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.

Selling Nostalgia.

One of my major problems with the publishing industries, and the content industries in general, is a refusal to fully leverage nostalgia.

If you own a newspaper, or magazine, or network, you have history.  And if you’re going to continue fighting tooth and nail for longer, stronger copyright, the very least you can do is try to make money off that history.  Sell the past to the people who fetishize it.  Reprint old (very old, not 6 months old) issues of your magazine on demand, at a premium.  Sell people the newspaper as published on their birth date, if they want it.  Sell a copy of your entire publication’s history, because digital storage is cheap, and because you already paid for that content long ago.

What’s the downside?  If you have an archive, you’ll never sell it.  Will people stop buying magazines or books or newspapers if they never go out of print?  Of course not, because at the end of the day, making copies of anything is easier than it has ever been.  And while physical copies will always have cost, tapping into nostalgia makes it very simple to offload that cost, plus a small profit, on to your consumers.

Whenever anything goes out of print, some money is left on the table.  Whether it’s a lot of money is meaningless, because you can store the information so cheaply that any profit has value.

Periodical content is often seen as having a short shelf-life, but that’s inaccurate.  Content depreciates in value quickly, then slowly accumulates value over time.  An article, or radio broadcast, or news program that was minorly entertaining 20 years ago is now interesting specifically because it was average 20 years ago.

Stop leaving money on the table, as carve every last sliver of value out of your archive.  Make it searchable, sharable, make it alive.

Sell the past, secure your future.