“What are you doing right now?” Facebook asked its users in 2007.
The social network, and its peers, have since become less dedicated to the present moment. Facebook has created Timeline, a historic presentation of daily posts. Foursquare has turned its vault of real-time check-ins into a valuable recommendation engine. And Twitter recently launched a feature that allows users to download their tweet archives. For the first time, social media platforms are looking back.
By facilitating constant, real-time conversation, these platforms inevitably created a detailed log of the past. As a habit of sharing and an emerging quantified-self movement merge, the potential to recycle our real-time content grows.
The next big thing, some entrepreneurs believe, will leverage not “right now,” but “then.” Here’s why:
Content Gets Less Valuable Over Time. And Then It Gets More Valuable.
Siqi Chen is building an instant diary. His product, which is still in stealth mode, uses your social media history and data from your mobile device, like location coordinates, to document your life.
Its success depends upon a funny thing that happens to the value of a memory. “It tends to drop fairly quickly,” explains Nabeel Hyatt, a Venture Partner at Spark Capital who invested in the startup. “So a month from now I might not care about that photo [I shared] at all. But then it rises back up again. A year from now, two years from now, 10 years from now…That person might have become my best friend in the world, that person may have become my lover or my wife. The history of that person becomes even more interesting as time goes on.”
Hyatt is also an investor in Timehop, which takes advantage of the same value curve by sending users a daily digest of their social media activity from one year before. With other players like Memolane and Everyday.me also digging into the social media past for nostalgia purposes, the concept is quickly becoming a category.
