This could very well become a good mobile personal diary. Love the way old history from Facebook/Instagram/Twitter is imported. It would be great to have a good way of visualizing this (Examples: Snapjoy, Facebook Timeline, iPhoto, Flickr Calendar)
But in all seriousness, the design looks really great. It's reminiscent of path, but that's a good thing. It seems like Evernote would be one of your main competitors, but luckily your application has a much more casual user friendly design.
Evernote has a pretty casual user friendly design, too. There are a lot of other options on the mobile apps, but I ignore them and can testify that Evernote Mobile still works fine for me. The two just happen to serve different purposes -- this application is geared towards a more specific one.
Evernote is clunky, slow, and confusing to navigate. Just the processes and slowness of finding and editing an existing note, particularly one that has anything copy/pasted with formatting, keeps me from using Evernote for anything much, let alone this. Evernote is close to being excellent, but for me falls short of being usable.
Thanks, we're glad you like our design! I think Evernote is a very well done app also, but targets a more business/work-driven use case. A poor analogy may be if Evernote is good for those 8 hours you spend at work each day, then we hope to be helpful a few times during the rest of those 16 hours in the day (minus sleep, of course).
Love the addition of printed reports (revenue!) but this seems (quite literally looks) like Path in terms of the layout. Given that you are pulling from other networks and adding other improvements on Path's model, why not change up the look a bit to differentiate?
Ok... so I get what the app does, but why would I want to use it? Why would I want to capture every single moment of my life, regardless of importance, forever? What do I care where I was a year ago? And why on earth would I want a "quarterly report" of my life with statistics? Honest questions. Apologies for the bluntness.
Indeed! That's the direction we hope to move in with our period reports based on your entries. Nicholas Feltron was also a big inspiration for our work.
In the last couple years I've been keeping a semi-daily diary of any activity that's out of the ordinary -- seeing a movie, taking a dance class etc. It's orders of magnitude less quantified than Stephen Wolfram, but it's fascinating to read back through it every now and then.
As I've gotten older, time has sped up. Whole years seem to go by in the blink of an eye and I think, "what did I do in [say] 2007?" Keeping a diary has helped me to slow time town a bit.
I got a letter in the mail recently that I wrote to myself almost 10 years ago. It was only one page long but it's ridiculous how much it moved me. I wrote about my relationship with my family and what I hoped to do with my career. Getting that brief window into my former self was amazing.
I've been using Everyday.me for about a month now and it gives me a lightweight version of that feeling. I don't record everything in my life, but I throw in the occasional photo or comment about my weekend. I probably could keep that same data in a physical scrapbook or word document, but having an iOS app makes it convenient.
For me, journaling is not really about the input; that part is tedious. I enjoy consuming the journal later, so the input is necessary. Everyday.me just makes the input a little less of a hassle.
The name confused me at first because I already knew about the Everyday app by Noah Kalina, Adam Lisagor, William Wilkinson and Oliver White - http://everyday-app.com/
I'm not sure I like the direction a lot of these applications seem to be going where the point of living becomes to distill all of our experiences and adventures through a 3" screen. It drives me nuts to no end when I am hiking or at a concert and everyone has to stop what they're doing and waste time trying to view what's right in front of them through their phone.
Hi there, our app is actually ready for you to use right now. So there's no baiting and waiting. Just sign up and try us out, and we'd love to hear your feedback.
(We're waiting on App Store approval, and you know how it goes with Apple...)
Apart from the printed reports, i wonder what is so different here from Path ? Path is an established app with a massive user base, that does everything i can ask from a journal,with the additional ability to share it to a private, handpicked social graph. I see no compelling reason that would make me switch to everyday.me
I think this whole Personal Analytics thing is going to explode. Every time I see a service like this my heart skips a beat. I want to work on this stuff so much but I have to finish my army service first. Good job.
Yeah the concept of their quarterly and anual reports reminds me very much of what Nicholas Felton was trying to do with Datum. Where Datum broke down for me was that I had to stay consistent with manually updating it.
This is the big challenge when it comes to quantified self -- passive tracking can be creepy, but manual track has such high adoption costs. Seems like it would be hard for manual tracking to go extreme, bc few people care as much about quantifying everything as this community does. Any form of passive tracking has higher upside but also must be treated carefully so it seems trustworthy.
Are you asking "why mobile", or "why native, as opposed to HTML5?"
The answer to the first question is obvious, IMHO. I always carry a mobile device, whereas I'm only at a computer 12-14 hours a day.
As to the second, opening a web-app using a mobile browser is cumbersome and thus a fairly large barrier to adoption. The key to this app's success - as with any personal analytics tool - is continuous use.
Now that so many things in our lives are timestamped and available online, collating it all together is a natural next step. It's interesting to see all the different ways that this is being done by different apps and services.
When I came up with Remembary in 2010, I thought I was the first to mix diary-writing and all these public feeds - and then I discovered that Momento had been doing a similar thing for almost a year beforehand. I feel like there's been a lot more of these kinds of apps and services popping up lately.
I like the Annual Reports idea - I'd be interested to see what gets tracked and how it's analyzed. It's also a great monetization strategy, although I know from experience that print fulfillment and shipping can be a headache!
Also, their "Blast From The Past" feature highlights one of the less-known benefits of keeping a journal: seeing what you were doing in the past and comparing it to what you're doing now - and thus getting perspective on both the past and the present. I have about six years of handwritten diaries, and I'll often go through them and check the same day in each one. The new version of Remembary (just finished QA testing - should be in the App Store in a few weeks) has "1 Year Earlier" and "1 Year Later" buttons just for this kind of thing.
Congratulations on a cool looking app. Trust me when I say I know how difficult it can be to make something that seems to simple.
"Now that so many things in our lives are timestamped and available online, collating it all together is a natural next step. It's interesting to see all the different ways that this is being done by different apps and services."
I completely agree. It seems like the timing is right for an app like this.
Not everyone wants to share everything. So this could be a great personal analytics tool capture life and build a better self. Then anything you don't mind sharing could go into a more public social network. I like the idea of a private timeline.
In the Reddit AMA Kevin Rose said he thought "Quantified self (eg. fuelband, fitbit)" were the next trends. So a Quantified self timeline would make a lot of sense and bring things together quite nicely.
Good luck with this and excited to see how this progresses.
A lot of these kinds of 'Automatic Diary' apps use Twitter feeds as a key data source (especially now that Twitter accounts are integrated directly into iOS) - is anybody else worried that this valuable source of life records might dry up if Twitter starts shutting down API access?
1) If you are pulling these tweets, you should be saving them.
2) This source is already “drying up” in some sense in that you cannot access your own tweets older than 3,200 tweets ago. (That’s a number I blew by years ago. It sucks. It’s “my” data — and text, at that! — and Twitter won’t let me have it.)
Funny, i had this same idea 4 years ago. Bought iCapsule.com. The idea of "generational" digital asset preservation is a big problem to solve. Museums across the world are struggling with this. My guess, is this startup hasn't figured out the problem of how to preserve assets for 25-50 years. That is a real problem. Solve that and I'll be a customer!
I had the same question. So I dug into the download page source and found an itms-services:// link pointing to a plist. This type of plist gives info about an app and points to an IPA which contains the app bundle itself. I've worked with enterprise certs before, and this was one of the ways we would initiate the intalls from a webpage.
So my guess is that they are indeed using an enterprise certificate. Though I can't be 100% sure, I can't think of anything else that would be done this way.
I was always under the impression that Apple required companies to have at least 500 employees to qualify for an enterprise cert. But, it looks like they might have lifted that restriction, which is fantastic.
Small piece of feedback: if you are going to connect with facebook anyway, instragram and whatever else, why are you making me write my name, email address, etc.? Nitpicking here.
Also, I'm just testing the app, but if I were to use it for real, I would like to know who I'm going to be trusting my most private thoughts and activities to. I didn't see much about that in your page, the "who am I and why I am here" question would be extremely important for your users to trust you, so including information about where you want to take everyday.me is important (how will you monetize it? there are many black hat monetization schemes you could pull with this kind of data which wouldn't be ok so we want to know what your plans are).
Hi, thanks for the feedback. We just need it to stay in touch with you and we don't want to spam your Facebook, Twitter, etc to do so.
Re: the About page. Yes, in our rush we didn't have time to put up an About page to tell you more about us. We'll be putting one up soon. We really hope to build something that can help people collect and tell the stories of their lives. To me that's what gets me really excited, is knowing that this app may be able to help someone share an exciting trip they've had to London, or to reflect back on how they've gotten to this point from a year ago. That's really fulfilling for us to know, and our motivation for building this.
The juxtaposition of the "Record Your Life. Store it Forever." slogan with the now-trendy-tomorrow-not website makes me cringe.
The word "Forever" is loaded with so much meaning.
The cursive font, the .me URL, the tired-ass layout with those obligatory three boxes at the bottom... all of these things reflect aesthetic sensibilities that may as well belong to fruitflies.
Maybe this app will be great and genuinely add meaning to people's lives but it makes me want to buy a notebook, some picture frames and a sturdy old chest that I can bury underground.
I totally understand that and it lines up with what I thought when I first saw the story in the front page.
I think a good way to mitigate that fear is for this guys to open source the server side of this app, allow people to easily and securely transfer their data out and expose a setting in the app to change the server it uses.
76 comments
[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 147 ms ] threadBut in all seriousness, the design looks really great. It's reminiscent of path, but that's a good thing. It seems like Evernote would be one of your main competitors, but luckily your application has a much more casual user friendly design.
Having to consolidate all my public sources and also allowing to update privately is really cool.
http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2012/03/the-personal-analytic...
As I've gotten older, time has sped up. Whole years seem to go by in the blink of an eye and I think, "what did I do in [say] 2007?" Keeping a diary has helped me to slow time town a bit.
I've been using Everyday.me for about a month now and it gives me a lightweight version of that feeling. I don't record everything in my life, but I throw in the occasional photo or comment about my weekend. I probably could keep that same data in a physical scrapbook or word document, but having an iOS app makes it convenient.
For me, journaling is not really about the input; that part is tedious. I enjoy consuming the journal later, so the input is necessary. Everyday.me just makes the input a little less of a hassle.
How? Did an external organization hold your letter for you?
(We're waiting on App Store approval, and you know how it goes with Apple...)
and we were quite inspired by Nicholas Feltron's work also. I think they're amazing.
Kevin Kelly wrote a great post about the inevitability of life logging back in 2007: http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2007/02/lifelogging_a...
The answer to the first question is obvious, IMHO. I always carry a mobile device, whereas I'm only at a computer 12-14 hours a day.
As to the second, opening a web-app using a mobile browser is cumbersome and thus a fairly large barrier to adoption. The key to this app's success - as with any personal analytics tool - is continuous use.
When I came up with Remembary in 2010, I thought I was the first to mix diary-writing and all these public feeds - and then I discovered that Momento had been doing a similar thing for almost a year beforehand. I feel like there's been a lot more of these kinds of apps and services popping up lately.
I like the Annual Reports idea - I'd be interested to see what gets tracked and how it's analyzed. It's also a great monetization strategy, although I know from experience that print fulfillment and shipping can be a headache!
Also, their "Blast From The Past" feature highlights one of the less-known benefits of keeping a journal: seeing what you were doing in the past and comparing it to what you're doing now - and thus getting perspective on both the past and the present. I have about six years of handwritten diaries, and I'll often go through them and check the same day in each one. The new version of Remembary (just finished QA testing - should be in the App Store in a few weeks) has "1 Year Earlier" and "1 Year Later" buttons just for this kind of thing.
Congratulations on a cool looking app. Trust me when I say I know how difficult it can be to make something that seems to simple.
I completely agree. It seems like the timing is right for an app like this.
In the Reddit AMA Kevin Rose said he thought "Quantified self (eg. fuelband, fitbit)" were the next trends. So a Quantified self timeline would make a lot of sense and bring things together quite nicely.
Good luck with this and excited to see how this progresses.
But in seriousness:
1) If you are pulling these tweets, you should be saving them.
2) This source is already “drying up” in some sense in that you cannot access your own tweets older than 3,200 tweets ago. (That’s a number I blew by years ago. It sucks. It’s “my” data — and text, at that! — and Twitter won’t let me have it.)
So my guess is that they are indeed using an enterprise certificate. Though I can't be 100% sure, I can't think of anything else that would be done this way.
I was always under the impression that Apple required companies to have at least 500 employees to qualify for an enterprise cert. But, it looks like they might have lifted that restriction, which is fantastic.
Also, I'm just testing the app, but if I were to use it for real, I would like to know who I'm going to be trusting my most private thoughts and activities to. I didn't see much about that in your page, the "who am I and why I am here" question would be extremely important for your users to trust you, so including information about where you want to take everyday.me is important (how will you monetize it? there are many black hat monetization schemes you could pull with this kind of data which wouldn't be ok so we want to know what your plans are).
Thanks for sharing!
Re: the About page. Yes, in our rush we didn't have time to put up an About page to tell you more about us. We'll be putting one up soon. We really hope to build something that can help people collect and tell the stories of their lives. To me that's what gets me really excited, is knowing that this app may be able to help someone share an exciting trip they've had to London, or to reflect back on how they've gotten to this point from a year ago. That's really fulfilling for us to know, and our motivation for building this.
The word "Forever" is loaded with so much meaning.
The cursive font, the .me URL, the tired-ass layout with those obligatory three boxes at the bottom... all of these things reflect aesthetic sensibilities that may as well belong to fruitflies.
Maybe this app will be great and genuinely add meaning to people's lives but it makes me want to buy a notebook, some picture frames and a sturdy old chest that I can bury underground.
I think a good way to mitigate that fear is for this guys to open source the server side of this app, allow people to easily and securely transfer their data out and expose a setting in the app to change the server it uses.