Memolane – remember your social life
As we all know the Social Web is full of tools, networks, and platforms you can join. They are helpful to organize your communication and they can be fun, e.g. spotting your food and sharing it with your friends. But do you remember what you have done on those networks last week? Maybe last month or even last year? Social Media exists primarily in the present, but a lot of your memories exist online.
Memolane.com could be the answer. It is a tool against the memory loss of Social Media; a place to archive your social life. You can travel back in time like Marty McFly did it with the De Lorean in “Back to the Future”.
The claim “See, search and share your life” speaks volumes. With the integration of the two biggest social networks Twitter and facebook, the picture sharing platforms flickr, picasa, instagram, the location-based service foursquare, the travel service tripit, the video platforms youtube and vimeo, the music of Last.fm, spotify and MySpace and any RSS-Feed a whole online life can be imported and shared with friends.
Memolane – Your time machine for the web from Memolane on Vimeo.
All of the services are combined to a single, visual timeline with one drop-down menu for each single day, to help users create an interactive scrapbook of sorts on the Web. Using this simple timeline it’s easy to travel back in time with one click.
The timeline can be totally private, public or also shared with friends. It’s also possible to share memories in a kind of a story. It’s maybe the best part of memolane. A story is a different timeline where your friends and you can combine memories. This could be also interesting for (social) marketing.
A campaign using Social Media is nothing unusual anymore. But at the end of the campaign you have to present something to your client. Why not share a project at memolane? It’s really easy to set up a private story and with this privacy setting no other client or contender is able to see it. Only invite the necessary contributors to the story, add memos and you have full coverage of the Social Media activities concerning a campaign or an event. And since 08/03/2011, memolane opens to the public, no invites necessary anymore. So it is still in beta, but it was the right time to open it up and it’s definitely interesting for marketing purposes.
It’s really more dynamic than alternatives, e.g. about.me, but a few things are still missing. Okay, it’s announced to integrate more and other social tools and platforms. On the downside, with the integration of facebook and Twitter the function “xy of your facebook friends have a memolane” could be simple and it would be easy to find friends. Unfortunately, you have to find or invite your friends to memolane not knowing if they already have an account. It looks like you’re spamming your friends again with an invitation to the “newest and coolest” Social Media stuff.
Other competitors are just around the corner, e.g. OurStory, AllofMe, Dipity and Greplin – but the huge advantage of memolane is the fabulous design of the user interface, an inspiring interface that triggers a lot of ideas.
Background Information:
The first idea was pitched by Eric Lagier (CEO & co-founder) at the Startup Weekend Copenhagen in April 2010 and with the co-founders Nikolaj Hald Nielsen and Harry Vangberg they built the first prototype of memolane. They won the event with it and Eric left his job to pursue it. In September 2010 memolane secured a 2 Mio $ funding from Atomico Ventures and August Capital. Eric was connected with both firms form his work running mobile for Skype from 2005 until 2008. Headquartered in San Francisco Eric and his team started a private beta in November 2010 and in February 2011 it becomes a finalist at the SXSWi Awards.