The Eachday Blog - Articles

Upgrades for May - Prints & Gifts, Collections, Sharing.

2008-05-16T15:29:00Z

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!

Major Design Upgrade on the Way - A Sneak Preview

2008-03-14T12:07:00Z

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:

Eachday is Nominated! The Open Web Awards.

2007-12-18T17:16:00Z

Eachday was nominated for the Open Web Awards in the category of photo sharing. We are in the company of Flickr, Facebook, and Photobucket here, so we’re a David amongst Goliaths.

Since this is open voting, awareness and recognition will determine the ultimate winner, so we’re pretty sure we can’t make it to the final round, but it’s a HUGE honor just to be nominated. If you love Eachday Vote Here! and help Eachday make a good showing!

Update: Well, as expected, we couldn’t beat out the Goliaths, but we did get several thousand votes and a very respectable percentage. Thanks to everyone for voting!

Eachday TV spot

2007-10-26T16:02:00Z

This aired in Los Angeles first, and then in New York, Chicago, Minneapolis and smaller affiliates across the country. We’ve seen a great response, and it’s been fun trying to track down where people are coming from.

One note though: contrary to the “One Dad, One Kid.” spin in this spot, Eachday is the result of partners. Eachday would certainly not be possible without Dave Myron, and we’ll make sure he gets a mention in the next one!

Big new stuff - Your Friends Page.

2007-10-10T18:20:00Z

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 …

An upgrade to collecting - the "Collect" button

2007-10-03T23:44:00Z

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.

Die Speech Bubble Logo, Die.

2007-08-01T16:16:00Z

It’s frothy out there in web round 2, assuming we’re in round 2, and all those bubbles really add to the effect. Each day, I see more than one new speech bubble logo. Am I the only one who thinks this has passed the point of group think, and entered the realm of comedy?

As a catch-all symbol, the speech bubble is tough to resist. It contains what everyone wants to say about the “new” web: user-generated, communication, collaboration, commenting, social media, community, self-published, my voice, our voice, rating, ranking, sharing and the rest. On top of that, it’s simple with a minimum of line, approachable and cuddly, and you can always count on people getting it. What more could a would-be communicator want?

But, it’s over. The day has come to pronounce from far and wide – “Attention all startups, it’s a bad idea to hang your ID hat on a speech bubble. Just don’t.”

Here is just a fraction of what’s going down out there in Web Bubble Logo Land. This is what happens when the perfect symbol, a symbol so good that it does all the thinking for you, gets together with a sea of designers who aren’t thinking enough.

Contribute a Memory

2007-07-23T16:59:00Z

I just returned from a family reunion, at which there were eight Eachdayers present.

So, we all return home, upload and share our stuff on Eachday, and that’s all great. But wouldn’t it be better if I could, with one or two clicks, “contribute” a memory, a shared experience on a given day, from my account to cousin Steph’s?

Yes it would (of course!). We are working on this, and it will be one of the sooner-to-roll new features in Eachday’s near future.

The "Move To" feature.

2007-07-22T16:00:00Z

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’!

Everybody Rotate

2007-07-21T21:54:00Z

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.

Rotating your photos

2007-07-18T19:39:00Z

We’ve been wanting to get this rolled out to everybody for a long while.

The problem was, the software we were using to resize images degraded the photos every time the photo was rotated. JPG has lossy compression and every time you make a change and resave a JPG a little bit more of its detail is removed resulting in photos that are muddy and full of compression artifacts. We couldn’t give you the ability to rotate your photos until we could do so without uglifying your memories.

Recently, we changed the software that handles images (image_science is a small Ruby library that generates thumbnails) and we’ve extended it to provide for lossless rotation of JPGs.

You’ll be able to rotate your photos very soon. I’m sure your neck will thank us.

Pink & Green

2007-07-18T17:38:00Z

Some of you might’ve noticed some photos coming through in a high-style pink and green palette. Unfortunately, this artwork was not on purpose; instead, being caused by a bit of native metadata in rotated photos that makes the automatic resizing in the latest version of the uploader go a little “wonky”.

We’ve found the cause and will be deploying an update that won’t make any snobbish style decisions for you – it’ll just upload your photos the way you took them.

Big new stuff - The Overview Page

2007-06-26T05:44:00Z

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!

The Long View

2007-04-02T15:42:00Z

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”.

Eachday is Born.

2007-03-30T16:49:00Z

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!