It's also a good example of a clean design and user experience.
And the random excerpt from the past is what keeps me opening the emails every time. Interesting to look back at the past.
YCombinator hopes to make money from this how?
Don't get me wrong: it's a simple and clever idea. Just... it's not philanthropy, is it?
And don't call me "Shirley".
I'm so sorry. I just couldn't resist....
(If you don't get it, watch this movie soon: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080339/)
Just think of it as a gift to the world and you can rest easy at night :D
I can still dig up random LiveJournal entries that I wrote on a whim ten years ago. What would people here rate the chances of me being able to do the same with OhLife entries in ten years?
I recently unearthed my AOL user database from the late 90s. Dropping it into a simple text editor, I get a ton of garbage characters but also every e-mail I ever sent or received on my AOL account for about five years (including almost all the Spam). While it was sometimes painful reading through that mess (for various reasons), I gained some interesting insight into my past that I found useful. What's interesting is that I have a great deal more mail saved up in my various e-mail boxes, but I wouldn't think to go through and read those chronologically as I did with the AOL mail.
It also has iphone and android apps (I actually wrote the Android version), which make it really convenient to update.