Memolane

» see memolane.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Memolane started at Startup Weekend Copenhagen in 2010 and launched publicly on 5 November that year with a pitch nobody else was making yet: connect your accounts, and it would pull your history back out of them and lay it along a horizontal lane you could scroll through by date. Your tweets from 2009 sat next to the photos you had uploaded the same week. It also emailed you a daily digest of what you had been doing a year earlier, which was the feature people actually loved.

The founder was Eric Lagier, who had run Skype's mobile products in the early days, and the money came from people who knew that world well. Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis both put in, as did August Capital's Howard Hartenbaum, Skype's first investor. Total raised was $2.5 million, which for a Copenhagen company doing social archiving in 2011 was real funding.

Then Facebook shipped Timeline in September 2011 and gave every user a free, native version of the main thing Memolane did. Timehop arrived with a cleaner take on the daily-digest half. By early 2013 the company was down to five people.

~ the chronicle ~

~ twenty four hours ~

The blog post went up on 21 February 2013 and said accounts and content would be deleted the next day. One day, for a service whose entire proposition was that it would keep your past for you.

The farewell itself was warm and said nothing operational: the team was proud it could bring joy to people's lives by sending out daily emails with fun memories from the past, and it thanked everyone who had sent in suggestions. It recommended Timehop. Lagier told reporters that the team was joining another company that would use the Memolane features in an expanded way, and then declined to name it, citing confidentiality. As far as the public record goes, the company was never named.

~ what facebook took ~

Memolane is the shape of a whole category that existed for about three years. A dozen services in 2010 and 2011 were built on the premise that your activity was scattered across a dozen sites and somebody needed to stitch it together, and almost all of them died in the same window for the same reason. Facebook stopped being one of the dozen sites and became the place the activity already was.

I had accounts on the services Memolane fed on and I never connected any of them to it. That is not regional distance, it is the ordinary distance of a product aimed at people who wanted their own past presented back to them. In 2011 I was reading hardware threads on donanimhaber and had no interest in a replay of my own 2009. The people who did love this were the people who had been posting daily for years and wanted credit for it.

What is left is the domain itself, which now serves a Gandi registrar page saying memolane.com is unavailable. For a product whose job was making sure nothing you posted got lost, that is a short enough epitaph that it does the work by itself.

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