MemoryKloud

Most social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare enable us to share content in a status-update fashion, or what we might call “byte-size” formats. This gives us up-to-date information about our friends and family informing us on what is going on with their lives. However, there are two major problems with this format. First, status-update streams come in from different sources, all of which compete for user attention. Users may find it challenging to stay on top of a particular event. Also, status updates usually come in as separate pieces of information, which users may find it difficult to differentiate their relevance and/or importance. Both of these problems cause fragmentation of the narrative, and ultimately the bigger picture of the story gets lost. This makes the Internet a one-way street. People push their precious memories to the Internet with the goal of sharing them with people, but there is no simple way to retrieve the memories back again.

These two problems are partly introduced by social media platforms because they are designed around individuals. While most memories are experienced with our family and friends, the mediums that these memories are shared on focus on the person not the event. The solution we envision, is to flip the paradigm on its head; a social network with events in its center and individuals feeding into it, instead of an individual feeding out their own memories.

An event-centric social network can be achieved with a suite of solutions called MemoryKloud. MemoryKloud consists of a mobile application, which would sit in between users and social media platforms to record interesting moments based on events, and a web application that could potentially pull users’ updates from various social platforms and auto-classify them into relevant events.

We believe MemoryKloud enhances users’ experience for memory preservation. On one hand, precious moments in our lives are kept in a digital format where they are easily accessible through different devices; on the other, social interactions for a particular event is enhanced by sharing, thus making memory preservation easier and more fun.

Keywords: moment, memory, sharing, nostalgia