Remember that vacation you took back in the late 90′s? If you do, chances are you have a photo from it framed on the wall, a shoebox of random photos, maybe a VHS video, and if you’re really lucky, you or your loved one created a scrapbook of the event.
Now, remember that vacation you took a couple years back? Chances are you have a ton of digital photos on your iPhone that you never got around to printing but uploaded your favorites to Facebook and Twitter. When you remembered to break out the SLR you uploaded those to Flickr and any digital video you took was either uploaded to YouTube or stored on your hard drive.
But, I bet you or your loved ones never created a scrapbook of the event.
Don’t you miss that?
What ever happened to that single collection of an event’s activities?
That’s the question we’ve asked in the lab and the reason we wanted to explore ways of creating a new type of scrapbooking that we’re calling Social Scrapbooking.
Today, we still have a photo and video camera, but we also have a ton of social outlets to capture an event’s activities. For instance, Twitter for what we thought, Foursquare for where we were, Facebook for how it was, Flickr for what it looked like, and the list goes on. Wouldn’t it be great if we could construct scrapbooks from all these activities?
For all you paper scrapbookers out there, your days of nursing paper cuts may be over.
Social Scrapbooking with Facebook
Thanks to Facebook’s Timeline we can view our wall as a scrapbook of our activities in chronological order. Add to this the ability to import other social outlets like Twitter, Instragram, and many others, Facebook Timeline could be close to all encompassing. But what about taking your timeline offline and onto a traditional paper scrapbook? You may recall Facebook’s announcement in October 2010 about the ability to download your information. It was then that we became able to freeze our wall and store our activities on our own devices.
Social Scrapbooking with Memolane
Yep, there’s already a site that creates a scrapbook of your social activities online. Although it won’t die cut your name out of polka-dotted paper, it will import your activities from Google+, Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and a ton more. Memolane then lets you create “lanes” around a specific time…like that beach trip you took last summer.
Overall, the way we collect memories has changed. Accounts of our events are no longer tangible. Although we’re generating more data, we’re unable to access it in a central location. Sure, we’re not going to want to reminisce all the time. After all, how often do you scroll to the bottom of your Facebook timeline. But heck, don’t you miss your MySpace posts or your AOL chat room discussions? What will you do with your Facebook memories when the next social network comes along? Will you want to scrapbook your social memories?
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