Amazing Apps: Memoir

Memoir takes you home for the holidays on any day! With all of your memories and photos available on your phone and computer, you can share these experiences with the people you had them with...without having to share them with your husband's friend from work you Facebook friended at the company dinner. Memoir contextually curates your daily memories based on where you are, who you're with, and what you're doing! So, when Christmas morning rolls around this year, the greatest gift will be getting to look at all of your past Christmas photos in an instant and share them with your friends and family! I had a chance to interview the co-founders to learn more.

• What was the inspiration behind the app?
  
  • Both of us have been long time journalers, chroniclers, documenters of our lives. We had been doing so in different ways - through spreadsheets, journals, planners, taking photos everywhere - and we realized the nostalgic memories have tremendous value when you go back through that content. That old content - our memories - became even more valuable when you were able to relive them with the people that had experienced that with you. Not many people in the world will do the manual work of tracking everything like we did, but people are constantly generating and creating content, especially by taking an exponentially growing number of photos. We figured out that we could extract value out of this content and resurface them back as old memories at just the right moments (e.g., exactly this moment 4 years ago today, you visited Paris for the first time), and make it seamless to share them with just the right people. 

• What advantages does it have above simply sharing from the photo gallery?
  
  • We do all the work of figuring out which of your friends was actually with you when you took the photos. So with a single tap, you can share your photos to everyone who was there with you. Let's say that you and your husband go to a dinner party, and you take photos. When you look in your Memoir, you'll see all the faces of the people that were there with you and with one tap, these photos are shared with your friends and become integrated into their Memoir. This also works in reverse and you can request the photos that your friends haven't shared with you, which we think is super cool. So at that same dinner party, your husband took a bunch of photos. When you open your Memoir, you can simply request his photos and when he shares them, those photos are now a part of your Memoir so that you can relive them whenever you want. 

• How does a person use it?
  
  • Other than being able to share and request photos seamlessly as discussed above, Memoir will let you know every single day when you have interesting memories to relive that day. Not only will we let you know if it's because something happened several years ago that very moment, but also when you were hanging out with a friend you haven't seen in awhile or at a place you visited before (e.g., you just hung out with Angela, remember the last time you hung out? / you were at Cafe Lalo, the first time you were here was in December 2011). By surfacing those memories at just the right times, it becomes super interesting to relive them but even more so, you can then share those memories with the people who were there with you, allowing you to reminisce together. The other cool thing is that everything in your Memoir is searchable; you can search for your memories near your current location, photos with your friends, the places you've been, go to specific dates and holidays, etc.