Social Archivist

I was intrigued to read about a new “social legacy network” called MyHeartWill.com which enables you to create, share and store digital memories in a “safe, private and secure environment that will live on for generations to come”.

“By using the internet as a storage space for these memories, they can never be lost or damaged.”

No form of archiving is completely safe but I do wonder how permanent anything stored online or even something digital can be? Is it truly more permanent than in printed form? How do I know if this service will be around in 100 years? Will Facebook? Will Twitter? How many floppy disks or computers are out there with data that can’t (easily) be read?

My other main concern with these types of sites (and more are popping up all the time) is that it is yet another regular discipline that we need to add to our already busy lives.

“People have a genuine desire to capture their lives. Other on-line platforms already exist that serve part of this function, but they’re frenzied, they’re fast, extremely public and by nature, pretty superficial. Here is a conscience-driven, thoughtful, evocative web-based tool that takes social marketing to a much deeper level.”

Maybe. You can already set up your Facebook, Twitter, blogs to be completely private if you so wish. There’s plenty of people blogging at a deep level about their lives so I wonder what this new tool offers that, say, opening a free account on Wordpress.com doesn’t:

• MyHeartWill costs $199US for 10 years and 2GB of storage for text, photos, videos and audio
• Wordpress is free and gives you 3GB of storage for text, photos, videos and audio and it can be as private as you want it to be

Those behind the site says that Facebook, Twitter and blogs etc are lacking when it comes to sharing the stories and content that comprise a person’s life, that they’re too hurried. In some sense I agree – most of the updates we do in Twitter or Facebook are very quick but those writing personal blogs or writing long notes on Facebook about events in their lives would likely disagree. The problem is that we don’t write long accounts of the stories and memories that we want to because we just don’t have time, not because we don’t have the tools available to us.

The issue is how to permanently store the things we’re already writing, sharing, talking about – and of course with the option of appending other content with it. Maybe the deeper stories will sometimes need to be added to fill in the gaps, but the day-to-day observations and comments really give you a thorough insight into someone’s life.

While writing this, I think of the blog Kyah’s Journey – one which documented the life of a beautiful little girl’s brave fight with cancer. The in-depth, personal and deeply moving blog is currently being converted into a book.

A truly ground-breaking tool is not another site to store our content but one which meaningfully combines our already-existing digital trails for future generations to enjoy.

Created using Blurb, NEWYORK2IDAHO documents a father and son road trip in April 2009 using tweets from a Blackberry while on the trip to narrate the photos.

Anthony Robertson used Blurb to print a book of Tweets (protected account) called Advice for my son.

In the forward he writes (emphasis mine):

I have thought about this project for some time. I have often wondered what little tidbits of information I should give you. I started to slowly post these 140-character granules of wisdom to Twitter; Twitter acting as a kind of repository of ideas. After several months of accumulation, I started to come up with a plan where the granules would have a bit of longevity.

When I found out I had rheumatoid arthritis and upon turning forty, I knew I wanted some of the ideas I have communicated over the years to stick within your brain.

Print Your Twitter is a handy little tool for doing just that.

You can easily delete tweets you don’t want in your archive, filter by keyword and optionally also include your friends’ tweets. The bit I liked the most is that it automatically pulled in my twitpics into the page:

Why not try taking a friend’s tweets/Facebook status updates for the year and using a tool like Wordle to create a personalized greeting card for them?

Inspiration for the wording inside the card came from Imogen Heap’s new single First Train Home: “What matters to you, doesn’t matter, matter to me”.

If you’re looking for a really quick way to print off all your Tweets without having any control over the design or format, try Tweetbook.

It only takes a few minutes before your own PDF file is ready for printing.

Here’s how a page in mine looked:

I once regularly kept a week-at-a-glance diary much like this one.  I still have ones from high school stacked in my attic and there’s no way I’d throw them out.  What once formed most of the content of my diaries is now scattered in many places online but is best captured by my status updates in Twitter and Facebook.

I wondered how it would look to copy in my Tweets and Facebook statuses into a week-at-a-glance diary.

Thanks to it being August, I bought a very cheap one today and picked a random week to add entries for.

This is how one page looked:

There was something strangely really fulfilling about manually copying in my Facebook and Twitter updates onto paper.  In this rapid-paced world, it’s not often we take time to reflect on things gone past and re-enjoy little recent memories.  I left out a few tweets which were links or things which didn’t have long-term value to me – but the process of filtering these out too was not a chore.  I was surprised at how much I wanted to continue with copying them in.  My status updates really were an important record I cared about keeping – not just something I found value in as-it-happened.

I began thinking: why couldn’t this process be done automatically on a large scale?  Not everyone has the time nor energy to do this sort of conversion.

Here’s how it could work:

1. You enter your Twitter/Facebook/Google Calendar/… login information
2. You optionally upload a sample of your handwriting (my husband says he’d hate to see things in his handwriting and would prefer it typed)
3. You filter out the things you don’t want to keep a permanent record of (e.g. reply Tweets, Tweets with URLs)
4. The application figures out the appropriate type of diary for you depending on the number of status updates that you do (one page per day/week/month)
5. You get sent a printed diary for your past year in your own handwriting (or chosen font).

Would this be an amazing gift to give someone for Christmas – and get sent a few weeks later?

(And aside from your own diary, you could buy diaries for other people – like Miley Cyrus’ diary…)