Announcement today from Tana. (This does not thrill me.) It reads like what ChatGPT would say if you asked it to write a product teaser using every buzzword for the current thing.

First, a small but important change:

The Tana you know today will be renamed Tana Outliner.

If you love it and it works for you, great. Keep using it. We’ll continue improving it with a dedicated team.Your apps will get a new icon, but otherwise nothing changes.

But we’re also introducing something new.

The new Tana is:
• Built for collaboration
• Much easier to get started with
• Faster
• Powered by AI that understands your whole graph
• Usable without understanding schema but still powerful if you do

It’s still a knowledge graph with types (aka Supertags) that turn unstructured information into useful output.

But we’re taking it much further with some major changes:

Meetings that finish the work while you talk
Video calls happen directly inside your graph. AI agents see the full context of the conversation, so by the time the call ends the ticket can be filed, the PR drafted, or the brief written.

Better context for AI
New ways to manage context across your graph so AI outputs stay useful and trustworthy, even when teams and agents work together in the same workspace.

From thinking to real artifacts
Turn voice, notes, or video into storyboards, illustrated journeys, annotated images, drafted PRs, and more. The goal is simple. Turn thinking into real output with minimal effort.

API-first (with MCP)
Send Tana data wherever work happens. Early integrations include Google Calendar, Outlook, GitHub, Codex, Cursor, Claude, Lovable, Slack, Linear, Jira, and more.

The Tana owners, in answer to questions, mentioned that the "new Tana" will operate in preview mode for existing customers, but 100% of data in the "old Tana" will not be transferable to the new platform.

I think we're seeing a forced platform replacement strategy driven by a heavy bet on AI, which itself is a technology that has not settled into long-term viability. Forced replacement by a developer in essence abandoning their existing product doesn't usually work out well.

At the AMA on 19 Mar (I believe now posted to YouTube), Olav and other team members from Tana provided much needed elaboration on plans:
- Tana Outliner (TO), the current Tana product, will continue to be supported and developed, with a dedicated development team working on it;
- an overview of the development plans for TO were provided, which will be published soon;
- the new Tana (T2) will have outliner capability (and this was demonstrated) though they said they have not yet "solved zooming". The editing interface will have outlining and other modes available (on the one screen);
- not all data in TO will be readily transferable to T2 but this is being worked on.

My take is that Tana is genuinely not intending to force TO users to T2 and stated that if you like TO and don't need collaboration then stick to TO. The dilemma they apparently faced was that their stated objective with the original product was to develop it as a collaboration tool and that attempts to do so with the current platform were too hard. Also that TO is too hard for non-power users and that T2 would be easier to onboard and not restrict editing to outline mode.

Of course, what transpires and what was said may be different, but at this point based on the undertakings I will continue to use TO (in crimp mode).

I am not affiliated with Tana and have been a long term lurker here (decades I believe). I probably had a login before but cannot find it, so have registered today.