i start use ohlife from 08/26/2010, has 658 entries totally.
every night i will wait for your email and input what i think or meet today, and i can know what i thought one year ago, and i have the chance to remember the good/sad life i experienced before.
it's always in my daily routing and the habit, i also introduced this service to my family and friends, everyone like it very much.
I have multiple calendars (about 20), some log things to do with work, one logs all SMS messages and phone calls sent/received, another logs fitness/health.
At any time I can look at any day, and there is enough information in the calendar to tell me everything that happened that day and for me to recall the day clearly.
Most of this is recorded implicitly (IFTTT handles whatever doesn't have calendar intgreation), only a little is recorded manually. It used to be more manual, now it's more automatic.
I've been doing this for so long I'm not even sure when I started... let me look. Well, May 2006 I see densely filled out, but Google Calendar doesn't seem to like looking before that... I guess that Google must store info prior to that in a cold storage solution.
Even looking at 2006, wow. I see the day I met my first wife, the film I saw at the cinema a few days before, my weight, the bike ride I did, some work appointments and a trip to Gloucester, someone's leaving party at work, and that my finances were flush that month.
I remember the weather for almost every day in May 2006, and it makes me realise how much weather is also a signal to recall information. I think I'll add weather history for wherever I am too.
For Android https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.zegoggles.... backs up all calls and SMS to Google Calendar and Gmail respectively. IFTTT can copy the SMS messages from Gmail to Google Calendar. I label the GMails, and copy them to a distinct calendar.
I run an IFTTT to detect calendar attachments on email and copy those to a distinct calendar.
I run a personal calendar for personal appointments, and then other calendars for friends appointments. Another calendar tracks gigs, films, exhibitions and theatre visits.
I run a different work calendar for every employer/venture I've had.
I run different calendars for process based work, i.e. I have a calendar that tracks visa applications and progress, and I have another calendar that tracks key dates regarding all financial obligations (start of agreements, agreement expiry, cliffs for option vesting, etc).
It's just a slow accumulation of information into buckets that I consider to have time-based views of them.
The Google Calendar agenda/search results is usually how I find things, but sometimes I do the whole "browse to this month and see what I was doing then".
Precisely that... I view all calendars at once for the holistic view, but even zoomed out I can see from the density of each calendar's colour roughly what was occurring when.
Inspiration came from two things:
1) Hearing about Stephen Wolfram documenting/logging every conversation.
2) Learning to meditate, and my first attempt at this was to label every thought I had and collate things together in my head
I figured I could log the stream of events that occurred in life, and label everything and collate things.
There are lots of subtle advantages. And it does seem that the book you mentioned ( http://www.amazon.co.uk/Experience-Curating-Increase-Influen... ) is a very similar concept to what I'm doing. No, I hadn't read it or heard of other people (beyond Stephen Wolfram) doing anything like this.
I don't use spreadsheets though... I consider time as being the primary key for all information. From that point of view, the storage should be a time based system.
That stems from how I personally recall things. I recall consuming music as a chronology of life... play a song and I know what I listened to in the months before, months after, where I was, who with, how I felt, what I was up to. But time is the thing there, the expansion of the pinpoint into a line stretching forward and backward provides all the extra context. I log way more than I need to because it's so effortless to do so.
I should've added another of the small processes as I added a few bookmarks today and remembered that I hadn't mentioned this one. I use pinboard and bookmarks are pulled from the RSS and put into yet another calendar.
This is too bad. I used this for my journal entries, and it really helped me keep track of where my life was headed. I'll have to find an alternative method of journaling now.
Does anyone know anything about the founders or how they tried to make money? I never saw a premium option.
If you sign into the web interface and click settings, there's a "Premium" option for $24/year or $40/2 years. It would give you weekly text-only backups to Dropbox or email, increase the number of photos per post to 5, and allow you to customize your daily email.
I think the one thing that disappoints me most is that there's no rich text / mass-photo export option here. Almost every post I made on OhLife has a photo attached.
I started using OhLife after psobot wrote a clone for it. His clone is now unmaintained, but I do think he had the right idea.
Agree, it's easy to backup all even I can write some script to backup all, maybe they feel boring to write a rich text backup after decide shutdown it.
Startup owners in exchange for creditability had to give time - thats one of the main currencies in this scene. In this case I wont trust them from now on expecting them to do the same with any other new startup they will launch in future...
> Startup owners in exchange for creditability had to give time - thats one of the main currencies in this scene. In this case I wont trust them from now on expecting them to do the same with any other new startup they will launch in future...
Yeah, that's not how it works.
Committing time and money to a failed venture is the biggest mistake an entrepreneur can make.
That's really easy to say when you're not the one who is paying for it.
This is pretty typical. Every single business owner out there knows that the non-paying users generate more noise and complaints than an average paying customer.
The bullshit 'reputation' angle you are playing is a total non-sense.
Tell that to Max Levchin and 99% of other entrepreneurs that had to fail and fail hard prior to actually making it. I'm sure their 'reputation' is ruined.
Without knowing the technology, costs, circumstances, etc, this is very naive to say. Don't armchair quarterback unless you understand all the circumstances.
Edit: And I got downvoted. I guess armchair quarterbacking is the right thing to do around these parts.
you have a big legal problem, either you shut down and discharge all the assets (sold or destroyed), or you keep the company alive and then you have to have a talk to your investors.
:( Been using this service for 4 years.. have grown so much thanks to it.
Everybody seems to be recommending Day One as an alternative, but that looks way more complicated than a simple daily email.
Edit: I take that back.. day one looks pretty awesome
Found https://twitter.com/kylesethgray/status/513476424955482112 which let me import all my OhLife data into this.. and this is backed by my DropBox account which makes me feel safe about my data
I've been using WordPress for many months now. You can change the privacy settings so only you can read it, and it has pretty much everything OhLife had - and more.
I have 1161 entries dating back to my first on August 18, 2010. I really love the service, but understand if they have to shut it down.
Thanks to the founders for keeping such an easy-to-use service around for so long. I'm off to find an alternative. My list of features isn't long. A daily email with a reminder and a previous post from the last year, month or week. It's that simplicity that kept me using the service.
Interestingly, my usage dates back to around the same time (Sep, 2010) and the list of features that I use/need is identical. Just a daily email reminder with a previous post from the past year/month.
If the founder(s) of OhLife are reading this thread, I'd like to make an offer: I'll pay to host the infrastructure/servers (up to $1,000/month) as a contribution to the community. My guess is, a lot of people are using this app and would like to keep it around.
Ping me @dharmesh on twitter if you're interested.
Maybe a crowdsourced model might actually do better than a freemium model. You're right, it's the simplicity that makes it so nice. So they don't really need to iterate on features at this point.
Neither 280daily or Penzu can get even close to the clean, fast, beautiful and simple interface of Ohlife. Specially It's large readable clean fonts.
Right now offline Secretpad seems like a viable alternative. or just the our old beloved notepad.
I have offered to buy but they have not returned my emails, so we're going to build our own version and offer an import feature. Will be housed at http://everymoment.me as soon as we have something ready to go.
They never replied to email or social message, so we're building a replacement that will allow people to import Ohlife entries. We plan to make them a little more secure as well.
It's basically a 2 way SMS reminder system that allows for flexible and simple scheduling. I've been using it for months to SMS myself and record thoughts throughout the day. At the start of each day I get a link to my recent summary which gives me performance metrics along with past content (see screenshot)
I haven't really focused on how to make a business out of this and OhLife shutting down is another data point around whether or not this type of service can be monetized effectively. For me email would never work to get me to do this kind of activity. SMS does work because it's invasive enough, on a clearer channel than email, and even simpler to respond. (even though my response rate over the last week is as low as it's ever been :-)
Comments and thoughts welcome as to whether or not people would be into something like this. I've actually been working on another idea that uses this app as a foundation but I (along with a few others) do use it everyday for journaling.
Thanks for at least having the decency to give people notice and a chance to download everything. I still remember the shameful way in which Dailybooth handled its loss of interest in the space by leaving everyone hanging...
Less functional in the sense that it doesn't support attaching a picture to replies and doesn't include a past entry in the daily reminder, but I'm happy to fast track both of those features if there's demand. Let me know if there's other features you'd like to see!
I have just joined daily diary (was on ohlife for 3 years). If you added the feature of emailing previous entries to us, that would be enough. Very exciting!
A past entry would be awesome to have. I actually never knew about the attach a picture feature until after OhLife got shut down, so I personally don't care too much about that. More importantly, in general the UI could use a facelift. It's not bad after you've already created a question but the form of question generation isn't really easy to follow at all. Also, as others have suggested, export of OhLife data would be awesome.
I found OhLife super helpful as a way of keeping a train of thought going. Am planning an open source side project like OhLife but that supports a few unobtrusive power features like topics. Email me at elliott @trinket io if you're interested / want to help.
A project like this should be an open source side project we build because we want it, not a startup.
Part of what I loved about OhLife was getting a reminder of what was going on in my life a month ago. Does anyone have any replacements with that feature to suggest? Thanks!
Yes, I would be very interested. I just signed up for an account with you. I would like the import for OhLife, but do you think there's anyway that you may be able to also include past responses in the near future. For instance, including what a wrote a year ago to the email I get sent today? Thanks!
Would LOVE this. I've been using it for nearly 3 years and desperately looking for a similar thing. Does yours email us with reminders of where we've been as well?
I have also just joined DailyDiary per your suggestion & would LOVE import capability for my previous OhLife entries as mlsenn & others have pointed out!
The feature of the 'one year ago you wrote...' would also be incredibly great to have and would ensure I stuck with DailyDiary for the future!
I found about OhLife 6 months ago and loved using it. I just signed up for http://www.idonethis.com so that I continue to journal and track my progress.
154 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 185 ms ] threadevery night i will wait for your email and input what i think or meet today, and i can know what i thought one year ago, and i have the chance to remember the good/sad life i experienced before.
it's always in my daily routing and the habit, i also introduced this service to my family and friends, everyone like it very much.
thanks guys, hope i can do sth to save this site.
I have multiple calendars (about 20), some log things to do with work, one logs all SMS messages and phone calls sent/received, another logs fitness/health.
At any time I can look at any day, and there is enough information in the calendar to tell me everything that happened that day and for me to recall the day clearly.
Most of this is recorded implicitly (IFTTT handles whatever doesn't have calendar intgreation), only a little is recorded manually. It used to be more manual, now it's more automatic.
I've been doing this for so long I'm not even sure when I started... let me look. Well, May 2006 I see densely filled out, but Google Calendar doesn't seem to like looking before that... I guess that Google must store info prior to that in a cold storage solution.
Even looking at 2006, wow. I see the day I met my first wife, the film I saw at the cinema a few days before, my weight, the bike ride I did, some work appointments and a trip to Gloucester, someone's leaving party at work, and that my finances were flush that month.
I remember the weather for almost every day in May 2006, and it makes me realise how much weather is also a signal to recall information. I think I'll add weather history for wherever I am too.
For Android https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.zegoggles.... backs up all calls and SMS to Google Calendar and Gmail respectively. IFTTT can copy the SMS messages from Gmail to Google Calendar. I label the GMails, and copy them to a distinct calendar.
I run an IFTTT to detect calendar attachments on email and copy those to a distinct calendar.
I run a personal calendar for personal appointments, and then other calendars for friends appointments. Another calendar tracks gigs, films, exhibitions and theatre visits.
I run a different work calendar for every employer/venture I've had.
I run different calendars for process based work, i.e. I have a calendar that tracks visa applications and progress, and I have another calendar that tracks key dates regarding all financial obligations (start of agreements, agreement expiry, cliffs for option vesting, etc).
It's just a slow accumulation of information into buckets that I consider to have time-based views of them.
The Google Calendar agenda/search results is usually how I find things, but sometimes I do the whole "browse to this month and see what I was doing then".
This is fascinating stuff. Have you read the book "Experience Curating" by chance?
Inspiration came from two things:
1) Hearing about Stephen Wolfram documenting/logging every conversation.
2) Learning to meditate, and my first attempt at this was to label every thought I had and collate things together in my head
I figured I could log the stream of events that occurred in life, and label everything and collate things.
There are lots of subtle advantages. And it does seem that the book you mentioned ( http://www.amazon.co.uk/Experience-Curating-Increase-Influen... ) is a very similar concept to what I'm doing. No, I hadn't read it or heard of other people (beyond Stephen Wolfram) doing anything like this.
I don't use spreadsheets though... I consider time as being the primary key for all information. From that point of view, the storage should be a time based system.
That stems from how I personally recall things. I recall consuming music as a chronology of life... play a song and I know what I listened to in the months before, months after, where I was, who with, how I felt, what I was up to. But time is the thing there, the expansion of the pinpoint into a line stretching forward and backward provides all the extra context. I log way more than I need to because it's so effortless to do so.
I should've added another of the small processes as I added a few bookmarks today and remembered that I hadn't mentioned this one. I use pinboard and bookmarks are pulled from the RSS and put into yet another calendar.
Does anyone know anything about the founders or how they tried to make money? I never saw a premium option.
Maybe it is an IP filter. I remember having seen the option for the last few years, both in Canada and in the US.
I started using OhLife after psobot wrote a clone for it. His clone is now unmaintained, but I do think he had the right idea.
Why not putting this on one Linode instance or Amazon Cloud, pay $50 a month and keep free users by offering premium $1/mo package to some of them?
But no, its easier to shut down. Less hassle, right?
While it's 'trivial' and 'not hard', the time it self is priceless.
Yeah, that's not how it works.
Committing time and money to a failed venture is the biggest mistake an entrepreneur can make.
I wonder when majority of people will dislike Startup folks like they did dislike Stock Brokers thanks to thinking like yours.
Greed is good. Right?
Honour is just a myth?
Committing time and money to enhance your reputation is never a mistake.
This is pretty typical. Every single business owner out there knows that the non-paying users generate more noise and complaints than an average paying customer.
The bullshit 'reputation' angle you are playing is a total non-sense.
Tell that to Max Levchin and 99% of other entrepreneurs that had to fail and fail hard prior to actually making it. I'm sure their 'reputation' is ruined.
TLDR: You live in a bubble.
Edit: And I got downvoted. I guess armchair quarterbacking is the right thing to do around these parts.
This service was so important to me that I think I'll have to make a Python script to keep this going in my life.
Edit: I take that back.. day one looks pretty awesome Found https://twitter.com/kylesethgray/status/513476424955482112 which let me import all my OhLife data into this.. and this is backed by my DropBox account which makes me feel safe about my data
You can use Day One as an OhLife replacement by setting a notification at your email time. Then just write and ignore all the other features.
it's far from perfect. I just created them, but I will give it a try.
https://ifttt.com/recipes/205213-record-your-daily-journal-i...
Thanks to the founders for keeping such an easy-to-use service around for so long. I'm off to find an alternative. My list of features isn't long. A daily email with a reminder and a previous post from the last year, month or week. It's that simplicity that kept me using the service.
If the founder(s) of OhLife are reading this thread, I'd like to make an offer: I'll pay to host the infrastructure/servers (up to $1,000/month) as a contribution to the community. My guess is, a lot of people are using this app and would like to keep it around.
Ping me @dharmesh on twitter if you're interested.
Now looking for alternatives too. So far Penzu is looking like the winner. It seems to have everything ohlife had plus apps.
http://carmela.io
It's basically a 2 way SMS reminder system that allows for flexible and simple scheduling. I've been using it for months to SMS myself and record thoughts throughout the day. At the start of each day I get a link to my recent summary which gives me performance metrics along with past content (see screenshot)
https://www.dropbox.com/s/hhpzt3g77ujy1go/Screenshot%202014-...
I haven't really focused on how to make a business out of this and OhLife shutting down is another data point around whether or not this type of service can be monetized effectively. For me email would never work to get me to do this kind of activity. SMS does work because it's invasive enough, on a clearer channel than email, and even simpler to respond. (even though my response rate over the last week is as low as it's ever been :-)
Comments and thoughts welcome as to whether or not people would be into something like this. I've actually been working on another idea that uses this app as a foundation but I (along with a few others) do use it everyday for journaling.
Can you imagine getting back from a trip to discover everything had been deleted.
It seems like they should give more time than this.
I started using it since 2 years and always used to wait for the daily email reminding me what i wrote earlier.
Really liked you "ohlife"!!
This was the only service I started using on my own and I really liked it.
A project like this should be an open source side project we build because we want it, not a startup.
A comparable question might be:
https://www.dailydiary.com/questions/342540/how-did-your-day...
Disclosure: I'm the founder. If there’s interest, I’m happy to add an import for OhLife exports.
Similar to a few posts here, I've been using OhLife for 4+ years and have ~1500 entries that I'd love to be able to port into Daily Diary.
The feature of the 'one year ago you wrote...' would also be incredibly great to have and would ensure I stuck with DailyDiary for the future!