The internet of post-web-2.0 is forgetting things very fast, sometimes through information overload (like my Gmail archive or my smartphone photo cloud) and sometimes simply because services die, APIs change and become incompatible, company A buying company B which had all your data, etc.
Thus if you make a home for all my memories it is not just important to connect all the data points, but to provide a solution that will exist for me, even if you as a company won't exist anymore. It must be a priority 1 topic for you to make me care about your product.
That being said, having a searchable, connected history of all my data points is really neat. Wish you all the luck in the world!
Thanks! I believe both Facebook and Twitter have the options to export your data.
That's definitely something we would like to make available at some later point for the content you generate within Fabric. Realistically though, because of just keeping something like the current thing between a team of 2 is a massive challenge, it would be later down the line.
Yeah, well the way FB handles it is glueing on features later. I'm thinking more of something like Github or Dropbox. See, if Dropbox or Github dies I still have my data in a readily usable form on at least 3 machines. It's inherent to the tools, not a feature that is glued on later. People are too lazy to regularly export their Facebook.
Btw I know it's quite hard to make as an inherent feature for that kind of service, but it's still part of what I understand as the promise of "home for my memories".
If you have to do it the export way. Please make it an API, and put your data in open formats like odt, email, what ever open street map uses for map files, etc.
And don't forget. If you make a cool business that only runs for 2 years, you may make 6 or 7 digits of money. But if you provide a real solution for people's problems you make a living, even if the first business around it dies.
This is kinda weird, it feels a little uncanny. So instead of doing the human thing, like remembering something, I'm going to store them in an electronic device. And instead of doing the human thing of quietly reflecting on memories, I'm going to grab my phone and have it dictate the memories back to me. I haven't used the app, but it just sounds unauthentic. What problem is it solving?
I read the blurb about where the idea came from, and I have to criticize a little bit; Without Fabric, learning about your father has become a wonderful journey, where you have to visit and talk with people to connect and learn about your father. If you had Fabric, you'd just flip through a couple of his pages while taking your morning dump.
There is also the "archival" use-case that I can see (and appreciate). A single window into what I was doing this day 5 years back? People would pay for that.
Kind of useful for business purposes too. I was in this city, I took some cabs and photographed the receipts, I met with these people, I wrote these entries in my notebook (and snapped a picture of the pages) etc. Recap a business trip or even a busy week, get your expenses in order, associate handwritten notes both spatially and temporally with people and projects.
That's kind of cool, TimeHop does something similar already, but it just scrapes the social media accounts you give it.
I dunno that I would pay for this. I'd have to use it for 5 years to get any value out of it (I don't care about what happened last week, I care about what happened past what I can reasonably remember). That's a big ask - to get a user to open your app every day and also pay a subscription.
I feel like the more likely scenario is you do the ~human~ thing and just forget. Forget that random day at the park, forget that afternoon at the coffee short, forget that trip with your estranged cousins.
We go through life with hundreds of thousands of minor moments that, without the ease of cheap digital storage and recording, we just forget. To me the service feels like a digitized version of that family member that maintains the photo albums and scrapbooks which is certainly a ~human~ thing to want or appreciate; in my opinion it's not at all diminished because it's now portable. I think you're nostalgic for a time that hasn't existed for decades; with photos (and before them slides), journals, etc the era in wish you needed the "wonderful journey" is long gone.
Very insightful thoughts. We actually agree that there is a way to over-robotize this space and an app like ours, and we are in fact very cognizant of that fact. We think there's something there that explains why none of the apps in the quantified self space (which we see as tangential to ours) have quite lived up to their potential yet.
But we started from the original angles we could offer as highly experienced engineers, and we're working from there.
I guess your takeaway from that story about my father is very different from mine. What I took from that was the extreme serendipity that my friend's parents happened to be in school with my dad, and that I happened to be friends with her in a different country, and that those people were still around to talk to me.
It's basically by sheer dumb luck that I managed to learn some of the most important things about the person I was once closest to in life.
Now of course, as you say, there's a way to do this well and a way to do this poorly. But that fact is, if we don't write it down it will be forgotten. We're just trying to do the easiest thing and write it down.
I got the same feeling. It seems like the app does not solve the problem that the original story stated: namely, the leaving behind of amazing stories. Instead, the app captures the mundane parts of everyday life, tracking locations, collating your Instagram food photos, recording your throwaway Snapchats.
My late Mom used to write a lot of stuff about in Multiply. She even got Boing-Boinged once by Cory Doctorow. Guess what? All those posts are gone when Multiply went down. If Fabric.me gets it right, it wouldn't matter if these sites go down - you'll still have the memories.
Same way Facebook does, advertising. Except they have every piece of your location data in addition to everything Facebook has, which means better targeted ads.
Some company should just back up someone's facebook, insta, gmail, etc etc etc... and sell them back their own information upon request. It would probably take a while to make money but I've heard this era called a digital "black hole" because all of the data that's going to be stored and lost because individuals don't have data retention plans.
Google Maps has Your Timeline. Google Photos already groups and searches by location, as well as automatically creating photo stories based on your vacations.
This seems really cool! I installed it yesterday to try it out - I really want something like this.
Your on-boarding is really good. However, when it comes time to create an account, I need to create a username and password. Can't I just create the account with facebook? I already gave you access?
I found it very hard to see what's actually going on. The images on the cities are so big that they obscure the context. The "history bar" is confusing (I figured it out eventually), but I thought it was some glitching, and it made it look unprofessional.
I feel lots of data is missing: you pulled from FB but I didnt see evidence of my facebook history.
My use case is to have "reminders" of my life. I'd love if you can pull data from lots of places, in particular my email. The email headers in my gmail probably include where I was at all times over the last decade. Can you include that in some way? If you can pull the photos from my dropbox account, you'd probably have a complete look at my life for the last 10 years at least, but my phone only goes to 2012. (Everalbum does a good job with this).
Anyway, awesome idea, looking forward to trying it again.
Hey, thanks for your thoughts. The other team member here.
1. Onboarding: thanks, we thought really hard about what to do there.
2. Images on the cities too big--can you clarify that one, you mean on the intro map you will see an image that is not necessarily representative of your entire time there as you'd like?
3. FB data missing--is that still the case? It's possible you looked while it was still importing where you were expecting content. Basically everywhere you go in the app, Days (when you posted), Cities, Places, People should have data from Facebook if the intro map indicated that the import was working. Feel free to send us a message to feedback@echo.works to follow up if that still looks broken.
4. Reminders: Great ideas, noted. We have also noticed that when we're missing Fabric, the best ways to remember what we were up to are our calendars, emails, and messaging.
Hi, good looking product :) I don't have an iPhone so I can't try it.
Did I understand correctly: You synchronize your various accounts (Fb, Instagram, 4square/Swarm ) and Fabric will do the same thing as the Foursquare "Time machine" [1]
But in addition it would also correlates Instagram pictures and whatnot?
Basically you're a low-friction & more modern LiveTrekker[2] (a 2012 app)?
This is neat, but it looks like a huge privacy issue, why would someone want his entire life recorded? Is it visible to all your friends?
I see one scenario I would like it:
Let's say I turn it on when I go on a road trip from August 1st to August 15th, to share the experience with my family and friends, can I decide to share only this August 1st to August 15th period with my family?
1. Have not checked out the foursquare or LiveTrekker stuff you mention--will do, thank you.
2. Nothing is visible to anyone, but yourself. Just like your text messages, Facebook messages, or email.
This is a large question in tech that we are only a part of--how do we build tools going forward in this environment of ever more granular and structured data, so that we can enjoy the benefits of better memory without introducing new issues.
As I mentioned already, we are not a social network exactly because of that, and the industry as a whole has been working actively to address such concerns as soon as they show up. Another example is the end-to-end messaging encryption being adopted by the messaging apps.
Anyways, we're very cognizant of that kind of issue and will continue to address them proactively.
3. The temporary sharing issue with family--it is indeed a fun scenario we have heard suggested before. For the time being, we're staying away for the reasons just discussed.
Hey, tried the app. The UX left me confused. I have used life logger apps before [before they were bought and shut down] and need a good one desperately. I gave it access to my photos and still nothing shows up. Also the oAuths dialogs are not native prompting me to enter credentials which I don't have the patience to do. :)
Thus if you make a home for all my memories it is not just important to connect all the data points, but to provide a solution that will exist for me, even if you as a company won't exist anymore. It must be a priority 1 topic for you to make me care about your product.
That being said, having a searchable, connected history of all my data points is really neat. Wish you all the luck in the world!