A lot of us, or our mothers, have a shoebox stuffed in the closet containing old photos and memories. Some of us even have these items strewn about our desk with nowhere to put them.

The company 1000memories, which stores your family history online, wants you to put all of your paper memories into a digital “Shoebox” with its app.

The service is primarily displayed as a place to share scans of physical photos, but I’ve found a few different uses for it. Since the camera has gotten better on iDevices, services like DocScan that let you “scan” documents with a photo have popped up.

Shoebox‘s differentiator is the social sharing aspect, though, and isn’t focused on just storing receipts to expense later.

Here’s a video from 1000Memories, showcasing Shoebox:

Scanning your stuff

I’ve found that I keep a lot of things that remind me of events I’ve attended, things I’ve done, and places I’ve experienced. I have stacks of ticket stubs, lanyards from conferences, and other physical items that probably should be placed in a box and stored. But I like remembering them, none the less.

Shoebox lets you take a photo of these items, describe and label them, for safe digital keeping and sharing.

The app allows you to crop and change the aspect ratio of the image, making it as flat as possible. Of course, taking a photo of the item from above will make sure it comes out great.

The missing piece of this puzzle though is the ability to add your own descriptive tags manually. I’m not sure how 1000memories could have left this out of Shoebox, but they did. Right now, items are tagged by the title, date you enter, and the names of the people in the photo. A little more customization would make this product near-perfect.

Social Shoebox

Instead of taking that Shoebox out of the closet, you can share your items publicly or with your family and friends. There’s no commenting or interaction here, which isn’t a bad thing necessarily. Not every service needs the ability to like something and say “wow that’s cool”. Shoebox is more personal than that.

When you open the Shoebox app, you’ll see items that are featured. Right now they’re mostly old photos, but I did stumble on some old postcards and letters. I don’t know the story behind them and don’t really have to. It’s interesting just to see what people would store in their own digital Shoebox.

While it’s not time to box up all of your stuff and throw it away, storing things in a place to share with others and review often is a great thing. Shoebox could add some more customization features like the tagging that I mentioned, but if you’re ready to clear your desk and closets of some things, the service is a great place to put them. Digitally, of course.

The moments we have in life are important, and sometimes when we’re using social media tools like Twitter and Facebook, we forget to fully enjoy the moment. Or worse, we totally forget the context of the moment. We’re left with a bunch of photos, videos, and tweets with nothing more than a date and time on them. No notes, no guidance on what was really going on at that very moment.

Nostalgiqa for iOS wants to take your memories as they happen and store each item as a “fragment”, with a parent memory. For example, the “Snoop Dogg Concert” would be a memory and “The Cute Girl” would be a fragment. With Nostalgiqa, you could take a picture of said cute girl and tie it to the parent memory.

After you’ve started your memory, and start to save your fragment, you can record text, a picture, and your emotion at the time of the memory. The text feature is interesting, it’s like keeping a private diary that you can make public if you like, or keep for yourself. All of these extra steps will pay off in the future, as with any service, the more data and information you put in, the more you get back by way of visualization and collection.

This is a really neat concept and the app is drop dead gorgeous. It’s nice to see some visual designs in apps, as some developers are using the basic design kits days, and everything is starting to look like Instagram. Sure, the Nostalgiqa way of adding items takes some extra thought, but the outcome is well worth it in the long run.

Nostalgiqa is 99 cents in the iOS app store, and I think it’s well worth it, especially if you prefer to privately record memories and moments for recollection. Facebook’s timeline is a way to bring up the context of when something happened, but again, the full picture of the experience still isn’t there.

There’s public sharing here as well, letting you take a glimpse into other people’s memories and fragments. This exploration feature is equally gorgeous as the rest of the app. After going through some of the text and photo posts that are shared in public, it feels very reminiscent of LiveJournal’s early days.

It will take a lot for the public sharing aspect of Nostalgiqa to take off, but if enough photo moment collectors enjoy the concept of adding a little more “color” to their memories by way of text, then it could happen.

There’s no doubting that there are a lot of sites out there which will take your information from social media sites and combine it into a viewable timeline. However, we’ve not yet seen one that’s quite as slick as Memolane.

Obviously, we really care about the memories that we create. As our society as a whole moves more online, we’re documenting these events of our lives across social media sites. Facebook understands this, as evidenced by the accidental launch of Facebook Memories. Foursquare even “gets it”, and has recently introduced a History service.

While the basis is the same — allow access to your profiles, the site gathers information and then displays it for you — the exexcution is beautiful, and the value-added features of being able to create stories with friends really sets it apart.

So, what are the services? How’s this for a list:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Flickr
• Last.fm
• Picasa
• Foursquare
• Tripit
• Spotify
• RSS

While that’s an arguably messy combination of social services, Memolane does an admirable job of keeping the information looking tidy, even with the newly-released feature of YouTube memories.

Across the top is your detailed timeline, showing social things that you posted on that day. As you can see in the shot above, I took a trip to the Winter Music Conference in 2009 and Memolane archived the whole thing. Did more than one thing in a day? Those will be listed vertically, while the horizontal scroll moves through your timeline.

Typically speaking, you’ll want to navigate through Memolane by a click-and-drag function moving left to right. However, there are keyboard shortcuts if you are so inclined:

So what’s the rest of the story? Memolane lets you keep things private if you want, or go as public as you desire. You can change your online services (networks) with a click and even choose between Amazon MP3 or the Spotify client for music playback (when music posts are included). The settings are all very straightforward and easy to find. Make some friends on Memolane? You’ll see all of the information about them in the News section.

The last thing to talk about then is Stories. First off, you need to know what a Story is. Here’s the description from the site:

A story is a new timeline where you and your friends can combine favorite memories from your own Memolane.

Stories can be about events in the past, present, or events yet to come.

Combining information from your own timeline into a story is incredibly easy. To start, you’ll just give your Story a name, add some contributors and then the rest somewhat falls into place. Privacy is turned on, by default, so you’ll need to change that if you want to tell your story to the world. The end result? Pretty darned impressive. In only a few minutes, I was able to combine a couple of friends’ timelines with my own to get a better look at that trip to Miami.

Here’s the rub — Memolane is in a private beta right now. If you want in, you’ll need an invitation code. Luckily, your friends here at TNW have gotten together with the Memolane crew to provide the first 1,000 people access to their memories with this code:

thenextweb

Just head to the signup page, enter your information with that code and you’ll be halfway to reliving the best times of your life. Or, at least the ones that you put on Facebook. So head over, sign up and then link your public timelines in our comments below.

Want to get behind the scenes? Robert Scoble sat down with part of the Memolane team and got the inside scoop: