Show HN: Everyday.me - a mobile app to record your life and store it forever | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Everyday.me - a mobile app to record your life and store it forever

everyday.me

104 pointsyukuan74 comments

I can see how a "life recorder" sounds appealing, and even genuinely useful. But shouldn't we also think about how much mischief and damage could be done to your life if someone decided to comb through your "life record"?

Real-life cases of people who made extensive audio recordings of their day-to-day lives and what happened to them:

(a) High-profile private investigator Anthony Pellicano recorded all his conversations with his clients, including Sylvester Stallone and Hollywood producer Aaron Russo ("Trading Places"). Details about the tapes were leaked by the police after his office was raided on an unrelated matter.

(b) Tax-shelter promoter Gary Kornman, in his bankruptcy proceeding, was forced to reveal and turn over 8000 secret recordings he made of conversations with clients.

(c) Former U.S. President Richard Nixon installed hidden microphones in his own office so that his advisers could not claim to have disagreed with his decisions. Nixon felt that such a record was very important but the taping system trapped himself.

It's unfortunate that each of the examples above involve wrongdoing--they're the most readily found because they get the most publicity.

But I think that anyone with a continuous record of their life will be vulnerable to being screwed over in some way. It could be as simple finding instances where you said or did anything that was contradictory to your current opinions and beliefs.

Putting the data in the cloud, and under the control of a third party, makes it that much worse to being exposed.

A "life recorder" that was completely and utterly under your own control would make more sense.

Yes, I am a life recorder junkie and will never put my private data on the cloud. TrueCrypt is your best friend :-)

You should take a look at https://deniablevideo.com/ for any video you record. but for a fixed location like a home or office, since it's not a mobile device.

That 'deniable' part is a bit thin. Say, law enforcement finds this device at your home. Even if it is not plugged in, a case could be made that you have been videotaping. It would be more useful if this thing had a secondary function, say as a file server, and if it were priced like one (this box is US $5999.00 for 500GB)

* forever or until we get purchased

But in all seriousness, the design looks really great. It's reminiscent of path, but that's a good thing. It seems like Evernote would be one of your main competitors, but luckily your application has a much more casual user friendly design.

Evernote has a pretty casual user friendly design, too. There are a lot of other options on the mobile apps, but I ignore them and can testify that Evernote Mobile still works fine for me. The two just happen to serve different purposes -- this application is geared towards a more specific one.

Evernote is clunky, slow, and confusing to navigate. Just the processes and slowness of finding and editing an existing note, particularly one that has anything copy/pasted with formatting, keeps me from using Evernote for anything much, let alone this. Evernote is close to being excellent, but for me falls short of being usable.

Thanks, we're glad you like our design! I think Evernote is a very well done app also, but targets a more business/work-driven use case. A poor analogy may be if Evernote is good for those 8 hours you spend at work each day, then we hope to be helpful a few times during the rest of those 16 hours in the day (minus sleep, of course).

The juxtaposition of the "Record Your Life. Store it Forever." slogan with the now-trendy-tomorrow-not website makes me cringe.

The word "Forever" is loaded with so much meaning.

The cursive font, the .me URL, the tired-ass layout with those obligatory three boxes at the bottom... all of these things reflect aesthetic sensibilities that may as well belong to fruitflies.

Maybe this app will be great and genuinely add meaning to people's lives but it makes me want to buy a notebook, some picture frames and a sturdy old chest that I can bury underground.

I totally understand that and it lines up with what I thought when I first saw the story in the front page.

I think a good way to mitigate that fear is for this guys to open source the server side of this app, allow people to easily and securely transfer their data out and expose a setting in the app to change the server it uses.

Ok... so I get what the app does, but why would I want to use it? Why would I want to capture every single moment of my life, regardless of importance, forever? What do I care where I was a year ago? And why on earth would I want a "quarterly report" of my life with statistics? Honest questions. Apologies for the bluntness.

I don't have a clue, but Stephen Wolfram could probably answer this question : http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2012/03/the-personal-analytic...

A person who has a personal diary, would really see value of this product.

Having to consolidate all my public sources and also allowing to update privately is really cool.

You could create a retrospective like Stephen Wolfram:

http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2012/03/the-personal-analytic...

Indeed! That's the direction we hope to move in with our period reports based on your entries. Nicholas Feltron was also a big inspiration for our work.

Being very much an obsessive over-analyzer, this data sounds terrific to me...

In the last couple years I've been keeping a semi-daily diary of any activity that's out of the ordinary -- seeing a movie, taking a dance class etc. It's orders of magnitude less quantified than Stephen Wolfram, but it's fascinating to read back through it every now and then.

As I've gotten older, time has sped up. Whole years seem to go by in the blink of an eye and I think, "what did I do in [say] 2007?" Keeping a diary has helped me to slow time town a bit.

I think this whole Personal Analytics thing is going to explode. Every time I see a service like this my heart skips a beat. I want to work on this stuff so much but I have to finish my army service first. Good job.

Yeah the concept of their quarterly and anual reports reminds me very much of what Nicholas Felton was trying to do with Datum. Where Datum broke down for me was that I had to stay consistent with manually updating it.

Good point. You don't mind something that automatically tracks you (gps, events, etc), it wouldn't creep you out?

and we were quite inspired by Nicholas Feltron's work also. I think they're amazing.

This is the big challenge when it comes to quantified self -- passive tracking can be creepy, but manual track has such high adoption costs. Seems like it would be hard for manual tracking to go extreme, bc few people care as much about quantifying everything as this community does. Any form of passive tracking has higher upside but also must be treated carefully so it seems trustworthy.

I agree.

Kevin Kelly wrote a great post about the inevitability of life logging back in 2007: http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2007/02/lifelogging_a...

Small piece of feedback: if you are going to connect with facebook anyway, instragram and whatever else, why are you making me write my name, email address, etc.? Nitpicking here.

Also, I'm just testing the app, but if I were to use it for real, I would like to know who I'm going to be trusting my most private thoughts and activities to. I didn't see much about that in your page, the "who am I and why I am here" question would be extremely important for your users to trust you, so including information about where you want to take everyday.me is important (how will you monetize it? there are many black hat monetization schemes you could pull with this kind of data which wouldn't be ok so we want to know what your plans are).

Thanks for sharing!

Hi, thanks for the feedback. We just need it to stay in touch with you and we don't want to spam your Facebook, Twitter, etc to do so.

Re: the About page. Yes, in our rush we didn't have time to put up an About page to tell you more about us. We'll be putting one up soon. We really hope to build something that can help people collect and tell the stories of their lives. To me that's what gets me really excited, is knowing that this app may be able to help someone share an exciting trip they've had to London, or to reflect back on how they've gotten to this point from a year ago. That's really fulfilling for us to know, and our motivation for building this.

You didn't answer his question about monitization. How will the product stay alive?

I'm sure those quarterly printed reports don't come free.

I'm not sure I like the direction a lot of these applications seem to be going where the point of living becomes to distill all of our experiences and adventures through a 3" screen. It drives me nuts to no end when I am hiking or at a concert and everyone has to stop what they're doing and waste time trying to view what's right in front of them through their phone.

I got a letter in the mail recently that I wrote to myself almost 10 years ago. It was only one page long but it's ridiculous how much it moved me. I wrote about my relationship with my family and what I hoped to do with my career. Getting that brief window into my former self was amazing.

I've been using Everyday.me for about a month now and it gives me a lightweight version of that feeling. I don't record everything in my life, but I throw in the occasional photo or comment about my weekend. I probably could keep that same data in a physical scrapbook or word document, but having an iOS app makes it convenient.

For me, journaling is not really about the input; that part is tedious. I enjoy consuming the journal later, so the input is necessary. Everyday.me just makes the input a little less of a hassle.

> I got a letter in the mail recently that I wrote to myself almost 10 years ago.

How? Did an external organization hold your letter for you?

This could very well become a good mobile personal diary. Love the way old history from Facebook/Instagram/Twitter is imported. It would be great to have a good way of visualizing this (Examples: Snapjoy, Facebook Timeline, iPhoto, Flickr Calendar)

The "Receive beautifully printed quarterly & annual reports with highlights and statistics." isn't prominent enough. To me, this is the killer feature - I've wanted this for years but I've been too lazy to collect it all myself.

Yeah, the printed quarterly report is a brilliant feature. I helped the everyday.me team with the design of it, esp around the data visualization bit. Excited to hear how people respond to it.

<\humblebrag>

Now that so many things in our lives are timestamped and available online, collating it all together is a natural next step. It's interesting to see all the different ways that this is being done by different apps and services.

When I came up with Remembary in 2010, I thought I was the first to mix diary-writing and all these public feeds - and then I discovered that Momento had been doing a similar thing for almost a year beforehand. I feel like there's been a lot more of these kinds of apps and services popping up lately.

I like the Annual Reports idea - I'd be interested to see what gets tracked and how it's analyzed. It's also a great monetization strategy, although I know from experience that print fulfillment and shipping can be a headache!

Also, their "Blast From The Past" feature highlights one of the less-known benefits of keeping a journal: seeing what you were doing in the past and comparing it to what you're doing now - and thus getting perspective on both the past and the present. I have about six years of handwritten diaries, and I'll often go through them and check the same day in each one. The new version of Remembary (just finished QA testing - should be in the App Store in a few weeks) has "1 Year Earlier" and "1 Year Later" buttons just for this kind of thing.

Congratulations on a cool looking app. Trust me when I say I know how difficult it can be to make something that seems to simple.

"Now that so many things in our lives are timestamped and available online, collating it all together is a natural next step. It's interesting to see all the different ways that this is being done by different apps and services."

I completely agree. It seems like the timing is right for an app like this.

" Store it Forever. " till they got bought out and shut down, acquihired or go out of business.

By 'mobile', do you mean iOS only?

Sorry, yes we're only iOS for now. But hopefully expanding to Android soon!

Love the addition of printed reports (revenue!) but this seems (quite literally looks) like Path in terms of the layout. Given that you are pulling from other networks and adding other improvements on Path's model, why not change up the look a bit to differentiate?

What does "Store it forever" mean?

Would it automatically send me a formatted archive of my entries (say every week or month)?

Send me a file that is automatically uploaded to Google Drive or DropBox or even just email it to me regularly.

I'd be much happier if it only kept records locally, or had the option. As creepy as... every social network has gotten, I want my privacy and anonymity back. As interesting, and potentially useful as this seems, I don't feel comfortable giving every detail of my life to a private third party to store "forever." I don't make committing crimes a habit or anything (copyright infringement not withstanding), but with the US government's position that anything you choose to store with a third party being accessible without a warrant, I'd prefer to store things locally.

How does this app compare to Day One and other journal applications?

Not everyone wants to share everything. So this could be a great personal analytics tool capture life and build a better self. Then anything you don't mind sharing could go into a more public social network. I like the idea of a private timeline.

In the Reddit AMA Kevin Rose said he thought "Quantified self (eg. fuelband, fitbit)" were the next trends. So a Quantified self timeline would make a lot of sense and bring things together quite nicely.

Good luck with this and excited to see how this progresses.

thank you! yes we are also big believers in the power of "quantified self" & life-logging, and we will be adding more analytics features.

Why does this kind of app scare me ? (Regardless of how beautiful they look, how well they are programmed, how kind/smart/known is the funder, ...)

Funny, i had this same idea 4 years ago. Bought iCapsule.com. The idea of "generational" digital asset preservation is a big problem to solve. Museums across the world are struggling with this. My guess, is this startup hasn't figured out the problem of how to preserve assets for 25-50 years. That is a real problem. Solve that and I'll be a customer!

Apart from the printed reports, i wonder what is so different here from Path ? Path is an established app with a massive user base, that does everything i can ask from a journal,with the additional ability to share it to a private, handpicked social graph. I see no compelling reason that would make me switch to everyday.me

A lot of these kinds of 'Automatic Diary' apps use Twitter feeds as a key data source (especially now that Twitter accounts are integrated directly into iOS) - is anybody else worried that this valuable source of life records might dry up if Twitter starts shutting down API access?

Sounds like a pitch for http://join.app.net!

But in seriousness:

1) If you are pulling these tweets, you should be saving them.

2) This source is already “drying up” in some sense in that you cannot access your own tweets older than 3,200 tweets ago. (That’s a number I blew by years ago. It sucks. It’s “my” data — and text, at that! — and Twitter won’t let me have it.)

We're definitely following app.net very closely, and would be quite interested in figuring out how we can integrate in the future.

I don't see the main competition of this being Evernote or other "life recorder" applications. The main competitor is Facebook. People record where they are, put all their pics there, and mark all the moments of their life there.

The name confused me at first because I already knew about the Everyday app by Noah Kalina, Adam Lisagor, William Wilkinson and Oliver White - http://everyday-app.com/

How are you installing this over the air? Are you using an enterprise license?

Probably using TestFlightApp: https://testflightapp.com/

From what I understand you still need user's udid with test flight. This just simply installs on any device.

Exactly, that's why I was so curious.

I had the same question. So I dug into the download page source and found an itms-services:// link pointing to a plist. This type of plist gives info about an app and points to an IPA which contains the app bundle itself. I've worked with enterprise certs before, and this was one of the ways we would initiate the intalls from a webpage.

So my guess is that they are indeed using an enterprise certificate. Though I can't be 100% sure, I can't think of anything else that would be done this way.

I was always under the impression that Apple required companies to have at least 500 employees to qualify for an enterprise cert. But, it looks like they might have lifted that restriction, which is fantastic.

What a pointless app. You have a brain. it processes memories. Brains have worked pretty well for millions of years recording memories. And they don't require a Terms of Service or Privacy Policy.

You mean that notoriously unreliable system which drifts over time by re-storing altered information during every recall, selectively stores some details and not others, and nearly always functions poorly during old age, the time when people would most like to tell stories and reminisce? That one?

Yeah, written records were probably the greatest advance of all time, simply because they aren't made of meat.

What's the business model ensuring the "forever" part?

Is it possible to export all the data to a service like dropbox automatically, so that if you do disappear, it really is forever?

Beautiful! Well done! Hopefully, it will be a good replacement for paper journal. Would greatly look forward to the iPad release!

I love the idea of the printed book being sent out each quarter - that's very cool! Scrapbookers would love that.

isn't this a lot like http://www.momentoapp.com/ ? I've been using it for some time now, it only stores the data locally with an option to backup into itunes.

Your POS seems to be the Statistics thing, momento doesn't have that.

Neat app. Don't think it will have mainstream success, in current form. People are lazy.

Forgetting is a blessing, not a curse,

Just curious. What's the reasoning behind this being a mobile app? Shouldn't this just primarily be a website ?

Are you asking "why mobile", or "why native, as opposed to HTML5?"

The answer to the first question is obvious, IMHO. I always carry a mobile device, whereas I'm only at a computer 12-14 hours a day.

As to the second, opening a web-app using a mobile browser is cumbersome and thus a fairly large barrier to adoption. The key to this app's success - as with any personal analytics tool - is continuous use.

We do have a website option btw, it's not as full-featured as the mobile app (yet), but you'll access it once you download the app.

Slick looking app. Kudos!

This looks sick. Is this all native? Did you guys design and build this in-house?

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