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.
