The concept reminds me of OhLife (ohlife.com) which sends me an email every night that I can reply to and it automatically makes a journal entry. I just type a few dozen words and it's easy that way. With each email it also pulls up a random old entry like "Remember four weeks ago when you wrote...[excerpt]." It's interesting to look back like that.
Your app seems to integrate location and photos which would be a bonus (a picture is worth a thousand words, after all). I would definitely try this app. I'm an android user
Would any of you (Bay Area preferred but not necessary) would like to try an app I just got done building? I spent the last 2 months designing and building it and I'm really excited to be able to finally share it with some of you guys. It's still a work in progress but I'm real close to launching it.
So the app in question is called Blobly and it's going to help us remember life's important moments. Blobly's mission is to become the repository of our lives.
If you are interested, please sign up in the link provided in the title. You'll get an email from me with a simple how-to-install instruction.
It looks like this is a private version of Path, and if that's the case, this may be just what I'm looking for! I'd love to ditch "social networks" and have my own way to store my moments and memories in the cloud on a timeline. I just don't want the rest of the world to see.
It's completely private and it will stay that way. I really want us to be completely honest with ourselves when it comes to writing an entry. Because you are your only audience, I hope this will encourage us to just pour our hearts into it without the fear of others reading it.
We all can agree that naming your product is tough. Especially when registering a domain for it. I initially went with the name "SympleMe.com" but I didn't like having to explain to people that there are two "y"s in the word simply. Time spent explaining about the incorrect spelling could've been spent talking about the actual product. I chose Blobly because well A) I love it :) B) the word "BLOB" stems from a technical term and I felt like it was very fitting for this product.
It's the three key features that DayOne doesn't have: Search, Notebooks (organization), and Data.
Search - I really enjoy writing. My thoughts are always racing which means I'm constantly writing into Blobly. As the number of entries continues to grow they become a lot harder to find. So I built a search functionality into the app to make it easy to find old memories.
Notebooks - Blobly provides away for you to organize your memories through Notebooks. You can have a memory notebook for home improvement projects, memories about your kids growing up, or simply a list of movies you've watched in the past.
Data - Last but not least data. The data gets automatically synced with our servers. I plan on building the app on multiple platforms with the SAME user experience and design. So your data will always be with you no matter what.
I came here to ask the same question. Honestly, I was hoping for proper encryption. That's the only feature Day One does not have that I want so very badly. I have no desire to upload my secrets to your server. No offense, but that's just irresponsible for a private journal.
Excellent question and your concerns are very much valid.
Data encryption is definitely on the list but wasn't sure if i should mention it because I wanted to limit myself to 3 talking points. I want to keep all the magic behind scenes and just focus on letting you guys know that it just works. Safe keeping your data is very very important.
I already use Flava. And the only thing that I don't like about it, it's that they do no ask for a password to enter. So when somebody is messing with my iphone (eg. My Girlfriend, or Colleagues) I have to be careful, and not put very personal notes.
From what I understanding is that they allow searching on their desktop OSX app but not on their mobile iOS app. Unless there was a recent update that I'm not aware of. If so then please ignore my comment.
How do you intend to make money? I read in another comment that your sync is a home-grown, non-iCloud solution. So you definitely have costs.
I ask because I would like to know why I should trust you with my personal data, and unless you have a non-privacy intrusive way of making money, how do I know that the data will not get "sold" later?
I have a revenue model spec'd out and I can certainly tell you right now that selling your data isn't one of them. I'm a huge fan of Evernote and Phil Libin and Blobly will follow the 100+ year plan. So privacy is definitely the top most priority. I truly believe that Blobly will become the repository of our lives so making sure you guys are happy is definitely important.
Blobly will have a freemium and a premium plan to help keep the application running. However, I can't list right now what some those features are just yet but I can assure you that your data will be safe.
I was going to respond to your comment but since this is a very important topic, I thought I would reply the original commenter so that it becomes more visible. The response was for both you and tsyhco :).
Feedback incoming! I enjoy the idea, it makes me imagine being a better, happier person, given the context I already have with gratitude and journaling. Looking forward to the invite! A few points that come to mind from my past usage of similar apps:
* Have you checked out OhLife? I love that it optionally reminds me once a day at the time of my choosing, with an email (Subject: "It's Tuesday, Oct 30 - How did your day go?"). Anecdotally, this greatly increases my retention and activation. Not sure about others.
* OhLife also reminds me of moments in my past, as it learns more about me. (It ends emails with "Remember a year ago? You were all like...".). I've always wanted it to be associated with a mood so it could constantly remind me of good things in my life (filter by mood > X or something). Think 'gratitude' journaling. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratitude_journal. I've always wanted an app that would make me happier. Gratitude journaling 'coach' app would be as close as I can think of for this vertical, and MVP could be some simple notifications on top of your app.
Your app in particular:
* Mobile will be great for photos and quick notes, but web input (likelihood I'll be able to use a real keyboard) is important to me for journaling. I hope that'll be an available feature.
* I'm on a 15" Macbook Pro and the path that is supposed to visually draw you down through the product explanation to 'invite' were way off the fold for me. I almost thought you'd removed the invite link. I'd suggest scooting things up a bit, maybe cut off the bottom X% of the phones, since by then I get that it's a mobile app.
* I agree with others that I didn't immediately get that it was private. I'd also want assurances that I can get my data out at any time, but the latter may be a bias among HN people.
* This will suffer from a "Mint"-like bootstrapping problem. It's value is extremely low at the very beginning. Any chance it could import moments from an existing timeline (FB? Path?) that I then choose to keep or not in the app?
* There's a certain "one app to rule them all" mentality, and I'm curious what, in practice, I'll do with events that I want to both (a) remember privately, and (b) share with FB friends. Have you noticed anything with this in your own personal use?
it looks impressive. Is there a way to export the notes to another software? Also, how is it better/worse than Evernote? I tend to use Evernote as a journal...
I keep a very detailed journal. It's part of my therapy. The social stuff bothers me and so I stick to use apps like Byword which offers markdown support and Dropbox sync. What's lacking is the ability to link articles and images. Something I can do in markdown but is tedious.
Love to give this a try, if its not forcing me to use social networks.
Looks nice. I'm curious though: the site mentions that everything is synced through the Cloud. Did you use iCloud or is it a home-grown solution - or something else? Sync is hard - and I've found iCloud sync in practice is still pretty hard.
It's all home-grown solution. Sync was definitely hard but it was one of my top priorities from the very beginning. Though it definitely still needs a bit of an improvement but it's working beautifully at the moment.
Congratulations! I think sync is much easier when it's done up front rather than bolted on later.
I'm wondering if sync might have stalled the Momento guys - they had big plans for Android and iPad versions but haven't brought anything out besides small fixes in over a year. (Disclosure: I'm in the iOS diary space too).
I'd like to, but only if I can export my data later. I like the interface, but don't want another 3rd party keeping my data and evaporating eventually (and unexpectedly). Email invite to case at caseorganic dot com.
Seems like something that I would actually use [which is more than I can say about most Ask HNs I see ;)] and I requested an invite, but just out of curiosity why are you saying Bay Area preferred?
Website looks good (Still waiting on your email - No worries though)
A couple of things spring to mind which other HN'ers have addressed, but I will put my thoughts down regardless
1. Having an iPhone app is great - given the fact that you can take pictures, log your location - but for a large part of my day, I have a full blown keyboard and a 25" screen - and not being able to use that to jot down thoughts defeats the purpose. Everyday.me and Day One get this right (although they both have issues that I will highlight next). Case in point - I need a client on the desktop. Momento, the app that I have been using for close to 2 years now sucks at this, but they get almost everything else right.
2. With regards to having a client, perhaps an API would be nice - one that someone can run with to build a desktop client. I have no issues using a web interface, but Day One gets this right - a rich client, a keystroke away to capture something really quickly. Furthermore, it gives me the ability to post longer - like an end-of-the-day entry covering how I felt, and how I thought the day went
3. Export - I want my entries out of the system. Momento (my current journalling app of choice) gets this right. They give you ways to back up your entire journal, and a way to export your entries as plain text. This is my current issue with Everyday.me (I know they allow you to export entries now, but it's only specific ones - No bulk export capability)
4. Security - This is the reason I stopped using OhLife - I still post once in a while, but all my truly personal thoughts go in Momento. You mentioned that you already have Dropbox integration on your list, and that would certainly be nice. That does not mean I will not post to blobly but I need to know that security is a top priority.
5. Tags and potentially Address book integration - Momento gets this right, to some extent - But tags not only help search better, they provide (at least to me) some context to "group" things together.
6. Multiple photos per entry - Momento gets this right, Day One not so much.
7. Integration with other social networking sites - Twitter/Facebook at a minimum. Momento gets this right. Another one is the potential to hook into an RSS feed (Momento does this)
7a. (Addendum to point no. 7) Here's my approach to it - I export my phone entries, text messages, photos, momento entries, and calendar entries every month. I am working on a script that "stitches" together all this information to give me a full view of what my day looked like. I think for most this would be a little extreme, but getting close to it would be nice :)
With all that said, let me say that your app looks gorgeous, and I can't wait to give it a spin on my phone (once I get my invite :D) - I would love to have a one-stop full featured journaling app on my phone (and desktop). I wish you well - and you can be certain you will be getting some feedback from me - and something tells me, even some money :)
Shameless plug: you might like Remembary (http://remembary.com/) - it's based more around writing in your diary, but it also pulls in Twitter and Facebook and RSS feeds like Momento. It also automatically finds the pictures you took each day, and puts any geotagged stuff into a no-work-required map. It automatically fetches your calendar entries (well actually it doesn't at this exact moment due to an iOS6 bug but it will in about a week), It doesn't have a desktop client but it was originally built for iPad and now has an iPhone version. It has a manual data export/import option instead of 'syncing' but I decided that privacy is more important than seamlessness. It doesn't really have tags or address book integration, but given your other other requirements I think you might find it interesting.
Your app seems to integrate location and photos which would be a bonus (a picture is worth a thousand words, after all). I would definitely try this app. I'm an android user