The minnows and the whale - a review of newish online memory services

Months have passed and my legions of avid followers will no doubt be wondering at my silence over Facebook Timelines. I've been prevented from blogging much recently by the fact that I've been working flat out - with one client on an R&D project around time-based navigation, and helping another deliver a service based on real-time updates. These are both stories for another occasion; but my ridiculous workload aside, this illustrates something about the current state of the web. The concept of time is now centre stage, whether in the sense of crafting great user experiences around real-time publication, or in the sense of providing a handle on the passage of time across longer spans - our personal pasts and futures, and the past and future of the content and institutions that shape our mental lives.

A few factors have come together to drive this change in the way we treat the Internet: 

• Smartphones encourage capture and storage of memories at an unprecedented scale and with unprecedented ease.
• The cloud has become ubiquitous and (perhaps unwarrantedly) trusted as a medium for storage and sharing of personal content.
• The web has been around for a generation now: not only is the digital past often staring us in the face, but a generation of us have grown up or matured along with it, and are naturally thinking in new ways about how we keep track of our lives.
• The meteoric rise in relevance of social networks means that for many, our default approach to archiving is open to the public (or to an enormous 'friend' group that's as near public as makes no difference).
• We are living through a time of economic and social turmoil that is changing the way we think about what's precious to us.

I don't believe it's any easier to predict the consequences of all this to our clients than it would have been to predict the impact of social media a decade ago. But we do think that some of the services this blog post is about mark a significant trend in user behaviour that organisations thinking about digital strategy are going to need to know about.

Facebook Timelines (the 'whale' of this post's title) is only the most prominent emblem of the web's maturing away from the eternal present. And since you would have had to be hiding under a rock not to know about it by now, I'm going to focus on some slightly less mainstream services that are out there around memory, and some of the underlying themes that bring them together.

1000memories

Probably the most direct pretender to Facebook's crown as default personal archive service, 1000memories invites users to upload a variety of formats centred around the concept of family memories - photos yes, but also documents, quotes, stories, audio (hooray!) and video. What could be their killer app is, er, an iPhone app called Shoebox. Shoebox enables users to 'scan' printed material using the iPhone camera and some nifty inline cropping & tagging functionality. 1000memories claim in their blog (well worth following, incidentally, if you are interested in online remembering) that, partly thanks to the quick uptake of Shoebox, we are for the first time scanning more analogue pictures than printing digital ones, as part of a growing recognition that the cloud is the de facto home or our personal content. 

Like most (if not all) serious online services and networks, 1000memories recognise that they are not going to beat Facebook, so they offer smooth integration with Facebook Timelines as well as its social graph. What they are looking for is an edge in their own specialism - which is why for example they make play of the fact that "the average photo on 1000memories is 20 years old in stark contrast to the average Facebook photo, which is just a year old".

1000memories also have their own community, and the mechanism they are looking to exploit to build it is the family tree. Users can construct family trees on the 1000memories website, inviting living members to join them in the enterprise of uploading and tagging content. They can also invite individuals to provide more information around specific pieces of content. What they don't provide is any ability to integrate with services that are specifically focused on genealogy, and in particular the ability to import or export the gedcom standard. My suspicion that this would deter hardcore genealogists from taking the service seriously was borne out by a quick exchange with a friend who takes his genealogy very seriously indeed, and doesn't see 1000memories as a useful service in that regard.

Erly

If 1000timelines' chosen route to expaning its community is through the family tree, Erly encourages users to mobilise co-participants in events to get involved in social remembering - uploading their own content and tagging others'. We can see a well-considered approach to the passage of time in practice here: Erly allows users to create future events, with messageboards and custom invitation facilities. Here again, users can invite friends from Facebook, and can also import invitation photos from there or other photo sharing services. Following events, the focus then moves to content sharing.

There's obviously a crowded market for services supporting events (Meetup, Eventbrite, LinkedIn, Facebook itself etc) - but the overall vibe of Erly feels more akin to Tumblr or Pinterest in the sense of simplifying functionality and putting content front and centre. As such, it would seem like 1000memories to have found an ecological niche where it can flourish safe from the whale's gaping maw.

Rememble

From the total lack of recent buzz about it, as well as the user numbers it perhaps incautiously displays on its homepage, NESTA-funded Rememble would appear to have become pretty well moribund since a well-received launch five years ago. I mention it here as it seems unfair to leave it out, but also as it looks like a possible object lesson in the importance of timing in launching services online. Text on its homepage proudly proclaims it "a 'washing line' for your digital bits and pieces. Thread together texts, photos, videos, sounds, scribbles, scans, notes, tweets... so they're not drifting in a digital wasteland". I won't comment on the execution, as I haven't signed up (I was deterred by the low figures and the lack of a gallery, which both looked like warning signs of a digital graveyard if not a wasteland). But could it be that the relatively carefree world of 2007 (before not only the economic crash but also the ubiquity of the smartphone and the cloud all changed the way we think aboutour memories) just wasn't ready for an idea whose time was soon to come?

Digital Scrapbooking

My fellow Unthinkables and I first noticed the existence of a phenomenon known as 'Digital Scrapbooking' when we put together a conceptual prototype a couple of years ago for an idea we christened, erm, The Digital Scrapbook. It turns out we weren't the first to coin that phrase, and that it's widely used by what appears to be a big and very active online community mainly of mothers, for whom digital technology is yet another realm for homespun domestic craft alongside quiltmaking, knitting and needlework. (Indeed, the digital scrapbooking community borrows tropes from all of those more traditional crafts.) More to the point, the trend is an outgrowth of existing physical activity for those already keen on keeping scrapbooks of their families' lives. The digital scrapbook lives in a determinedly web 1.0 world, bringing together Geocities-style web design with a lot of offline software and old-school communities and content sharing for people who want to create things that look a lot like old-school scissors-and-glue scrapbooks and either share them online or print them out. Enthusiasts share tips with each other, and enterprising designers sell PSDs of their layouts across a dispersed set of websites and blogs.

This is no more cutting edge technology than a pipe and slippers are, but it is a salutory reminder that old technologies, once established, very often don't go away. Just as many of the most successful and flourishing online communities are based on 90s-style bulletin board technology, a whole lot of activity still goes on away from the shiny, hip and interoperable world in which many digital insiders live their digital lives.

At the borders of remembering

I've pointed out elsewhere that pretty much all digital activity leaves a trace and is therefore to some extent about memory. Narrowing the focus from that observation, there is still a borderland of related concepts and by-products around services that are purely and explicitly designed around personal and social archiving.

Gimme Bar (pictured) and Amazon's Universal Wishlist each in their own way (i.e. for content and products respectively) scratch the itch of users who have outgrown the ability of offline bookmarks and even traditional social/cloud bookmarking services like Delicious to aggregate, organise and share the things they are interested in. Again, looking at Gimme Bar, I sense the operation of the same zeitgeist (one that has grown weary of the fiddliness and complexity of many of the first generation of web 2.0 services, but also one more in love with content) that has contributed to the success of the likes of Pinterest.

1000memories' arresting claim that 'Old is more viral than new' inevitably brings to mind the paradox of Instagram, a photo capture and sharing service that on the one hand is all about simple, easy, viral and real-time sharing of content but on the other offers the novelty-fatigued a nostalgic patina of the past through a selection of arty filters that simulate the aging process of photographic prints. Instagram also has in common with 1000memories and Erly that they allow in-app or online photo editing and image manipulation.

Like Gimme Bar, the success of Storify rests partly on the recognition that users are growing ever keener to treat the web as a canvas of raw materials to hoard, remix and share. The flipside of Erly and 1000memories enabling a social model around personal memory, Storify enables individuals to assemble elements already available on the web (through Twitter, blogs, image sharing sites, online news sources and so on) into their own personal take on public events (thereby recognising that memory without context is solipsism).

Dipity uses the concept of the timeline as the hook on which its users can hang their own curation of public events, using HTML5 functionality to enable users to create timelines (as well as a range of other views driven by the same data) of public events that again draw in a range of formats alongside the crucial extra element of the timestamp. 

Finally and just for the sake of completeness it's worth stating the bleedin' obvious fact that for many, online remembering is something that has little or nothing to do with the exhibitionist world of websites and apps - it means using the cloud (iCloud, Amazon-based backup services etc) to store stuff that's shared, if at all, with nearest and dearest and altogether out of sight of the general public.

BBC Online's Social Strategy

There's a huge amount to say about the changes BBC Online announced last week. As a former member of staff with many friends whose jobs under threat, I'm prompted by both personal loyalty and passion for the BBC's mission and purpose to say a lot of things I might regret later. So this post isn't about the overall rights and wrongs of the strategy and cuts. It's about a narrower pet passion and area of interest of ours - social media and accountability.

Ian Hunter has written a concise and lucid post about this on the BBC Internet Blog, setting out some ways the BBC is seeking to move "from a site which offers a few fairly circumscribed social experiences to one which is more social everywhere". The most eye-catching and commented announcments are the closure of the 606 sport messageboard and the so-called "disposal" of h2g2 (in other words, the BBC is trying to find a sympathetic new owner for the latter project). There is also a reiteration of the deliberate trend away from messageboards and towards trying to shepherd interactions and conversations around BBC-generated content (blog posts, some programmes, some news stories).

There is also a restatement of the importance to the BBC's approach to social media of Facebook and Twitter. This itself takes a number of forms. Listeners to the increasingly cash-strapped World Service will have already noticed the extent to which the BBC has made itself dependent on Facebook in particular as CMS, CRM and user engagement strategy combined, with programmes often bypassing the BBC website completely in order to promote their Facebook pages. We've already blogged here about the iPlayer's integration with Facebook and Twitter. And we publicly recommended that the BBC engage more fully with external public conversation and comment around both its content and its strategy.

But there's clearly a danger here as well. In conceding ownership of the social graph, conversation and in many cases content itself to international commercial interests, an accountability deficit may emerge, where the BBC's audience and paymasters are less able to exercise their intellectual rights of ownership in a transparent manner. They may also be less able to own and manage the data they generate around themselves in relation to the BBC. It should be noted that Facebook and Twitter are both still entirely privately owned, unlisted companies.

There are of course additional concerns, such as the BBC losing control over its own content, and the building of private value to individual corporations instead of public or civic value to the commons. There are echoes with the long-running debate over the BBC's support of proprietary over open formats for audio and video. That one resolved pretty happily. And it's important to recognise the legitimate public service argument in support of, say, Windows Media or Facebook, on the grounds of meeting the habits of the audience - standards as defined by level of uptake rather than theoretical openness or public ownership.

As Ian puts it: "Much of this is standard practice across the web, of course, and we need to evolve to meet the changing expectations of our users." Absolutely right. But this in microcosm represents an overall concern with the BBC's online strategy - is there too much of a desire to fit in to the online world as it is, and not enough of a vision for the unique role that the BBC can play in shaping that world?