Conversational Memories
One of the things that I want to do is to create a simple way for people to be able to add memories in a conversational manner. With the proliferation of LLM’s and users becoming more comfortable speaking with their phones conversationally, this is a feature that just makes sense.
The goal would be to create a space in the app where the application asks the users questions about themselves. The user then provides answers to the questions, which then prompts further questions, permitting the app to gather deeper information about the memory.
An example might be like the above:
“Can I help you create a memory?”
I remember eating paella with my family
“Sounds delicious! Do you remember when you ate the paella? What made it so special?”
My family would go to Spain every few years in the summer to see my grandmother over there, and my grandfather would make the most amazing paella. We’d walk to the market in town to get the ingredients, and then we’d cook it together over the fire.
"What a great way to connect with your family. Was this your grandmother’s house outside of Barcelona? How old were you when you went?”
Yeah, it was the Barcelona house! It was amazing. The last time I went, I was 10 years old.
“Okay, I think I have enough for a memory. I’ve created two below, can you choose the best one?”
Anyhow, something like this.
The system would also periodically pulse or pop up a notification when it thought there was a memory that the user might want to add that they hadn’t — common memories such as births, graduations, global events, first kiss, first significant other, first car, first job, big moves, etc..
I love the idea of being able to engage at a more intimate level with the application and feeling free to discuss things conversationally while the application does the heavy lifting to compile everything.
Dan Olson and platform purpose.
If you haven’t heard or seen anything by Dan Olson, you should go to his channel, Folding Ideas, on YouTube and watch something now. There is a blend of content to choose from: he has movie story analyses, a deep dive into Fifty Shades of Grey, a introspective piece on how he accidentally “did a colonialism” in minecraft, and his most watch video “Line Goes Up”, a piece that examines and deconstructs the NFT and NFT bro marketplace. He creates well-written, well-crafted, considered, and thought-provoking video essays, presented in an approachable way, and he’s brilliant. I could go into him at length, but, as I mentioned, he’s thought-provoking, and he provoked a thought that I wanted to speak to.
I was watching an older video of his in the background while I was making my kids’ dinners, and his piece on Vidme made me start thinking about Facet.
His analysis goes into Vidme as a YouTube competitor, what it means to be a video hosting provider and the relationship between creators and content platforms. It’s a quick and great perspective on the genre, but in his typical calm and matter-of-fact method, he eviscerates the Vidme platform. He doesn’t dissect its content or its interface or its advertising (although he opens with it initially), he challenges Vidme at its core. He questions its being.
It spurred a fear deep down. What if he was to analyze Facet? What would he say and speak to? There are a lot of parallels here.
False Friends
He discusses how platforms attempt to make creators their allies, but as the platform scales, the content creators become background noise to the true users: advertiseres
Uncodified Relationships leads to exploitation
Without a structural commitment to a relationship with the content providers, the “just pals” and “we’re all in this together” statement feels like a disingenuous lie to get creators to generate content so that they can then be quickly left behind for the true “pals”, the advertisers.
Duplication
If you’re just a copy of another platform, who are your real users going to be?
Cultivate what you want vs. toxic communities
Without cultivation and moderation, the content can become a toxic blend of ideas and people that were kicked off other platforms.
You need to tend your garden to grow what you want.
Features and competitors flaws.
There are opportunities to create a better platform, but Dan points out how Vidme didn’t choose to add any new features or analyze their competitor’s flaws to give users what they really wanted.
The point that really got to me was the “Launch Feature” comment, and how the launch is a promise to the user. It’s the initial agreement between the company and their users/audience that speak to the values and priorities of the companies.
It was a fantastic point that I think will be the seed of a daily existential crisis for Facet. What promises am I making, and how am I fulfilling those promises?
The “duplication” comments were also penetrating. If you’re just going to be someone else, then why bother being at all? Duplication means you’re just setting yourself up to be a worse version of the other, subsisting on the lost users that haven’t found out about the other yet or the dregs that have be spurned by it.
It’s important to “be something”. It’s important to define yourself or others will define you. With Facet, we invite comparison because of the giants around us.
Are you like Instagram?
Are you like Snap Chat?
Are you like Facebook?
Are you a journal
The comparisons are large and forceful and oppressive. And the other networks are so large and offer so many things that it’s hard for people to find the spaces between, making it not only important to be different but to be loud about those differences.
Dan’s video is a reminder to constantly examine how Facet answers those existential questions and then how we proesent those answers.
Being.
Apologies, this is going to be a train of thought post. I just needed to get some things down quickly.
Por qué no los dos?:
I’m struggling a bit because I can see this being two things at once. I see the opportunity to challenge social app conventions and release a more relaxed version of the social app, but at the same time, I see it as a place to serve a specific need for remembering.
Big Social App:
The problem with being a social app replacement is that there are too many parts and pieces to the current social paradigm to build and replace. The things that Facet is missing currently to fill that void from a user perspective are:
DMs
Rich text editing
Link posting and link summary posting
Self promotion and idea promotion and shouting at the world at large
I can add the former 2, but the latter 2 are concerning because, while they increase adoption and advertising, they hurt the overall user experience for what this was meant to be.
Link posting is just a death knell for social media because permits users to quickly post someone else’s thoughts as their own. It circumvents actual content sites and news sites and contracts the global lens for people that view the links, creating a “one side to every story — my side” bubble. Yes, it’s nice to be able to post something else online and share it, but I think that it devolves quickly into an echo chamber.
Self promotion, idea promotion, and being able to shout to the entire world are also nice features (it’s arguably what I’m doing here), but that’s not the direction I want Facet to go. There are more established platforms for that, and in competing with them, Facet just becomes them.
Life Timeline App:
Facet is missing a few key elements to be a true timeline app as well.
Image dump to timeline: take a lot of photos and videos and auto categorize them
A way to just drag and drop / dump images into the system so that it would auto categorize and make memories from them.
A method to export memories in a stylistic manner. Auto styled and categorized memories.
A personal prompting mechanism that asks users questions and have them answer them (timeline prompts)
“Who was your first kiss; what was it like”
Could this be more organic and contextual
Modernized scrap booking; prompts for stickers and patches and things…
Maybe most importantly is the way to add someone that’s deceased, but I’ll get into this in another post.
Things I really want now:
The ability to see the timeline in a more interesting way. I’d like to be able to pinch and zoom through a life in some way and see the connections. Maybe zooming in and out of the ladder in an interesting way.
Speed for loading the memories.
A richer “remember these” interface.
Computer vision implementation for automated memory searching.
Things I really want later:
DMs and rich texting.
A quick way to put images to the timeline using an LLM to auto-sort and post them.
Personal prompting for memories.
A better memorialization process for groups of people — this will be in a later post.
Social Media Ick
I’m older, but I still have an appreciation for the term “ick”. In writing this, I know that I’m likely contributing to the term’s death because the youths will probably move on as soon as someone like me uses it. However, I like how “ick” uses brevity and onomatopoeia to perfectly capture a visceral dislike for something.
Ick is how I feel when I first opened up SnapChat and TikTok. I’m aware that those apps weren’t really made for me, and that I’m likely beyond their demographic aim, but there was an immediate disgust with both platforms when I first installed them.
Let me show you my Snap Discover feed right now:
Snap is a $15B company, and what I’m being force fed without asking is buff guys, scantily clad women, celebrity gossip, and what I’m pretty sure is the last minute of fame for the girl who is famous for talking about spitting on men’s genitals prior to fellatio. And hockey. I’m not only not interested in any of these things; I go out of my way to avoid them. This feed presents like the magazine stand at a grocery checkout. It’s nothing I’d put time into or look at, and it’s not me.
I’m willing to bet that it’s not most people.
Sure, you might get pulled in by a bikini or some abs or a celebrity downfall, but I don’t think that’s why you’re on the app. Not only is it not who I am as a person, it makes me not want my kids to use it. Having to wade through trash or being trash adjacent isn’t something I want my kids or family to be forced into just to talk to me. I’m not a prude, and there is definitely a place for all of these things, but making them the first thing I see when I open that app only makes me distrust the platform because I know someone in a room somewhere made the decision to just skip educational or relevant content and just play into my most primordial of desires.
It wants my attention, and it’s willing to debase itself to get it. It will show me anything that it thinks my lizard brain will be drawn to so that I’ll dig deeper and keep my eyes on it. And while it’s showing me these purely click bait posts, it flashes me ads that I don’t want to see either.
I’d like to think that Instagram would be better, but this what I see when I press Search:
Again, this isn’t me. This isn’t what I want to see. I just want to search the site and search my friends and family for their posts. I don’t need to see women in bikinis, shock value medical images, or celebrity gossip. Like with Snap, I’m being fed these images so I’ll click on them. They tap into the most base of human desires and instincts, and they’re doing whatever they can to keep my attention and get me to click.
On the other side of the post, the people creating this content are being rewarded for their efforts. They’re click bait, sexy, monstrosities are shown an enormous audience that maybe, like me, doesn’t want to see them.
This just repulses me, and, in keeping with the post’s theme, it gives me the ick.
We deserve better.
We shouldn’t have to be surrounded by nor wade through garbage to connect with people.
Unsocial Network
I think about how difficult it is to make a social network often. I’ve show Facet to a few friends, some MBA friends, and their first thought, like good MBAs, is “what’s the business model?” and “how do you scale?”.
It’s strange to be in a place where those aren’t my first thoughts. My first thoughts are “how to I serve my users better?” and “how can I make sure people trust us and have a good experience?”.
The problem lies in the examples that we’ve seen. Companies like Meta, Snap, and TikTok have aggressively and manipulatively vied for our attention. These aren’t social networks anymore, they’re advertising engines disguised as ways to connect with people and share photos and videos. I think there’s a necessary shift in perspective when it comes to Facet. My MBA friends are phenomenally smart, and it’s to their credit that they’d gravitate towards scale, growth, and business model thoughts first, but I think that the case studies they’re referencing aren’t the round hole to put Facet’s square into.
I don’t want it to be an advertising monster that feeds on the attention of it’s users. Facet should be more of a protected space without the typical “social ick”. It’s a place to store the parts and pieces of your life.
I don’t think that it will ever have the engagement of an advertising beast like Insta, but at the same time, it’s currently ad free without the feed/algorithm manipulation found on those platforms meant to drive people back with division/rage. If you don’t come back for a month, that’s okay.
I think that there is room for artisanal social networks in the market in the same way that there are places in the world for Blue Bottle Coffee and Verve Coffees in the coffee space. Blue Bottle makes $750MM a year where Starbucks makes $36B (that’s 48x more). But for my money, if I’m anywhere that has a Blue Bottle, I prefer to go there over a Starbucks. Sure, Starbucks has the convenience when traveling and when on the road, but if I want to have a meeting with someone, I’ll suggest a higher tier place than Starbucks because they’ve lost their brand presence as a cool place with goof coffee.
While I hope that Facet will scale, the goal isn’t to co-opt our user’s attention spans or be part of the advertisement tug of war between the larger socials. Facebook/Meta mentioning recently that you might have AI friends is just a punctuation mark on how far they’re willing to go to remove people from a human experience to keep your attention. Imagining a world where individuals engage with fake friends and groups of friends that remove you from real experiences is dystopic to me.
Advertising?
Maybe the future will have advertising revenue, but it should be about focusing people toward wonderful experiences where they can make profound memories. I’d consider Facet to evolve like a source for positive experiences in a way. If people are continuing to have great experiences doing certain things or in certain places, there may be a promotional avenue for those places or businesses in Facet. If those good experiences decline over time, then there would be an avenue to let those groups know when and maybe how their experiences became worse.
Authentic Ratings
As we search for authentic and good experiences that don’t waste our time, I think a collective network of individuals sharing real-life, and real-world positive feedback about those experiences has a high value, especially in a world where AI and fake reviews are becoming hard to see through. Facet’s closed system to “only your contacts” also helps create a more honest representation of experience because there is no reason for users to become fake or become influencers.
Subscriptions?
I’d like to stay away from the subscription model because I think that there’s too much of an uphill battle against the free platforms. I don’t know if people are willing to pay for it. There is the option to make Facet a premium social network without ads, but I don’t know that there’s enough evidence out there to prove that would be a viable path.
A subscription model also requires significant differentiation. At the current state, I don’t see offerings available to justify and expense.
All that said, I have grown to love my timeline in Facet and each memory is a curated piece of me and the ones around me. It would be painful to lose everything I’ve put in there. As a user, and I know I’m a super-user, I’d be willing to pay $12-24 a year to keep it going just they way it is for me and my custodial accounts. Maybe others will feel the same.
I don’t know the cost at grow yet, and I don’t know how it will evolve, but I’d like to keep the app simple and user-centric. It’s fine with me if Facet isn’t considered a social network, and in reclassifying what “social” can be, maybe hyper-scaling and attention span mining won’t be top of mind for some when they think about what we are and how we expand.
🎵 ”Falling Apart” — Leaving Laurel
Authenticity in an AI world
There's a rise in the ability to make any website and any video and any image that you want as fast as you want, and this is leading to a marketing grey goo across the internet.
Advertisers will be constantly assaulting any space with bots and fake things to get their ideas and their points across.
This leads to a marketing grey goo that consumes the internet where it's hard to know who is real and who isn't -- at least in the digital space.
This is going to make it near impossible to understand who you're speaking to and if the information that you're getting is real or some marketing spoof bot.
The solution is to be able to understand who and what is real. Marketing is going to be a joke because you'll be able to access (online) everyone all of the time at their level, language, demographic, etc.. Product reviews become pointless in an era of infinite fake reviews and fake profiles to review them. Digital agents will just be assaulting and attacking the online spaces.
Instagram and TikTok at their base layers become AI influencers selling AI sex and AI skin to the lowest common denominator viewer who can’t distinguish real from fake or doesn’t care to.
What's left?
I think that all that's left is realism.
I think that brands being able to PROVE that they are real and use real people will have value.
Markets that won't suffer from this are sports because of athletes and maybe top end celebrities that are well watched and well known.
Authenticity becomes the biggest marketing tool for smaller brands.
What to be?
Online environments seems like they’re going to just be a lot of AI Slop/Trash in the future except where the spaces of "real" are and where real people voice real opinions and AI bots are well filtered.
I don’t know how to position Facet in that space, but there’s a way to make authenticity a tenet of the brand and app.
🎵 Strings Attached - Opia
AI // The elephant in the room
I don’t see how to not incorporate AI in to Facet. There needs to be an easier way to post to your timeline.
More specifically, I think there needs to be a way to post old things more easily. We have decades of photos and videos in Google Photos, Apple Photos, Dropbox, Google Drive, etc.. Facet will let you post from those places, but, as the super-user that I am, I know that it’s work. We looked into Apple’s Journal API to figure out how that might work into what we’re doing, but it wasn’t quite perfect for us yet. I think there’s some in between where we leverage Apple’s tools and an LLM to help identify moments of time that are likely memories from a probability perspective.
I need to experiment with ways to do this.
**The above image was created with ChatGPT in about 5 mins.
Black Mirror: Eulogy
I watch Black Mirror.
I’ve been a fan since about 2016. I found the show, and I was mesmerized by the complexity and the sincerity with which it approached its technologies, its people, and its plot. There was real care taken to show a near-future world with outstanding technology that can turn on us quickly, and Charlie Brooker is an incredible writer/producer. If you’ve seen it, “White Christmas” is still what I’d consider to be a perfect sci-fi short story.
Netflix definitely softened the tone of the show when they picked it up, but they maintained the solid punch that that show had with episodes like San Junipero and USS Callister even if they removed some of the dark aspects that gave Black Mirror its “blackness”.
I recently watched the episode called “Eulogy” on the latest series release (Series 7, Episode 5), and I was blown away. I don’t want to give away too much if you haven’t seen it because part of the joy of Black Mirror is the twist that it pulls on you; even when you learn to expect it or predict it, it’s still a fantastic journey. Paul Giamatti’s character learns that someone from his past has passed away. There’s a phone call to him from an (AI) system designed to help people construct holistic versions of the deceased so that others can get to know the deceased better. He’s sent a package to help him construct these memories and capture them for the platform.
Again, I don’t want to give away too much, but Giamatti is phenomenal in his role, playing someone who is transformed by his own recollections where he initially doesn’t want to remember a person, then realizes that maybe his memory is slightly jaded, and then has an epiphany about his understanding of past events through the lens of this AI program that helps him extract and recall memories from a set of old photos. Giamatti is a one-man, tour de force in what is essentially a “bottle episode” where it’s mostly him in his house and then with the AI working their way through recreations of his photos in faux 2.5D. He walks us through tangible emotions from someone that initially doesn’t want to remember to someone who desperately wants to understand and recall. It’s just brilliantly written and performed.
It’s hard to watch this and for me to not think about Facet. I think that the eventual end goal for this is to be able to help people capture and recapture lives that maybe they’ve lost to time or degrading memories. It would be great to build a platform that helps people see each other more clearly and get deeper perspective for the events and emotions experienced by themselves and those around them.
Some bullets from the show while I’m thinking about it:
There were many special subtle comments on things I’ve been thinking about for years:
Older people (Boomers, GenX, some GenY) don’t have their lives digitized yet. We’re the between generation where some of our lives are digitized, so many memories that we might have are stored in shoe boxes or old cameras. The show does a great job of showcasing this.
Sometimes, we think of people often, but we don’t have a lot of physical bits or pieces of that person around us. Sometimes, we only have a few photos and a letter from them stored away, but that doesn’t mean that those people didn’t matter or affect us significantly.
An AI agent is super useful to help someone talk/walk their way through their memories of another person, experience, or time period, even being powerful enough to maybe pick up on details that the person may not have noticed.
The collective input from multiple sources can build a better view of a person.
We cherish the items from others, and we store and save them in ways to help us remember, even when the memory of that person is painful.
Overall, fantastic episode, and serendipitously relevant. 5 stars. Highly recommended.
🎵 So Slow - Yuno
Journal Apps: a quick look
Just some high level information about journal apps for my reference.
JOURNAL FEATURES
These seem to be the most common or spoken to features for journal apps.
encourage daily entries
reminders
templates, themes, and tags
map feature
calendar feature
prompts for memories
end to end encryption
analysis AI to help you ask yourself questions
export and print features
send emails to users
Penzu Pro+ is $50/yr, Penzu Pro is $20/yr, there is a free tier
Daybook Pro is $30/yr
sites have blogs
Journal apps out in the space.
A app for keeping a journal, great for micro-journaling or whatever you want your daily writing to look like. It allows you to include photos, videos, and sketches, and even upload voice notes. Owned by the company that owns Wordpress.
Combines diary and planner templates with reflective prompts to help you focus on specific areas of life, track them by day, week, and year, and flourish.
A mood-tracking journal and diary app that enables you to maintain a private journal without having to type a single line.
A diary app that lets you keep a private journal with modern features, allowing you to assign photos, videos, places, people, and events to your entries.
A secure and versatile journaling app that focuses on journaling and reflection, fostering a daily habit of mindfulness and introspection.
A diary and personal journal focused on privacy.
Diaro:
A multi-platform diary, journal, notes, and mood tracker designed to record your activities, events, appointments, experiences, thoughts, feelings, ideas, and secrets.
A journal app for iOS, macOS, Windows, and Android devices with features like adding photos and videos, hands-free text input via dictation, adding locations and tags, and more.
A journaling app for capturing life's moments, big and small, available across Android, iOS, Web, Alexa, and the Open AI ChatGPT Store.
A journaling app that provides a personalized journey for users, using artificial intelligence to offer tailored prompts and insights based on individual preferences. Reflectly is a journal utilizing artificial intelligence to help you structure and reflect upon your daily thoughts and problems.
An app that lets you write and send thank-you notes to people in your life, with features like inspirational quotes and reminders to practice gratefulness. More zen-ish and for self care.
A versatile platform that can be used as a digital journal, offering a canvas for creativity and organization.
Subscription Memories
I was speaking to a friend of mine recently from business school about Facet. I bring the app up often. Maybe too much. He had an interesting take on how he thought this could be or maybe should be a premium or subscription model service. Within the same breath, he mentioned how the payment model immediately conflicts with the concept that everyone deserves to be remembered, turning it into “everyone that can pay deserves to be remembered”.
I don’t know if this will take off, but if it does, I’d like to be prepared to understand the financial model needed to keep it running. For me, and for my data, it’s relatively inexpensive. Maybe a quarter a month. But things become complicated at scale. I need to examine how to address this, esp if we’re bringing in something like DMs and API calls, etc..
🎵 Any Other Name - Thomas Newman
Endurance.
One of the things I wanted to do with Facet was to create a space where people could reach out and let others know that they’re thought of.
We live our lives and go through our routines, and in going through them we see images, touch objects, and hear sounds and music that reminds us of other people. Looking at my room, I can see that the influence of other people peeking out from the things around me:
a water container from Kat at HITS boxing
a wallet 3D printed by my buddy Steve
stickers from my wife
a canvas print of Steamboat Springs from my brother
a ruler from ID school at Georgia Tech that reminds me of Cheng, Ron, Thom, and more
a guitar from Norse that he bought me after he broke my other one
a print of the Falkirk Wheel that recalls John and Kelli
I’m listening to a song that I wouldn’t be hearing without Mindy
a stuffed duck that was given to us by a kind manager at the Kindly Hotel in Zurich
And this is a small sample just glancing around the room. I’m inundated daily with the memories of other people and they aren’t just a part of me, they’re how I became who I am.
BUT they don’t know that I’m thinking of them.
I wanted a way to encapsulate and place these memories in time so that the people that helped create them knew that they were still with me. They are with me, they are thought of, they endure.
We make efforts to preserve.
There is beauty in a moment. There are parts and pieces of it that should be put together so that we can all feel the impact of that moment, but also, that moment is likely shared. And in a shared moment, each person that experiences it can contribute a different perspective to it. Each person contributes to the whole that eventually becomes the best truth of that moment.
I want Facet to help with those moments and to help with those memories. Facet should be able to help build a more holistic picture of who someone was by collecting the memories of that person from many possible sources. We have friends and family and coworkers that know us, and each of these (and more) add dimensions to who someone “is”. But there is also the passage of time. People change and evolve as friendships come and go, as jobs are taken and left, and as loved ones are cared for and then moved from. Each of the people in these setting across time has some perspective of the person that they knew, but there’s not a great way to collect all of these piece to build a life.
Facet is a step in that direction. And in collecting and combining these pieces in their proper order, we get to see the depth and breadth of a person across their many relationships over time.
And this is why we make an effort to preserve. There should be a place to gather these memories and these moments to reconstruct a person and represent a life.
Thanks.
Launch thoughts
The app is in a place where it’s about ready for launch.
I’m excited and nervous to see if and how people might use it. I think there’s a lot of good that can be done with it. I believe that there are major gaps with how Facebook and Instagram work for preserving memories, and I think there’s a place for this app in the world for people that don’t want to be a part of the ecosystem or who don’t want to become advertisements. I also think there’s an opportunity here for people that just want to stay connected with close friends and family without the rest of the world encroaching on their experience.
There is still a lot that I want to do. I still want to:
employ a way to auto-grab and prompt memories for people based on their photo, music, and map habits.
work on a better system to jump into the app from notifications
a snappier add memory button
a DM feature
a better way to pull videos and images from Google Photos and Apple Photos
a better way of dealing with multiple email notifications stacking up in the user inbox
a richer way to engage with “remember these”
rich text editing for text posts and a richer experience there
the ability to export timelines to powerpoint or video in compilation formats
fix scrolling and loading issues
maybe an agent that does some of this for you.
I’m stoked with everything that the app has grown into, and I have a phenomenal developer working with me on this who has done incredible work. It’s just hard to contain what I think may be possible.
Loom
I almost named the company Loom. I liked the idea of how we’re interwoven with other people. We are the warp running though time, and many people in our lives are like the weft, crossing our paths for a while and sometimes terminating.
Some people come into our lives and create these thick bands of influence as we overlap and weave together, and some of them are only a thin band. However, those thin bands aren’t insignificant. Just like in a woven material, they matter. They affect the whole. They provide dimension. They provide color and texture that the rest of the weave builds on.
This is another reason I like the timeladder view because we can see how others have impacted us, and how we’ve shared moments with each other. We may have deeply connected or only shared a small amount of time, but they are there with us, a part of us.
You can see the influence in the way that Facet lines up time ladders with each other when you search for someone. Below you can see my timeladder with my wife and where we crossed over.
And below is one from an ex girlfriend from college, Jill. You can see our moments together at Georgia Tech and then when we reconnected after my dad passed away.
We cross into each others’ lives and affect one another, and we build these beautiful tapestries. It’s wild to be able to see it.
Logos…
One of the toughest things for me is working through logo ideation. I’m not as talented as many graphic designers out there. I just didn’t have the training, and I don’t have the eye. I think that I can get by, but when I look super talented people’s portfolios, I’m humbled.
The initial logo seen in a previous post was more of a placeholder. From there I needed to evolve the style of it.
You can see the thoughts behind a few of the ones below. I was trying to highlight the journal aspect of the app as well as the “facet” aspect with the jewel undertones as well as a play on the letter F. I even played with the Morse code for “f - a - c - e - t” with dashes and dots in some of the circular logo borders.
I had a few favorites that I put in front of people that I trust more than myself with these decisions, and there were 3 that stood out. The Book Flower, the Hex Hidden F, and the Jewel. The specific versions that people liked are here.
After some review, I decided to move forward with the Hex Hidden F because of its bold presentation and its customization options. And here we are, with our hexagon with a hidden extruded F in the middle.
40 slides
One of the things that threw me the most in going to different funerals for friends and family was how there was usually a PowerPoint deck. It always seemed out of place. A projector was cabled to an open laptop in the middle of a room and projecting on a wall. It was sometimes tilted, sometimes out of focus, but it was always there. There were usually people standing around it, watching the slides move forward, and speaking about the slides.
I think about it a lot. I think about what a strange way it’s evolved to capture a life. It’s difficult to go through the grieving process and want to encapsulate someone and then represent them for others to see. You want to show them when they were young, when they were old, when they were happy, their achievements, their loves, their hobbies… You want to show the world “them”. And you want to grab those images and save the for yourself. It becomes an act of materialization and slight desperation as you try to get photos from their phones, from their apps, from Facebook, from Instagram, and from the physical ones laying around the houses of those they interacted with. You become a collector, and in the process of collecting, you hope to build a life from these parts and pieces. You compile a gestalt mosaic of this life because you want others to see the person you knew and that they knew, and maybe even show them a person that they didn’t know.
And so you ask for photos and stories, and you try and put them together, but nothing is sufficient. Nothing really captures a life, and while PowerPoint is a decent tool, at each point where I’ve seen this happen, I’ve thought that there must be a better way.
Just to be transparent, this isn’t a shot at PowerPoint or Microsoft. I recognize fully that PowerPoint gives almost anybody the tools they need to put photos in an order and then play them on a loop without interruption. It’s a simple thing that everyone can use. I think it speaks volumes for the grieving process that people are so motivated to try and capture and display a life that they’ll turn to something like PowerPoint to represent a person. Whether or not it’s the best software for the job, it’s the one that people have turned to. And Microsoft has recognized this with the templates they provide online to build these presentations, featuring the slide above with the peonies and thistle.
At one of the funerals I attended, this deck was only 40 slides. It’s hard in those moments to not feel both connected to that number and sad by it. I don’t discount the person and what they were going through to put the deck together. Like most people at that time of grief, they are rushed and stressed and emotionally exhausted, but they doing their best to keep themselves together while capturing a life in this deck. But it’s hard to think that a friend’s life on display was only this deck of 40 slides; and it’s hard not to think that those slides will one day be me or my wife or my kids. I think they deserve better, and maybe I do as well.
As Facet grows, I’d like for it to be not only a way for people to continually add to who this person was but also maybe export that information in a way where others can view it or play it. I imagine a way to capture a life and then let someone easily move through the timeline to create a video or gallery presentation and then play that on a projector or TV or whatever they prefer. Maybe even a way to make multiple presentations easily.
Additionally, Facet serves as a place to keep those memories and those presentations permanently so that anyone can view them, from now until the end of the app, maybe 100s of years if we can figure out a way to make them portable and easy to transfer to future formats. I’ve had my gmail account for 20 years now, and I don’t see that I’ll stop using it anytime soon, so maybe there’s hope for that level of longevity.
Welcome Notes
I wanted the app to have an opening welcome message, and I came up with the concepts below.
The app has a splash screen now with these triangular facet things at the bottom, the facet logotype on the screen, and then you’re taken to a screen with a quote.
“You and Us are a part of Me. The more that we share, the easier it is to understand who I was when We were”
I like the idea of the statement. I like that it’s relatively simple, but it conveys how we can better get to know each other and ourselves by sharing our collected experiences. Other people are a part of us, and as we get to know who they are and how they felt, we can better understand who we where when we knew them.
There’s also the welcome paragraph about being excited to see people. Apologies for my spelling, this is in Illustrator.
Onboarding onboarding
Here’s the first attempt at an onboarding for the app.
Sorry for the small image. The process from left to right onboards a new user to the app. There were a few things I wanted from this experience.
The user should already have a memory from Facet in the inbox.
The user should be able to create a memory immediately
Having a memory already in the inbox is a small throwback to Tom from Myspace, but it also serves as a gretting to the user and a method for them to look at a new memory and maybe add or delete it at the same time.
You can see the first Facet memory example below. I like the idea of getting a user to onboard and already have something that they can do.
Filtering
I wanted a method to filter the posts. While there are simple ways of doing it with a pop up, list menu, I wanted a way that conveyed the colors of the memories as well. Above are some exploration on the theme with colors. I was working with an amazing developer and told him to help me choose based on implementation difficulty.
Search
I needed a way for users to search the memories. I explored a few ways to do it, but went with the above where you press the search icon (magnifying glass), and then if brings up a search field. From there, you type in the person you want, and it begins to auto-list the people in your memories. And lastly, once it’s selected, then you see the name of the person, the memories that you share, and the lines on the timeline/timeladder begin to pop out to show you where in your life your memories are with that person.