The monumental influence of online social media, networking & instant sharing in our lives these days has a very subtle advantage to it. By sharing your moments you are unknowingly, also, journaling your life. As you continue tweeting each thought, instagramming each photo, youtubing each video you end up creating a detailed diary. Right now there’s no easy way to bring all of that together, no way to make sense of all that data distributed across a plethora of services and look at it from a collective perspective of a daily diary.
Timehop tries to solve that with a brilliant solution. Timehop is your personal time capsule — it will show you what you posted online exactly a year ago or even two and three years ago. Using Timehop will require you to create an account either via email or Facebook connect. Once that’s done, it will ask you to link with other services such as Twitter, Instagram, Flickr, and Foursquare. Now all you got to do is sit back, relax and wait as Timehop fetches all the relevant data, each day, from all the services you linked and send you a push notification as soon as your Timehop for that particular day is ready.
All stories are neatly marked with a moon or sun icon, the time it was posted and the social network it was posted on. Images can be viewed full screen and Foursquare check-ins can be viewed on a map. You can choose to share that story or post it to Timehop. Choosing to share presents you with options to SMS a link to that story, send the story as inline email and post it to your Facebook or Twitter. Posting it to Timehop will add that story to you Timehop social feed and all you friends using Timehop will be able to see it in their Timehop social feed.
Talking a bit about the design, everything is nicely color coded, from the type of social network to the day of the week and year. Timehop is by far one of the best-designed apps I’ve used. Everything from the colors to the interface looks crisp and uncluttered. A special mention has to be made about Timehop’s mascot – a super cute dinosaur. That cute little thing is present on every aspect of the user experience, be it refreshing your timeline where he rotates the spinner or just browsing through the app settings where he joyfully starts dancing. Seeing that little guy wear his goggles and jet-pack off in the social feed is a treat to watch, it’s almost as if he’s getting ready to time travel.
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Timehop will definitely amuse you, it’s always interesting to know how our life was in the past but Timehop also does something more, it makes you think in retrospect about the things you are doing now and the things you’d rather have done differently. I can’t help but get reminded about an iconic statement Steve Jobs made “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.”
Timehop is available for Free on the App Store, I highly recommend it and I hope it helps you in connecting your dots.