The social media concentrates on the present moment. Living in the moment. And that’s fine, it’s a nice way of living. But what happens to all the photos, all the connections, all the check-ins, all the posts when they are old news? Your past is part of your digital life too, but where does it disappear? I checked, I don’t have any photos saved of me between the bloom of digital cameras and the bloom of Facebook, for example. The more the life flows on in the digital environments, the daily activity is recorded in social media platforms only. See the problem?
Take a snapshot of your digital life
PastBook (idea born in 2010 by Davide Ardore and Stefano Cutello) let’s you “keep your digital life in your hands”, as their slogan says. Basically, PastBook is a service that collects your social media life in one place and records it for your future needs. What ever happens in your digital life in Facebook, Instagram, Flickr, Foursquare, Google+, WordPress (and more), PastBook collects the most important things to save from the present.
Online and offline
With PastBook you can for example create a poster out of your digital life; like all your photos, connections, friends, status updates and activity in the social media. And not just a poster, they allow you to print this digital life on a sort of accessories too, like mugs, flip-flops, t-shirts and shopping bags. In addition, in the future they will provide even more interfaces and products.
Do not think PastBook just as a poster creation or a printing service! The main purpose the service fills is to organize and select the content most important to you, and arrange it in a pleasing format that you can then take and do what you wish with; offline or online. The beauty of the service is that it allows you to take advantage of their digital download, printing on paper or on accessories, and in the future they will provide a tool to download all your stuff locally in different ways, browse your history on-line (TimeMachine), receive a summary of your past activites by mail (Digest E-Mail), customize your products (VAS) and enjoy the same experience on your smartphone (iPhone app).
For companies that wants to link their brands to their users or customers, or for web-marketing agencies or event-organizers they are providing a B2B services to create social contests, like the one they created for the Social Media Week this year,’The Social Media Wall’ (link to gallery).
Effortless and automated
Thanks to the algorithms that the creators have made to enhance the user-experience, you don’t have to insert all this info on your “digital safe-keep”, but it does it all by itself by rating the importance of your actions and content. All this, of course, by respecting privacy regulations. To enforce privacy user can produce PastBook’s artifacts only for himself as owner of his data and the data which is used to create the artifact and deleted afterwards.
More than the Facebook TimeLine
The two friends behind PastBook’s innovative idea were recently challenged by Facebook launching the TimeLine feature. This only shows how the bigger player gets the publicity, even though the smaller got the idea first. Nevertheless the geniuses behind PastBook were eager to give a comment on the current situation change.
“The main goal of PastBook is not to be new or different Facebook interface. We love what Facebook did with TimeLine project because it just confirms that PastBook’s spirit is a value to the user. What PastBook is aiming to do is to collect user’s social life in one place aggregating it from diverse range of social networks, and not just from a single one. We don’t intend to compete with Facebook, our application will be complementary to its TimeLine, adding value that social networks in general don’t have, like off-line products representing your history, cross-social network experience, data ownership and download.”