StoryWorth (YC W11) Aims to Elicit and Record Family Stories

http://allthingsd.com/20130403/storyworth-aims-to-elicit-and-record-family-stories

by nickbaum • 13 years ago

48 10 13 years ago

akharris• 13 years ago

Been using storyworth with my dad for the last few months. Learning new things about him is awesome, and he definitely wouldn't be interested if this were just a mobile sorta thing. Keep it up!

flyingdtchmn• 13 years ago

Have both my parents on this and its a treat to get the weekly morsels of information I have never known about them. Major +1. Good luck with the official launch!

phillmv2• 13 years ago

Hey!

I love this kind of service. That said, here's what I want:

I want a description of what happens when you give up or get acquired. Thirty days notice for this kind of thing is not good enough. What about an option to be crawled by the Archive Team?

I'm glad your committing to be around for forever, but a worst-case plan is absolutely necessary to trust you with my family's patrimony, etc.

nickbaum4• 13 years ago

Hey, StoryWorth founder here. Great point, and especially important for a service where the data has value for decades to come.

Crawling by the Archive team isn't really an option, since the information is mostly personal and private.

However, the way I've addressed this is by making data export part of the story from the start. At anytime, you can request a backup of your stories, and I will send you a beautifully formatted PDF, along with any audio files (and eventually pictures, videos, etc).

If the service ever had to shut down, I'm committed to giving everyone ample notice to download such backups. So worst case, your stories would no longer be accessible at StoryWorth.com, but you would always have them.

Does that seem reasonable? This is something I care a lot about, so I'd love to hear other suggestions.

phillmv2• 13 years ago

Yeah.

I recently began to the process of digitizing family photos and thinking about the best way to keep them around for another fifty years and found myself playing with the idea of building this kind of infrastructure.

You're still relatively early in the game - on a decades long timeframe at least - but it's worth considering these kinds of policies. Your average customer is probably not savvy enough to have a preformed opinion, but from one technologist to another I find myself naturally pedantic over what "ample notice" might mean.

If you're lucky and successful you'll eventually have to deal with stuff like, "what if the user dies, and stops paying" - do you delete the data?, and how do you handle people associated with them looking to grab the info?

Having a next-of-kin login process or a "shutdown the webview but allow people to always have access to their backups" would be considerate.

Good luck :).

danso• 13 years ago

I'm kind of surprised there's no date element connected to the stories, if the samples are any indication:

https://www.storyworth.com/sample-story/nancy

By "date", I mean, the day or era that the stories take place in. If my parents enter a bunch of these stories in it'd be nice to have a way to view them besides as a list of headlines.

nickbaum4• 13 years ago

Hi Dan, good suggestion. You will be able to add more metadata to the stories down the line (dates, maps, etc). That will open up a lot of cool visualizations (timeline, map, etc). It could also be fun to pull in related data from that time period, for example newspaper headlines or archival photos.

The reason I haven't added this yet is that I've focused on the writing experience. Because most of the stories are written via email, there isn't a structured way to add metadata, so it has to come as a secondary step (either automatically extracted, or annotated by family members)

duck• 13 years ago

One small nitpick - if you're going to put a Chevelle on your site and talk about the one Dad had, don't use a picture with 20" rims. :)

nickbaum4• 13 years ago

Hah, great catch!

StoryWorth (YC W11) Aims to Elicit and Record Family Stories

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