Lifeblob's World

As you capture your photos and build your connections over time, your photos begin to tell a story, a story about you! Our visualization of your lifeblob captures that story, frame by frame, as it unfolds.

Each connection that you add to your photo indicates things that are important to you. And connections that occur across multiple photos indicate things or people that are really important to you. Wouldn’t it be very interesting to see how your connections, your preferences and your relations have  changed over time?

That is exactly what we bring to you with the new lifeblob visualization. Below your lifeblob, you will now see your connections represented in a tag cloud format. The following rules determine what the tag cloud looks like:

• The connections that are more important to you show up bigger and the ones that are not as important show up smaller.
• As you move across your lifeblob, your connections also change to reflect things that were relevant to you in the date range you are currently looking at.
• And when you are looking at someone else’s lifeblob, the connections that are common with you show up in green color.

As an example, here is a screenshot of my lifeblob – can you find 4 connections that are most important to me during this time period?

And here is a screenshot of Rahul’s lifeblob – can you find 4 connections that are common between him and me?

Do let us know how you like this visualization – we are all ears for your feedback

As you know, Lifeblob allows you to to post your content and associate it with 4 dimensions: persons, places, tags and time. Today I am going to tell you a real story of what dimensions can do for you – and this one is mindblowing.

Last week, we were deliberating on how to make Lifeblob more intuitive for new users. One of the suggestions that was floating around was to add a welcome post to the timeline, so that a new user gets to see what a post on the timeline looks like. Once we finished implementing this feature, we just decided to tag it with “lifeblob_member” so that it is easy for everyone to see if the people they invited joined Lifeblob – after all that is what tags are used for.

The sight that we saw after we rolled this out blew our minds ( screenshot below, click to enlarge ). As you will see in the screenshot, the timeline of “lifeblob_member” not only aggregates all the welcome posts, but also creates a frequency distribution of our user acquisition ( see the green icons at the bottom ). It tells me that a few users joined us in Oct’07, a few more at the end of Dec’07 and then a steady stream starting Mar’08 till date.

Now thats an innovative tracking mechanism, built out of something as simple as tagging in Lifeblob. Reminds me – “The possibilities are endless“.

PS: If you are a lifeblob member, you can see this view by clicking this link after you login. You can also maximize the welcome post on your timeline and click the tag name to get there.

Today, we turned on a very exciting feature, something we ourselves have been really eager to use.

If you are a regular reader of this blog, you would remember from our previous post how timelines for tags and places allow you to slice and dice your life on various axes. In addition, place and tag timelines are also a very powerful means of discovering new people and new pieces of information – read on to learn more.

When you add a tag or place to your post, your post also becomes a part of these tag/place timelines and implicitly establishes a connection between you, the tag and the place. If you look at tags as the representation of your interests ( like trekking, gardening ) and places as the locations you are associated with, you will notice that tags and place timelines are natural and powerful reserves of information centered around certain interests or certain places. So next time you are seeking trekking enthusiasts in Bangalore, you know what timelines to look at.

Coming back to the feature we launched, you will now see a list of top places and tags in the sidebar on your right. How does it help ?

• On your timeline, this makes it really easy to access tag/place timelines that interest you the most.
• On someone else’s timeline, this becomes a way to discover their interests and explore more about them.

Here is a screenshot of the new sidebar:

Note: Only tags and places from public posts are shown in the sidebar. This is done in order to protect the privacy of our users.

This is the question that I get asked most frequently these days. So this is my first attempt to explain the essence of the service and more importantly, why we exist.

LifeBlob’s mission is to help people connect their lives with the world around them.

We started lifeblob because we were not happy with what existing services provide us ( yes, including facebook ). We believed that there had to be a much better way for people to network and we started out with zeal to discover that. Three months and a couple of prototypes later, we had something interesting in our hands, something that we call lifeblob today.

What is lifeblob ?

Simply put, lifeblob is your personal diary, with a social angle to it. We also call it your timeline. Just like you would write in your personal diary about your experiences, the events that happened in your life and stick pictures to make it memorable, we allow you to make posts on your timeline to capture those precious memories.

What differentiates lifeblob is that your timeline has a social angle to it. When you make a post, you can include a list of people who are related to the post or who were participants if the post is about a real event. And in a flash, the post not only becomes a part of your timeline, but also becomes a part of the timelines of all the participants. So imagine, if you and all your friends start posting on lifeblob and add each other as participants for relevant posts, you would get all the information relevant to you delivered right on your timeline. Now that is “effortless networking” – the information finds you rather than you finding it.

But that is not all, lifeblob also lets you add tags and places to a post and believe it or not, tags and places also have timelines. So whenever you add a tag or place to your post, it also becomes a part of these timelines. But whats the point ? It presents very interesting ways to slice and dice your life on various axes and also discover like-minded people. More about this in another post.

Why should I use lifeblob ?

Simply because:

• Its easy
• Its fun
• Its addictive
• Its valuable

To the last point, everything that you talk about with your friends and family through lifeblob becomes a part of your personal diary automatically. And anyday you wish, you can go back and replay your life just like a movie. And if you choose, you can also pass on access to this information to your future generations, so they know you better.

How do I get started ?

We currently allow users to signup on an invitation basis only. If someone you know is already a member of lifeblob, you can ask them for an invite. Otherwise, you can register your name for an invite on our home page and we will send it to you when we have the capacity.

This is what a timeline looks like ( click to enlarge ):