Eachday

Picture yourself 40 years from now looking back through your collected memories, skimming through the days, months and years to see how the happenings in your life were all connected. We call this the “The Long View”, and it is was our starting point when we designed Eachday.

Here are 5 different models of personal media sharing, I have addressed The Long View for each.

Model 1: Album Based Services

By far the most common format. You know the drill, you need to first create an album like “Ava’s 1st Birthday” or “Fiji Vacation” before you upload. These services are too numerous to mention, but they range from the biggies like Snapfish, DotPhoto and Shutterfly which rely on selling prints, to smaller and better designed services like Bubbleshare, to feature rich applications like Smugmug. There are literally hundreds more, and the better ones have some take or set of features that make them unique. When using these services, your memories (usually just photos) will end up in the ol’ album.

The problem in the Long View: For all your efforts uploading albums, the net result is an ever-growing and disconnected list of… albums. There isn’t much of a Long View. Your collection certainly grows over time, but it hardly grows in meaning, since there is no meaning without context. And what about your other memories, like video, audio, and journal? If you even have the option of uploading videos, you’ll need to put those videos in a video-only album, but memories are memories, regardless of what media type they are. Albums will always have an important place (we call them “Collections”) but with Eachday there is a wider fabric that ties it all together: the passing day.

Model 2: Tag Based Social Services

With tag based sharing, you describe your photo or video by use of a keyword, which allows you and other people to easily find it and other images relating to a certain topic – place name, subject matter, person etc. It doesn’t sound very exciting on paper, but it can be fun and addictive. Flickr was the first mover here, and its tag based model not only changed photo sharing, but also set the beginnings for a whole new web. Flickr and its descendents (like YouTube) typically treat your photos/videos as a stream or channel, and once they are tagged, you can further organize and categorize them using keywords. Flickr is still the best on the block, because in this model, “the best” relates to the number of users and the amount of uploaded and tagged stuff. Flickr did it right for photos. YouTube did it right for video.

The problem in the Long View: If you have a photo or video that may be interesting in any way to a wider audience, by all means inject it into the public sphere, and Flickr or YouTube are great for that. But I often stumble upon very personal family oriented content on places like this and think to myself “Why is this here?.” Looking at your captured memories as a whole, some of it is beautiful and interesting, some is personal, some only you would care about. Eachday was designed to be your hub for ALL of these memories, with 3 levels of privacy – protect your entire account, protect a day, or protect an individual memory. Then, when you have that gem photo or video that you want to be seen, you can publish it directly to your Flickr or YouTube account from your Eachday account. That means, over the Long View, the whole of your memories stays in one place, where maybe just a handful of friends and family have access, while your interesting stuff can be published from this “hub” out to larger networks so it can still get the social love it deserves. More specific to the Long View, Eachday has tags and collections, but its emphasis is on the personal accumulation and preservation of memories over a lifetime. We’ll leave the viral tagging network effect to those who came before.

Model 3: Personal Media Sharing within Social Networks

There are lots of flavors of social network based media sharing, with new services arising all the time. The behomith MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, the list goes on. Then there are social networks that do the personal multimedia and daily journal thing better, such as Multiply.com and Lifelogger. All of these services approach sharing in varied ways, with different features, and usually there is overlap with Models 1 and 2 (albums and tagging) above. Maybe it’s unfair to group MySpace with Lifelogger, since Lifelogger provides more tools for collecting your memories over time than MySpace. Wait, I just took another look at Lifelogger, and next to every photo, there is something called “Hotness”, where any random blow can rank how hot they think you are. And hmm, how do I get to the previous day? Scratch that, they deserve to be grouped together. It would be a long night if I even attempted to clearly differentiate how they all approached personal media sharing. Lucky for me, they all have one thing in common – viral stuff cheaply wrapped around your personal memories. Hey, I’m not knocking the wild success of these things, it’s just not my demographic, and not the demographic we built Eachday for.

The problem in the Long View: Since the primary objective of these social networks is to “grow the beast” virally, there is minimal focus on privacy and the meaningful accumulation and preservation of your memories. When you are looking back through your memories years from now, you’ll be glad you weren’t dumping them into a social network. This is an easy one, ‘nuff said.

Model 4: The Personal Blog

Some people opt to use a blogging tool like Blogger or Typepad to publish and share their memories. Usually this type of person has at least a modicum of technical ability, and wants to maintain some control over their site. Hey, we’re all for that, Eachday was designed to be the central hub for your memories, so we built an easy way to publish directly to your Blogger account from your Eachday account (more publishing services on the way).

The problem in the Long View: The standard blog format is top down, meaning that archives get lost and buried. It is difficult and not much fun to scan and visualize your past, at least the photo/video stuff, in a standard blog format. The more you upload, the longer it scrolls, until you get down to the bottom of the page and click that “Previous” button. Some blogs do have calendars, but compare the layouts of these pages and the way the media is treated on an Eachday page. Blogs are tailor made for primarily textual content, not so great for collecting other types of memories. Then there are the privacy levels that Eachday offers, the tag based collections, the Memory Stream, the Day Sorter, and other features. In short, blogs are great mainly for journaling with some media sprinkled in, Eachday was designed to be the central hub for all of your media.

Model 5: Publishing to the Web from a Desktop Application

A pundit asked me this question recently “OK, you mention this whole privacy thing, why then publish to the web at all? Why not just keep your memories on your local disk, using a desktop application like Picasa or iPhoto, and then publish password protected albums to the Web when you want to share something with family?” Hmm, that’s a good one. This is all just personal preference anyway. I personally have tons of stuff in iPhoto, but as much as I like Apple’s UI and product design, I don’t really get much out of iPhoto’s perspective or “Past 12 Months” view of my memories. While you have the option to be completely private with Eachday, it was really designed to be more of a mixed-state: most often public, with certain days and individual memories kept private, but overall a “live” account that friends and family can keep up with.

The problem in the Long View: See Model 1 – you wind up with a bunch of disconnected albums on the web if you occasionally publish from a desktop application, and make sure you maintain really good backups of your data if you keep all of your memories local on your hard drive. Otherwise, there is no problem with the Long View if sharing your life in date context with a close circle is not important. You may miss out on ways to visualize passing time like with Eachday’s Memory Stream, but many of these desktop applications provide their own good ways to visualize your memories. Again, it all comes down to what you want to do with your stuff. Eachday can be totally public, totally private, or mixed, but it is published content.

Stay tuned for more thoughts on “The Long View”.