New York-based startup Timehop is still digging through your old tweets, Facebook posts and Instagram photos to make you remember your past self. Originally, Timehop aggregated all this data and sent you a daily email. It is now going a step further by encapsulating this in an attractive iPhone app and bringing a couple of new features along the way. Nostalgia still kicks in every day.
“What we’ve found is that users really love seeing their old photos,” co-founder and CEO Jonathan Wegener said in a phone interview. That is why Timehop on the iPhone makes sense. In addition to adding Flickr as a content source, users will now see their photos from their camera roll from a year ago.
Another change, the service now goes even further back in time. As social services get older, meaningful content from four, five or even eight years ago tends to get lost. Timehop now shows everything you did on this day ever since you started using Foursquare, Facebook, Twitter or the other services.
“Every single day is fresh content because it’s the next day in history,” Wegener said. And you now receive a push notification on your iPhone to remind you to check forgotten memories.
But what if your friend is in that photo you tweeted two years ago? With an application, Timehop opens many new possibilities. “Email is a tough medium to build interactive features into,” Wegener said. In the app, sharing content on Twitter, Facebook or just Timehop is just a tap away. Every shared update gets its own URL as well that you can put in a text message or email.
With comments and likes, I can’t help thinking that Timehop has just become the social network of past experiences — the “remember that time…” social network.
The 150,000 users will receive an email to prompt them to use the free app. The email product will keep on living, and the app may come to other platforms in the future. The company is looking at other services, such as Runkeeper, to make your daily dose of past updates even better.
With $1.1 million from OATV and Spark Capital, Timehop hopes that users will continue to connect with their own past and share it with others.