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Comment by tuhin | Hacker News Reader

This in short is a great piece of design. Especially coming out of facebook this is amazing (well they now have one of the most talented designers so not that surprising).

However, as a business this is killer and shrewd. Everyone would want to save a log of their life. More app permissions to add to timeline > more auto posts in ticker > more connection for Facebook.

Well played!

Disclosure: I am working on something similar as a place for all the memories of your life (http://momment.com) so the above text comes in view of having actually thought about this problem for months now.

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How cool is this going to be for kids who grew up with Facebook and their kids and their kids' kids? I would love to have had insight to this level of detail for my ancestors.

Do you really believe that facebook will be around for 4 consecutive generations while retaining the data that was entered there?

The question really is "Do you believe the data will be around for 4 consecutive generations, in some form?" And my answer is that yes, yes I do.

Especially as storage becomes cheaper and cheaper. I think if something were to happen to Facebook we would see a GeoCities like effort and everything you posted publicly would be backed up.

http://www.reddit.com/r/Cyberpunk/comments/gdy7s/the_book_xp...

That's when they will start charging for access ... gateway to your family history

You could always follow the old-fashion method of keeping a journal. Maybe modernise it a bit and have a digital one with, wait for it, images and videos!

I love keeping a journal and have done so for a fair few years quite diligently and before that, on and off. I have friends who have journals from their grandparents and some even further back.

Would you trust FB with that data? I certainly would not. Nor would I trust ancestry.com.

Yep. And I wish there was a way to capture everything in my life in this Timeline-like fashion, without any extra effort from me.

The one condition I have, though, is that I don't share it with anyone except someone I explicitly want to share it with. With everything being absolutely private and in my control to carry with me, by default, it would be killer. But this could well be opposite to Facebook's own direction.

All-in-all, this is a rehash of the news feed with a few more controls. But the presentation is really nice.

Depends on who you mean by 'anyone except someone I explicitly want to share it with'. You will most likely be able to decide which fb users have access to it, but it will nevertheless be accessible (albeit in some condensed form) to advertisers.

I always figure my life is archived thoroughly enough by the e-mails I send and receive for me to reconstruct any period in reasonably high resolution.

This is iPhoto events, at least for me. I call it my wayback-machine :)

You will not be disappointed then by what we are cooking up.

Cool, it looks interesting. I put my email on the list. I hate hate hate the "sign up your friends now! The more you sign up, the earlier you get in!" thing that shows up after I do. I don't know anything about your site, so I'm not going to go recommend it to anyone.

I can see how the practice started; help spread the word. It just doesn't inspire confidence in me for a site where I'm going to end up posting all sorts of details of my life...

Still, I'll be interested to check it out myself once I can.

Keep going with it. I started a similar (short-lived) site a few years ago.

At the time I think I got too caught up on the idea of it being all my own data. You could easily make it pull in data from Facebook (as well as your own data and other places). I think the gain of a dedicated app is that it won't change when the next idea for a profile comes along. Also, you can probably do an even better and more useful job if that is all you are focussed on.

Good luck!

Cool, I've signed up for the beta.

I'm curious though, you seem fairly upbeat about FB's entry into the space - does them doing so make you any less enthusiastic about your product?

Well it is not the happiest day of my life. I first had this idea when I was looking at these pics on my hard drive and mobile that were years old and yet I had never shared them anywhere because they were just private bits of my life. That is when I read more about it and laid my hands on "Total Recall" and that gave a whole new dimension to the idea.

I am kind of sad actually when I realise that when in say a month from now I launch the product, people would think it was inspired by FB or is atleast something similar.

That said I think merging apps and everything else out there is a bit tricky since what you end up remembering about your life are moments by people and cherishing the experiences. Not by what song you are listening to, what movies you watched and stuff. Or maybe that is just for the emotionally bent folks like me. So we will see how people respond to what is essentially a very natural way to cherish our lives.

Yes. I think there's a real place for this sort of thing. Best of luck.

I wouldn't place all my bets on that. Remember facebook with profile boxes? Bloat. "Click to see more boxes". Yes, some people may rush to upload their childhood pics, but what happens 3 months later? How many people will go through the hassle of scanning old pictures when they know that facebook may overhaul the profile 1 year later? I 'd rather have a dedicated site for my old photos... And, importantly how often do people read blog archives from 2 years back?

I read a lot of older blog articles... when they are presented in a fashion that makes them accessible. Generally they are not, unless you are searching for keywords.

This IS a great design. What isn't is the new front page with four columns; two that are actively updating content. The simplicity of the timeline looks wonderful, but man that new front page is daunting

I'm not really impressed with the design, but nothing out of FB has ever impressed me in the slightest. Maybe I'm just predisposed to be biased on this.

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