Do you remember scrapbooks? For those of you born after the year 2000, they’re what the rest of us used to keep photos and other odd significant mementos in. They are a thing of the past now. If I had a scrapbook today, I’d put a scrapbook in it. That role – let’s call it Keeper of the Things That Were – has now become the province of the smartphone. Using apps like Instagram, Facebook or Twitter, we now upload our respective histories to the digital cloud.
From mid-September, 2013, a new start-up by the name of Memoir plans to become the new scrapbook on your iPhone. Lee Hoffman, one of the founders of Memoir, was quoted as saying, “More of our lives is being automatically recorded. But it goes into a box and you never look at it.” Obviously the box is your phone, and the stuff that goes inside it – pictures, places, contacts; that kind of thing – myriad.
With a calendar, data from services like Foursquare and contacts, that box is capable of being transformed into a smart version of a scrapbook and that’s what Memoir does. According to Hoffman, it is a “major step towards augmenting memory.” The app will also do things like automatically showing people photos and reminding them what they were doing one year before.
Where Memoir wants to distinguish itself from other apps attempting the same concept is by offering a search function that lets its users find their mementos of days gone by from any given companion, time or place. The app correlates photographs, even if they weren’t tagged or stored in a particular way, and calendar events so that if you were to look for one event in particular, it would produce all the relevant snaps from that event. Smart scrapbook, you see?
And of course, in these file-sharing days, Memoir also lets you wirelessly share photos with your friends, as long as they have the app too. For the time being, Memoir is free but there are plans to launch premium features some time in the future. No doubt this is a great day for all you tech-nuts out there, so feel free to print this article out and stick it in your… Oh. Yes. I was forgetting. Just take a picture instead.
