At QS18, I shared my experience with lifelogging 4 months of my life with a pair of camera glasses, and I mentioned a web app that I am working on to help you automatically document your life by aggregating data from a bunch of apps that you already use—recording every second of every day wasn’t a sustainable option. Today, I’m pleased to announce that Eternalist is live and ready for you to try!
What is Eternalist?
Eternalist automatically captures your life’s greatest memories without the hastle of keeping a journal or a scrapbook. It works by aggregating data from a bunch of apps that you already use and assembling that data into a beautiful timeline. See what it looks like.
WARNING: behavior may be unpredictable on mobile. The best setup is on your lap top or desktop with Chrome.
Which integrations do you support?
Google Photos, Google Calendar, Spotify, FItbit, Instagram, and Twitter.
What was my motivation for building Eternalist?
In the very beginning, we started Eternalist with the fundamental belief that it was an utter shame how much of your life you simply forget. If you think back, I bet you can’t even remember what you did last week. That changes today!
Some other important influences include:
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My grandpa’s wall-mounted photo collages
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Lifelogging, An Inevitability a blog post by Kevin Kelly
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Lifestreams as proposed by Eric Freeman and David Gelertner
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The Entire History of You Black Mirror Episode
Security and Data Privacy?
You create an account on Eternalist and then choose which apps to link up to your Eternalist account. We require new users to add google photos because we find it to be an essential part of the experience. All other integrations are optional. We use 0Auth to handle your credentials.
When you authenticate an integration, we request the data from the api every hour and store a copy of the results to a postgres database running on Digital Ocean. Images are not stored on our database. We simply reference the baseURLs that each API gives us. You can download a copy of your data from the export page.
At the moment, the data is not encrypted on the backend, but we plan to make this a priority on the next version of Eternalist if we get any initial traction with this launch. An interesting idea that we are flirting with is to implement Eternalist on the blockchain so that you truly own your data.
How can you help?
In addition to signing up and trying Eternalist, there’s a few ways that you can REALLY help us out:
- (EASY) Fill out this 2 minute survey after trying Eternalist
- (MEDIUM) Pick a time here to hop on a 20 minute call with while you try Eternalist
- (HARD) We’re looking for talented people to join our team. If you or someone you know is interested in helping with development and vision, please email me at aaron@eternalist.io
- (BONUS) Join our private user feedback Facebook group
Overall, we’re really just need feedback on the experience. How can we improve this?