
I was just reading through Fast Company magazine when I discovered an article on a new web service called OurStory. This is probably the best representation of what I was talking about before in my previous post entitled Storyboard Your Life. There are, however, some key things missing from the service compared to the idea I envisioned though.
- Filtered By Category/Tag – I should be able to tag entries as “Music” and then see a timeline of just my music (but still by my choice of Year, Decade, or Lifetime).
- Filtered Storyline – If I select Recent or click on a Decade, I should only see the storyline entries related to that time period.
- Non-Visually Focused – Your timeline only displays images. You should be able to display storyline titles as well, since not all entries may contain images. Even more so, an image in a story may not always represent the entire story well.
- Meaningful/Transitional Rating – I should be able to rate my storyline entries. Thus when I filter by my Lifetime and say by the tag “Music”, I should only see the most meaningful rated music over my life which in effect are the transitional music moments in my life.
Of course, most important of all, I shouldn’t need a proprietary service to do this. Blogging software should allow me to do this itself and very easily. In effect, instead of having a static archive view (i.e. by month), you instead have a dynamic archive view that anyone can change on the fly through the use of multiple parameters that are visible on the site. In addition, each dynamic view should have it’s own RSS feed so that each visitor can just stay aware of what they are interested in.