Memolane – a Time Machine for your Digital Life
Winner of StartupWeekend Copenhagen, Memolane describes itself as an “online time machine”, and joins numerous other lifestreaming services on the web looking to organise your digital life. What sets it apart from some of its competition, is its innate ability to organise activities by time, in a web application that is simply a joy to use. A digital timeline is used as the main interface, with stories added when you signup and connect other web services to it, and these can be browsed past and present. For example, I connected my Twitter, Facebook and RSS streams, and immediately was able to see and review what I’d posted on those networks on particular days, including retrospective posts. Once you have given Memolane access, it continues to record activity as it happens live in realtime.
That however, isn’t where it ends. Probably the coolest feature of Memolane, is the ability to create custom “stories”. Essentially these are suitcases where you can further organise your social activity. For example, I created a story entitled “Ryan’s Wedding” – as one of my best mates got married recently. In that story, I was able to select Tweets where I had expressed nerves about public speaking, Facebook photos I’d been tagged in on the day, Flickr photos I’d uploaded, and so on. You can then file that story away and return to it at any time to bring the information together in one place for easy retrieval.
I can think of loads of applications for this, particularly for those of you who work on promoting different companies, and would like to be able to see them individual and together chronologically over a period of time. It certainly gives you at a glance a perfect way to see activity / inactivity around a particular subject and review your activity. This additional layer that allows you to sort, filter and curation of your own social media activity is what sets it apart from the crowd.
Currently supported platforms for import of content to your digital timeline includes the following: Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Picasa, Last.fm, Foursquare, Trip.It, YouTube and a generic RSS feed – which pretty much covers any service that you would like to aggregate content from. Notably, Last.fm even allows you to play small samples of the music you were listening to on a particular day (through Amazon) or spawn a Spotify client to listen again if you have it installed. A really nice touch.
As for privacy, you can choose to share your Memolane either publically or privately, which (depending on how paranoid you are) is a welcome addition to their service. Overall Memolane is another curation based service which is well worth watching in 2011, and allows you to capture, create, search, comment and share your online history.
If any of you lovely readers are interested in taking a look around the service, feel free to leave a comment, and I’ll see if I can’t muster up a few invite beta codes.
Update -for the first 200 of you readers, use the code “webdistortion” to get access.
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About the Author (Author Profile)
Paul is a regular 28 year old web bloke / programmer with a penchant for online marketing. This blog is a personal outlet, with an eclectic mix of articles.Subscribe
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Great write up. Really appreciate that you see the power in stories. We look forward to let you invite friends so you can start making great memories together.