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

At lifeblob, we are committed to helping you connect with your friends through photos/videos and discover through the connections you build.

Today, we announce the launch of our next major release that will redefine the way you share and discover photos forever. This not only makes us the best photo sharing service around but also comes with an unprecedented offer of unlimited photo storage for everyone who signs up in the month of November ( and our existing users ofcourse ).

Here are the highlights of the new release:

1) Connected Photos

The core concept behind lifeblob is that events that happen in the life of a person connect him/her with other people and places and often are related with specific interests. We are now moving to the next level where we enable you to explore and discover through these connections.

So, whenever you upload a photo and tell us something about it, we instantly show you 20 photos that are connected to it in some manner – through people, through places and through tags / interests.

2) Timescape

Every event that you are a part of has some relevance that spans beyond the timeframe of the event itself. For example, you may have attended the NASSCOM conference in 2009, but the relevance of this conference spans a period of 2007 – 2009. This in a nutshell is what we offer in the timescape section.

3) Visualization of Connection Strength

Over time, various events happen in your life, each connecting you with other people, places and interests. It is often very interesting to visualize how the strength of your connections changes over time and how some connections disappear after a period of time whereas others remain stable throughout your lifetime. We have updated the timeline unit to clearly indicate the strength of connections in a tag cloud format.

We will follow up with detailed description of each of these in subsequent posts on this blog – do let us know how you like these changes.

One of my friends, and a regular user of lifeblob asked this question yesterday. So I thought I might as well post my thoughts here and see what others think about it.

So there are a couple of reasons for our renewed focus on photos:

1) Photos depict reality – The core concept behind lifeblob is that events that happen in the life of a person connect him/her with other people and places. A photo is proof that a real event happened in the life of a person and provides a much stronger and qualified way for building connections with others.

Unless it is in the context of a photo, people generally use text to put their thoughts together. These thoughts may be completely fictional and therefore make it harder to build connections around them.

2) Photos are beautiful – A lifeblob that has photos in each post looks so much more beautiful than one that has pieces of text sandwiched inbetween. This made us feel that there is a much more compelling case for a lifeblob with only photos in it.

3) Photos tell a story – A lifeblob strings together a set of events that have a common connection and lets you navigate through them over time. A picture is worth a thousand words and by itself tells a story – pictures that are connected together in a lifeblob along a coherent theme therefore tell a much more powerful story.

4) Photos are mysterious – A textual description has a definitive meaning for most people, but photos are mysterious creatures. Different people look at the same photo and come up with their own interpretations of the story it tells. As a result, building connections across a photo provides a solid context around it and is a valuable problem to solve.

5) Focus is good – Last but not the least, focus is generally good for a product. Now that we are thinking only about photos, we come up with tons of ideas to connect photos together that we would not have thought of otherwise. Wondering what these are – wait to see some of these in action in our new release that goes live later this week.

Now that you have heard our side of the story, what do you think?

This post is part of a series of posts explaining the features of the new lifeblob v2.0 release.]

One of the things we’ve tried to do with the new release is to bring about a seamless integration of social features around the timeline. Here is a low down on what we have to offer:

1) If you are interested in getting updates of a particular timeline, you can now follow that timeline and we will notify you.

2) On the home page, you will now find a timeline that is composed of all blobs that have been added by your friends, or added to the timelines you are following and some popular content. This makes it really easy for you to see what everyone in your network is talking about.

3) We have also added a few widgets to make it easy for you to find other interesting and popular timelines.

4) And as always, we have a status message and a news feed.

The timelines have a fresh new look – do check it out and let us know if you like it.

Surprise surprise ! This morning, we woke up to find ourselves covered at Startup Dunia. While the post provides a good summary of Lifeblob, I think it is time to dispel a few myths about Lifeblob and tell everyone what we are really upto.

Lifeblob Is:

• A huge mesh of timelines inter-connected though various posts on them.
• A place where you can record your personal diary and connect events in your life with other people, places and things.
• A cool new way to write your blog and showcase it using an interactive timeline.
• A way for people to keep their friends and family posted about things going on in their life and collaboratively build timelines.
  • Especially useful for parents – they can post photos and videos ( coming soon ) of their kids on their timelines and the service automatically builds a timeline for the kids.
  • Alumni groups can add posts about the alumni interactions on their timelines and the service automatically builds a timeline of the alumni group.
• A way for you to view interesting slices of your life. As a personal example:
  • I view My Timeline to see my entire life, instances where I interacted with friends and family and all the thoughts that I have blogged about.
  • I view Delhi, Chennai and Bangalore timelines to view slices of my life that I have spent in these three cities with my friends and family.
  • I view Trilogy and Lifeblob timelines to view slices of my life that I have spent in these organizations.
  • I view OCC and Barcamp timelines to view slices of my life that I have spent in these unconferences and to keep a tab on activity happening in these groups.
• A way for you to discover other people with similar interests ( using tag timelines ).
• A way for you to find out what is going on in your city or connect with people around you ( using place timelines ).

Lifeblob Is Not:

• Yet another aggregation service. We only support aggregation to get our users started quickly.
• A place where you are only supposed to capture real-life events. You can use it to express your thoughts just as well or a mix of both.
• A direct competitor to LifeInLines, Plurk or Dipity. Our focus is not just to provide a beautiful timeline view, but to provide value to our users by exploiting the relationships that exist between these timelines ( or the mesh of timelines ).

If you are interested in more details, these two older posts on our blog are highly recommended:

What is Lifeblob all about ?
The power of dimensions

Today, we pushed a new layout for the maximized view of blobs on the timeline. This should address two problems that we have heard from our users in the past:

1) “As a new user, I did not know how to switch between different pieces of information ( text / photos / comments )”

With the new layout, it will be really easy to switch between different pieces of information. When you maximize a post on your timeline, you will now see one tab for each piece of information that your blob contains ( see image below ). Simply click on the tab to see what you want.

2) “I added 30 participants to my blob and the data overflows outside of my blob.”

We never thought we would have blobs being shared between 30 participants ( wow ) so soon ! But really, we are happy to see that happen and we have added another tab for participants. The participants panel on the left of the maximized blob will now only show a max of 8 participants and you can click on the participants tab to see all of them.

Keep blobbing and keep telling us what you need !

You can call this our first step towards playing your timeline like a movie, or you may call this a better way to scroll, but whatever you choose, I can guarantee you will love it.

When you login next, you will find a small cluster of buttons on the top-left corner of your timeline. Here is what these buttons do for you:

Arrow Buttons: Scroll the timeline in the direction pointed by the arrow. If you want to scroll a relatively long distance, simply hold the button down until you reach the date range that you are interested in viewing.

Zoom Buttons: The other two buttons in this cluster are for zooming in and zooming out your timeline. Yes, thats one more addition to the variety of zoom options we have to offer, but we figured you would not want to move your mouse too far for changing the zoom level, when you are already around that area.

So now, sit back, relax and click that button and see your timeline roll in front of your eyes.

The next time you log in, you will be greeted by Jim, your help assistant.

Jim will take you around your timeline and show you how things work at Lifeblob. And if you forgot something and you want him back, simply click the “Help” button above your timeline.

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.