Fabric (YC S16) Is a Home for All Your Memories
themacro.com
themacro.com
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 can't believe the #1 most important question about a new business is the one that's totally glossed over, but hey this is HN so maybe I can.)
Hope you enjoy Fabric!
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] http://mashable.com/2013/06/13/foursquare-time-machine/#3R8p... [2] https://www.livetrekker.com
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.
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.
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.
Thanks again!