I use OhLife because it's so easy just to hammer off a few sentences at 8pm when it sends you that daily email.

And the random excerpt from the past is what keeps me opening the emails every time. Interesting to look back at the past.

Interesting. Somewhat off-topic but what on earth is their business model? Journals are private. There are no advertisements. The service is free.

YCombinator hopes to make money from this how?

Don't get me wrong: it's a simple and clever idea. Just... it's not philanthropy, is it?

They send you an e-mail daily... one that you presumably actually look forward to getting. Surely they could add an advertisement to this e-mail if they wanted?

Probably.

And don't call me "Shirley".

I'm so sorry. I just couldn't resist....

(If you don't get it, watch this movie soon: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080339/)

Never explain jokes! You can dissect a joke, but it dies in the process.

But it's ok to point to a reference for the joke. It helps to educate people.

Some things don't need a business model. They should release the code as free/open source software if they haven't already.

Just think of it as a gift to the world and you can rest easy at night :D

Y Combinator is supposed to invest money in startups with the hope of making bucketloads of money. It's not a charity for establishing cool web apps as a gift to the world.

Phenomenal, simple idea. I, too, signed up.

I can still dig up random LiveJournal entries that I wrote on a whim ten years ago. What would people here rate the chances of me being able to do the same with OhLife entries in ten years?

Don't you keep all emails you send in a "sent" folder?

Good point, and true enough. I should have signed up using my Google account (I should still sign up using my Google account).

I recently unearthed my AOL user database from the late 90s. Dropping it into a simple text editor, I get a ton of garbage characters but also every e-mail I ever sent or received on my AOL account for about five years (including almost all the Spam). While it was sometimes painful reading through that mess (for various reasons), I gained some interesting insight into my past that I found useful. What's interesting is that I have a great deal more mail saved up in my various e-mail boxes, but I wouldn't think to go through and read those chronologically as I did with the AOL mail.

That looks like a great site. I've been using http://www.memiary.com for over a year now. Its method of encouraging use is to present five small text boxes. Seeing that you only need to enter in a few list-like entries encourages me to actually write _something_ down.

It also has iphone and android apps (I actually wrote the Android version), which make it really convenient to update.

I have never really kept a journal, but when OhLife came along I thought it was a great idea, for about 3 days (the idea is still good). OhLife is great, my wanning self discipline however, is not so great.

Thanks for the link. Just signed up.

I love Ohlife, it's just so easy and natural to send an email, it takes almost no activation energy.