330 karma · joined April 3, 2008
You might be interested in trying my service http://www.StoryWorth.com. It helps people record their family stories, and we often end up talking about my parents' stories during our weekly phone calls.
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I'm very lucky, my dad is 83 years old and doing great. The past few times I've gone to visit my parents, I've made a conscious effort to ask them a lot of questions about their life, and it's been incredibly rewarding.
One thing led to another and now helping people record their family stories is what I do for a living (http://www.storyworth.com if you want to check it out).
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Some details:
* Anyone who has access to a user's stories can download a backup at any time.
* If a user stops their subscription for any reason (including death), I will notify all users who have access to those stories with the option to download a copy (or renew the subscription). Depending on the size of the data, I may even be able to include the full backup in the notification email.
* I will keep backups available for download for as long as possible after the subscription has lapsed, ideally indefinitely (this also makes resubscribing more compelling).
* For full peace of mind, I send you all the text responses by email, so you have a copy archived there. I will look into including the actual audio attachments in the emails as well.
The trickiest scenario is if a user dies and their stories aren't shared with anyone. I could assume that the person didn't want these stories shared, but I think these will have to be dealt with on a case by case basis.
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The reason I haven't added this yet is that I've focused on the writing experience. Because most of the stories are written via email, there isn't a structured way to add metadata, so it has to come as a secondary step (either automatically extracted, or annotated by family members)
Crawling by the Archive team isn't really an option, since the information is mostly personal and private.
However, the way I've addressed this is by making data export part of the story from the start. At anytime, you can request a backup of your stories, and I will send you a beautifully formatted PDF, along with any audio files (and eventually pictures, videos, etc).
If the service ever had to shut down, I'm committed to giving everyone ample notice to download such backups. So worst case, your stories would no longer be accessible at StoryWorth.com, but you would always have them.
Does that seem reasonable? This is something I care a lot about, so I'd love to hear other suggestions.
The problem is that internally you're competing for resources against products with (a) tons of users (Gmail), (b) tons of revenue (AdWords), (c) high strategic priority (Android, Google+).
To justify staffing a smaller product, you have to argue that it has the potential to be as big as the other products, and that the marginal impact of an engineer is higher on an under-staffed product.
White House Petition!
One less site that needs Flash.
We chose to get it out the door first so we have a larger user base to learn from, but hopefully we'll get to it soon.
Great suggestion!
We see WhereBerry as most useful for less mainstream things (Inside Job, Cambodian restaurant, Lebowski play) where you want to do it, but don't know who might want to join you. WhereBerry helps you gain some momentum, at which point you can organize it via email.
Did you see any of that kind of activity? I'd love to chat briefly if you want to get in touch at feedback@.
We removed that requirement last night. Unfortunately we left in a piece of code that redirects you to the thank you page if the login fails. Facebook Auth has been failing intermittently for us all day, so that's likely what happened to you.
If you try again, you should be able to sign up immediately (and if Facebook fails again, you'll see an error screen rather than the confusing thank you screen). Sorry for the inconvenience.
dodo53 and useflyer's comments do a good job at explaining how WhereBerry is different from a calendar.
WhereBerry is helpful for capturing ideas that aren't fully formed events yet – simply things you'd like to do. In fact, a lot of our items don't have a set date (movies, hikes, restaurants...). Once you know who's interested, it's easier to pick a date and organize it.
Re:curation, for now you can unfollow people who post activities you're not interested in. As we get better data, we plan to add relevance ranking so manual trimming becomes less necessary.