Experiences

Anyone who's visited my personal website probably knows that it's pretty much just about telling my life story (filled with a ton of TMI, of course). Every thought I've had for the past 13 years is on here. Nearly every photo I've ever taken is here. Shit, if you want to know how much I slept, walked, or even what I weighed yesterday, it's all here.

But over the past couple years, I've been thinking a lot about experiences and contextual stories.

So, a lot of times after an event, I like to send around a link to the photos i took. But more and more, I'm finding that these photo albums don't capture everything. They're missing important thoughts, places visited, and many other things that tell the full story - at least from my perspective.

Foursquare, Twitter, and any of the dozens of photo sharing apps are all amazing services, but individually they only tell small pieces of a story. Facebook and Google+ are built to have all of this data in one place (after stealing the ideas of these other services)... but 1, not everyone likes Facebook or Google+. and 2, these behemoths don't seem to be doing anything to connect all of this related (but different) media they have within their own platforms.

So..

I've been experimenting a bit with this concept of an "experience." An experience (in its current state) is a collection of anything that's happened between two points in time, whether those be photos, tweets, check ins, whatever. This could be a concert, a festival, a trip, one of my buddies visiting from out of town, my friend shaving her head, a walk, a party, etc. They're all fun memories and stories that can be better told by simply mashing a few medias together.

I've only generated a few so far, but after almost every single one I've made, I get surprised about how complete the stories are. And by how many other memories they spark just by seeing the context.

It's still super raw and there's a lot more I'd like to do, like...

• Add an overall map to each experience.
• Add a "currently experiencing" feature that's essentially a live stream that I could turn on while travelling or whatever so family/friends could see what's going.
• In addition to timeframes, I think it'd be super fun to create experiences that have a geofence. Then I could make things like, this is my experience living in Wicker Park, or this is has been my experience from all the times I've visited Ames, IA, etc
• Figure out a better way to break things up/paginate things
• Surface experiences in more places... maybe even completely replace photo albums with experiences!
• Finally, I'm very obviously not a designer... there's plenty of polish that could be done.

Anyway, that's what I've been hacking on a bit lately. Check it out. I'd love to hear other thoughts or ideas.