cofounder”, “Theo is one of my closest friends”.
• Or on a Mac or the web, hold Option (Alt) and drag from them to You.

2. Keep the main map to the few hundred you care about

Aim for 300–500 people: roughly as many as anyone can really keep in mind. Bring in as many as you like, then keep on the main map the ones you would want to see when you open it.

Hiding is not forgetting. Hide takes someone off the map you are looking at; Kith still knows them, finds them when you search, and can answer questions about them.

• Tap or click a person and choose Hide.
• Or ask in plain words: “Hide everyone at Acme except Lena and Joe.”

Starting from a big import? Two ways to build your map walks through bringing everyone in and hiding the rest.

3. Give everyone else a place: sub-maps and tags

The people who are not on the main map still belong somewhere. Two tools put them there.

Sub-maps, for people who belong to one place

A sub-map is a map inside a card. Put a company’s people under the company, a course under the course, a community under the community: they leave the main map and stay one tap away, behind the card’s Sub-map button.

• “Put everyone from my Stanford class under Stanford.”
• “File the people from the Lisbon trip under Lisbon.”

Tags, for what people share across places

A tag cuts across companies and communities: #investors, #seahack, #climbing. Type #seahack into Find on map and Kith draws everyone carrying it, laid out by their own connections.

When one card gathers fifteen or more connections, it offers Turn N connections into the tag #name…: everyone keeps the tag, the lines go, and the map breathes again.

4. Arrange the map on a Mac or the web

The phone is for looking things up; a big screen and a pointer are for arranging. Open the map in the Mac app or at app.kithrabbit.com, and use two keys:

• Option (Alt) + drag from one person to another draws a connection between them.
• Shift + drag moves a person together with everyone around them, so a whole group goes where you put it.

Both work on an iPad with a keyboard too. The magnet in the map’s toolbar lets the connections arrange things for you; switch it off and you are back to your own arrangement.

5. Talk to your Kith about your people

The map knows that you know someone. Conversation tells it how. Mention people the way you would to a friend, and Kith keeps what matters as memories of its own:

• “Ana and I worked nights together at the hospital. She’s who I call when something medical comes up.”
• “Marcus introduced me to half the hardware people I know.”
• “I owe Priya a coffee; she read my deck twice.”

That is what lets Kith answer the questions a map alone cannot: who could open this door, who you have not spoken to in too long, who would enjoy meeting whom.