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The time of your life, now in Web 2.0

Rafe Needleman Former Editor at Large
Rafe Needleman reviews mobile apps and products for fun, and picks startups apart when he gets bored. He has evaluated thousands of new companies, most of which have since gone out of business.
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Rafe Needleman
2 min read

Recently two online projects surfaced that help users create timelines. Mike Yamamoto covered the SIMILE timeline project on the News.com blog yesterday. It's a tool that makes it easy for developers to create very cool scrolling maps of time-based data, from minute-by-minute events like the Kennedy assassination to millions of years of evolution.

SIMILE is an academic exercise; it's not something end users can use yet to create their own timelines. If you want to experiment with timelines today, try Dandelife, a tool that lets you sketch the sweep of your own life in a timeline, with associated stories, pictures, and videos.

I found the process of creating a timeline in Dandelife very straightforward, although one thing nagged at me: Who on earth would care about the detailed thread of my life, other than me? To be fair, Dandelife is still in very early development, and if its barely-working "connect" feature evolves into a way for a user to weave the thread of his or her own life into a fabric with other users' timelines, it could make for an interesting site, or at least a fantastic icebreaker for dating.

(Also of interest is Dandelife's bizarre revenue model.)

Google Maps and its competitors spawned a raft of sites that use the map as the central interface into data. SIMILE and Dandelife (and another life-tracker, OurStory) are early experiments that do a similar thing, but using the timeline as the interface. These two ideas will no doubt merge: Mapping sites will get better relationships to time, and the timelines will end up displaying events on some form of a map. I'm looking forward to those experiments.