Eachday

We’ve had many requests to allow commenting for unregistered visitors to your account. So, we caved in and made it happen. Now great aunt Nellie, who was unlikely to register her own Eachday account, can say “My goodness deary! That’s a fancy internet photograph!”.

Here’s a convenient new feature – you can now breeze through your Eachday account using your keyboard.

On any page, hit these keys to do the following:

• H: Returns to the overview of the current account
• C: Goes to the collections of the current account
• F: Goes to the friends of the current account

On a collection or day:

• S: Starts the slideshow

On a day:

• Left arrow: Goes to the previous day
• Right arrow: Goes to the next day

On an item:

• Left arrow: Goes to the previous item
• Right arrow: Goes to the next item
• O: Goes to the day/collection overview

Yeah, we know – most Eachdayers will stick to the mouse. But, once you start keyboarding through your account, we pretty much guarantee that you’ll never go back to the old way.

We’ve had several Eachdayers mention that it would be nice to have one centralized place for all your visitor comments, rather than comments getting “lost” in the past.

So we banged it out. Now on your profile panel, the “Show All Comments” button lists all the comments and discussion threads in your account, with each comment linking to the original context on the day or item it is associated with.

All of your requests and feedback are appreciated! We are always listening.

It’s time again to announce some more upgrades.

Beneath each day, and each photo in your account, you will now see 3 buttons: “Collect This Memory”, “Share This Memory” and “Order Prints and Gifts”.These 3 buttons expand into panels once clicked.

With “Collect This Memory”, we have given more exposure to collections, it is now much easier to add any item to a collection, or start a new collection with any item. You also now have the option to collect without tagging. Anytime that you want to add something to a collection, regardless of tag, just open this panel and go.

With “Share This Memory”, we have made sharing your memories easier. Also, aside from being in a more convenient spot, you may now personalize your message when you invite someone to see a specific day or memory.

And the big one – with “Order Prints & Gifts”, you may now finally order prints from your account, and create all kinds of great stuff from your memories – prints, photo books, t-shirts, calendars, posters, customized mugs and more!

We’ve been burning the midnight oil on several big improvements to Eachday – among them a major UI overhaul that will be going live on or before April 1.

These changes, which affect every aspect of your account, were the result of gathering customer feedback and analyzing customer behavior over the last year. For example, we noticed that a relatively small percentage of you discovered and opened the Memory Stream along the top, so we redesigned it, and we noticed that not enough of you were Collecting after organizing into Days, so we brought the Collect feature to a higher level. These are just 2 of several examples.

We are also adding new features, such as ordering prints and gifts, which this new interface was designed to contain. Overall, this new design is just a brighter, cleaner container for your memories. No detail was spared.

Here are some low resolution preview screens, much more detailed info coming soon!

The New Overview:

The New Day Main View:

The New Single Entry View:

Settings:

A major upgrade! Now you can see all the latest from your friends, and stay in touch, in one centralized place. No longer will you need to launch out or open another window, separately, to see what your people are up to.

So, what all is in your new Friends section? Glad you asked, here is what you can do now:

• See a “feed” (or digest) of all your friends’ latest activity, in one convenient spot.

• Add friends (well, of course)

• Keep Friends and Family updated. Eachday now allows you to have a once-weekly digest of your activity sent by email to the people you care about. For example – Aunt Erma may never use Eachday herself, but she might love to have a handy digest sent to her each week so she can keep up with her nephew.

• Invite Friends to Eachday. Do you know people who aren’t using Eachday, but you wish they were in your Friends network? Now there is a convenient way to invite them in.

• Import your Contacts. If you use Gmail, Yahoo Mail, MSN Hotmail or AOL, now you can import your contacts in one super-simple step to automatically keep people updated on your Eachday account.

Now there’s a heaping, helping spoonful of upgrades …

Organizing your memories into collections with Eachday is already fairly feature rich. You may start a tag-based collection and have your stuff automatically organized based on assigned keywords, or you may upload a collection independent of days (like an old school album), or you may drag and drop things from your timeline into a new or existing collection.

However, we are trying to make it even easier, so today (or tomorrow) we will be rolling out a new feature, and you’ll find it in your options menu along the upper right of each memory – the “Collect” button. No longer will you have to scroll to the bottom and add a tag (for tag-based collections), or go to your Collections page to collect things.

Whenever you see something that should belong in a collection, just click Collect, and you’ll be able to add it to an existing collection or start a new collection with that photo, video, or audio clip. Easy peasy.

The ability to move an individual memory to a different date has been deployed for a couple months now. You just go to the full view of that memory (photo, vid or audio clip) and click “Move To” in the upper right options menu and then enter a new date. This is handy if the Memory Sorter could not detect a correct date stamp at upload, or if you manually uploaded to the wrong date on your first try.

Yesterday we deployed this same feature for whole days. You can now shift all memories from one day to another in one fell swoop.

I just realized we never really announced the first “Move To” release, so I’ll take this opportunity to announce both. Happy movin’!

Photo rotation is deployed. When logged in to your account, simply go to any photo that needs rotation, and click “Rotate” in the menu at the upper right. From there you may rotate in either direction.

Today we are rolling out a major new improvement to your Eachday account: the Overview page.

In the past, when you’ve gone to your main account address, you would simply see the latest day in your account. We have thought for awhile now that something was missing here; that your Eachday account needed to show a bigger picture at the top level. Think of this Overview as the “book cover” on your account; a page to welcome your friends and family and give them a bird’s eye view of your recent life.

Visit this account overview as a example – http://elliotts.eachday.com. Here is what you will see:

In the middle is a list of the most recent days we have added. From here you may to go to each of these days, or “expand thumbnails” and go directly to any of these recent memories. This provides a wider view of our latest activity before going to these individual days. Notice that when you go to an individual day, those are just the same as they were before. So individual days will remain familiar to you – this Overview is all that has changed.

In the right column of the Overview page is the other major change: a Profile panel. It is not required that you create a Profile to use Eachday, but it is very simple to do so and creating a Profile will enhance your Eachday experience, even if you have password protected your Eachday account. Why? Because you can do these great things with it:

• Add a profile picture: an image that represents you, your account, or your family. Think of this as the welcome image, and this may be changed at any time. It will also appear in any comments you make on other Eachday accounts.

• Add some text about you or your account to welcome your Visitors.

• A Guestbook. Visitors may leave comments directly on your Profile.

• Add links to favorite memories. You may call attention to your favorite memories by listing links to them here. To do so, simply log in to your account, then visit any day, collection, or individual memory and click the “Favorite” icon in the upper right of each memory.

• Add links to other, external websites

• Add friends on Eachday. If you know other Eachdayers, simply enter their account name and they will appear in a list here. In this list, direct links to the last 5 days each friend has added will be displayed, so this serves as a great centralized place to check up on your friends’ latest activity.

Another thing to note: When you log in to your account now, this Overview page will be the central place to upload your memories, with just a single “Add Your Memories” button displayed. As before, you may also use the calendar to go to any day in the past to upload or edit a day directly.

We have signed up many new Eachdayers over the last 6 weeks, but we have actually not officially announced our launch yet. We plan to roll out some more features, fixes and changes in the next week before we make our big announcement.

If you have any difficulty or questions with your Overview page or Profile, please send us your feedback!

After triple the time originally estimated for gestation, we proudly announce the (re)birth of Eachday. Today we exhale.

As a celebration and promotion, we make this smashing offer: Anyone that signs up within the next 30 days, before May 1, will have a free Premium Eachday account for Life. That means unlimited uploads, with no ads displayed, with all of our current and future premium features, forever. This offer starts April 1, yes, April Fool’s Day, and if you don’t grab an account within 30 days, then well, you might be foolish. (Note: It would be inauspicious to launch on April Fool’s Day, so for the record, today is March 30)

After May 1, we will continue to offer “Free for Life” non-premium accounts. However and of course, these will have upload quotas and text ads, as well as other limitations. Premium accounts will be a paid yearly subscription.

There is another reason that we are making this offer. As the public comes through the doors over this coming month, we want Eachday to be put through it’s paces – lots of stuff uploaded, lots of memories tagged and tag-based collections made, the Memory Sorter well used, etc. Tell us what you don’t like, what could work better. We want input. Undoubtedly there will be some things that need improvement, and that is what this month is for. There is a “Beta” in the logo, but we are actually still “Alpha” for 30 more days. Don’t tell anyone.

Launching this baby is exciting. I won’t speak for my partner Dave, but for me it’s also a bit scary. It is in some ways easier to work on a product while dreaming about it’s potential, than it is to finally expose that product (and yourself) to the world in the hope that people will embrace it. OK, enough of the personal tone.

We hope that you will use Eachday to collect your memories, whether privately or to share with friends and family. That one place on the web that you will come back to 5, 10, 50 or more years from now to scan through your life, and see how it was all connected. Scrap the album, long live the Day!