For all the complexity of the human mind, when it comes down to remembering what we’ve been up to for the last few weeks our memories are pretty pitiful - you might remember a few notable events, but your day-to-day activities barely make a dent. And while some of us are not prone to such bouts of mental inadequacy, the vast majority of the population probably can’t remember what they were up to last weekend, much less a month ago.
Memiary, a site built by developer Sid Yadav over the course of a weekend, is looking to help you remember what you’ve been doing with your life. The site is a micro-diary, offering a private place to fill in your thoughts and takes only a minute or so to fill out every day. Blogging fills this role well enough for many people, but most of us aren’t comfortable with sharing the most personal details of our day-to-day lives with anyone who stumbles across our webpage. And most of us simply don’t have time to fill out longform diary entries, so the short text snippets work well.
Getting started is simple: enter an email address and password, and you’re presented with five text fields asking what you’ve done today. Fill those in, click the checkbox next to each one, and you’re done. Each of those daily activities is saved in a log, which can be browsed through later. At this point the site is very barebones (understandable because of its short development time), but I’d like to see more ways to input my daily activities, such as through a SMS message.
It’s a fun little site and will probably be pretty handy for users that consistently keep it updated. It could even drive a few people to rethink their lives - I can’t help but envision users suffering mid- or quarter-life crises as they realize their days almost invariably consist of the same five activities.
You can check out Yadav’s blog post on creating the site here.
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Finally someone gets that private matters. I don’t know how many picture or video sites I have looked at over the past few months where they never explicitly that the stuff you upload is private unless you choose to share it. It matters to people.
sorry, but you would have to explain that.
Friday…brain is dead…
Please! Is there a business model for serving ads against your pathetic life?? Maybe they will allow heavy users to share in some of the massive revenue their raking in off my sad life!
I’ve been doing this for months… with notepad. Why do I even want this stuff online? If I did, couldn’t I use Google Docs?
Of course. This is a lame idea, Guess that it could be successful with the truly impaired between us…
I have a bad memory too…but I don’t know if I would put this kind of stuff online. It would be yet another site where I would be going…and…I might forget about it :)…
Would be good as an iphone app….
I think that “RescueTime” is going to be the type of program that will “Tell You” what you were doing. Because you will probably forget to go to Memiary every day or have little time to do it and then where are you?
Computers need to take the next leap - deductive reasoning. What you did was…
Worked on Project X because I:
1.) Tracked your time sheet and that was the project you used
2.) And you created a folder in your web root with a similar name as the company for that project
3.) And I saw 13 emails go by that had a domain name which matched the project ….
So you spent 178 hours of your life in the last 3 weeks on this project and you learned x, y and z ….
I think that is teetering on Big Brother. Then again it sounds like Pandora and other predictive websites are going the same thing.
Okay, is it just me, or does the name sound like certain female organs?
Mammaries? LOL
Oh for goodness sake. There are untold numbers of ways to note what you did in a day. Do we really need another?
I do work for a major overpriced department store chain which also maintains a fairly good size online presence. God forbid should something be wrong with our website and people actually have to use the phone to contact us to place an order. They do get their knickers in a not that a phone order does not get them an email and they actually have to write down their order number.
Maybe this is exactly what those people need. The ones that can not manage to live their life without email reminders.
“built over course of weekend” - go easy. Good concept - how about twitter integration that let’s you set a “private Twit” feature thats send your private flagged twitters to your life log. That’s right - the Llog. Your llog (pronounced la-log) has web based access as and some other nice features like: auto diary data feeds into your llog like “you spent $128.79 today of which x was food, y was gas, and z was unnessecary!”, private GPS track of everywhere you went that day (oh boy big brother’s watch’n), by the minute bio-rhythm charting (heart rate, blood pressure,etc via wearable device). Great potential here, especially with a tie to twitter - which is in a sense a daily dairy. Some shared, some private. To be able to chart your daily spending, bio-rhyhtm’s, geo-location over time AND drill into any particular time and see what your daily thoughts were could be a great life tool to make changes or great stuff for your obituary! Call’n it.
As others have said, is there any reason why you would want to post your private thoughts on the web if you wanted them to remain PRIVATE? Go to the store, buy a notebook and some pens, and write. If you want some real privacy, get some password protected notebook or encryption software on your compy386 and write it there. If you really have an interest in keeping this stuff private, posting it on any web site at all is a bad idea, much less somebody else’s. The website has to make a living somehow, and that is going to mean selling you something, probably ads that use your comments to target your interests, and that means someone’s software is snooping your notes. If you really want to make this stuff available to you from the web, but aren’t interested in sharing it, there are myriad ways for doing so that will afford you more privacy than this.
My $0.02
I remember using a service similar to Memiary back when it was known as “calender.” Check it out, it’s available from many different vendors.
oops, a funny
It would be better.
http://www.iboozi.com
I like this, really helps me get an idea of what I’m doing every day.
If the person who created this is reading - what about offering the ability to enter in the number of hours it took to complete that task? Would be interesting to know how many hours were “wasted” or unaccounted for.
Brilliantly simple. Fantastic for thoughtful, busy people. And there are tens of millions of them.
I’m with many of the others here. Either break out the moleskine and a nice pen and have a beautiful private journal, or let an excellent lifestream do the journalling for you automatically.
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Wrote comment on TechCrunch.
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What a project!
we can only note 5 things…this site’s memory is short
it’s funny though
interesting..
but get this. i recently went to check out the new Center of Contemporary Art in Torun (that’s in Poland, here in Europe). they have an exhibition on the “phenomena of collecting”. it basically showed weird collections of people built during their lives..
and there was an AMAZING collection of HUNDREDS of notebooks, filled in by one woman from Cracow, Poland. those were her notes from her personal life. she noted down EVERYTHING she did during her life. what she ate, who she met with, where she’s been to, what she’s seen on tv and even what she’s seen on her way to work/shop.. 724 notebooks categorized, stored in her flat. now on exposition.
as soon as I saw this note about Memiary it reminded me of that woman’s DISTURBING collection.
you can find more about the exhibitionover here:
http://www.csw.torun.pl/exhibi.....-our-lives
her name is: Janina Turek and her exposition called “Diaries”.
and i just wonder if that is all “normal” to note everything you do in your life.
leave it to you folks..
I find it amazing that less became more lately.
I find it strange that instead of looking for services that give them MORE control, people choose the services that limit them (Twitter - post length, Memiary - post count).
i still use outlook to keep track of stuff and lot of other things (or memory if you wanna call it)
http://12tb.com
Err… how is this featured here?
I think the author of this article is just trying to promote his pal’s website… Lame! Get a life dude. Your opinion doesn’t matter anyway… people still have brains.
Obviously I’m biased (!) so while I think this is cute way to track stuff I still prefer our site
You can write real stories, leave them public or private or in a time capsule and write as little/much as you want, add pictures etcetc. So, shameless plug: http://www.StoryOfMyLife.com
(hey boss will I get a raise for the plug?haha)
..sorry, way too much work and not very compelling. Google is the model here..low effort, immediate results.
what does google have anything to do with any of this……?
While it doesn’t sound like this site will win huge audiences any time soon, it is creating some good conversation in the comments! I think there is room compiling more intelligent systems for journaling, as no one can argue that it requires time and discipline to manually record one’s activities at the end of the day. Obviously, security is a real obstacle here, as a journal becomes less effective if you’re afraid to record your real thoughts. On the other hand, local-only paper or digital copies don’t provide much confidence against loss some day. Some time soon we’ll figure out the right solution, mixing public and private feeds in a secure and redundant way.
more questions. More buttons. more forms. more ‘reminders’ and checkboxes.
Are we becoming slaves to computers?
And the point of this site is what, exactly? What could possibly be interesting or useful about recording 5 things you did every day?
Oh and the built-in-one-weekend thing? All the site does is create entries in a user table and an event table, and read them back. Big effing deal. My dog can do that in under 24 hours.
lol
I think this has its uses and it could have a great iphone/android pendant. If it’s full of mundane things that don’t warrant recording, maybe you should start to think about you life in general. My main concern would be the survivability of the site. It should have a backup-to-local feature.
I’ve been using notepad each day since 1986 to write a couple of paragraphs about what I did. I don’t think I don’t need it on-line. I wouldn’t mind some sort of mashup from my GPS, email, browser, credit card, refrigerator, TV etc. to remind me where I went and what I did but that wouldn’t help me remember that I spent the weekend in the garage adjusting the valves on my bike.
BTW it can be very interesting to look at what you were doing on a given day 20 years ago.
why would I ever use this? what could possibly be so compelling as to want to make me fill out, on a daily basis, another friggin’ webform? Come on. And how the hell did this goofy app get a TC writeup? Derrr.
Memiary seems to be nothing but a very simply copy of annoknips.com which launched in August 2008, supports two languages, already has thousands of photos and much more interesting functions. Take a look.
Yes, Peter’s right. Check it out at http://www.annoknips.com. They have much more to see than Memiary.
“Getting started is simple: enter an email address and password, and you’re presented with five text fields asking what you’ve done today”
Parça Kontör
thanks….
http://www.beymod.com.tr