Timehop, and Unintended Consequences

Timehop is, at first glance, about nostalgia. It’s about looking back and seeing the actions of a year ago.

The first order side effect of this is adding retroactive value to your social media interactions from a year ago - you’re no longer just checking in at places for today; you’re building a social history that you can explore, tapping into the same desire for narrative that makes Facebook Timeline so emotionally attractive.

But timehop has another side effect that’s been catching my attention, lately.

I want to do more stuff online every day, to make my timehop emails more interesting.

This sounds silly, and probably is, but it’s the absolute truth. I look at a day’s particularly slim email and think ‘really, that’s all I did on this day, last year? Check in at work, and then again at home?’

I signed up because I love the idea of having a trackable ‘datashadow’ as part of my life. An automatically generated biography. But instead I’m seeing that this level of detail is making me dissatisfied with keeping so incomplete a record.

The same way Timeline made a lot of people feel like Facebook was reducing their life to:
Born: 1984 / Joined Facebook: 2006 / Went to Parties: 2006 - Infinity, Timehop has me thinking that my datashadow could use a little beefing up.

This could probably be the business model for Timehop, if they find a good way to quantify it - build a massive feedback loop for social platforms, and sell them inclusion in the day by day journal they send out to users, reminding them that their actions on the platform in question have value and context.