This article was published on December 21, 2010

Memolane: Your social media actions become a slick timeline of memories [Invites]


Memolane: Your social media actions become a slick timeline of memories [Invites]

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

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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:

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