What is OurStory.com's mission/purpose? Who is the targeted audience?
OurStory will become the best, easiest, most trusted place to capture, share, organize, and preserve photos, videos, and memories from life. This can be done privately with family and friends, or with the entire OurStory Community. Our primary target audience is women (and secondarily men) 35 , mostly with children and often with aging parents. They are interested in bridging the generations through meaningful sharing, and creating and preserving a photo-history of the important moments and memories that inform their life-experience. They are conscious of both their past and their future, rising above the demands of the moment to entertain broader perspectives on life and a desire to examine it. Of course, there are many young men and women on OurStory (including my children, whose arms I haven't had to twist too hard to begin using OurStory), and everyone in the extended family is invited and welcomed...but let's face it, the Moms are the ones who often initiate these activities which bring families and friends together.
OurStory’s mission is to host and preserve the illustrated conversations our users conduct with themselves and with others about real life experiences, and create an engaged and respectful community that cares.
How does OurStory.com fit in the marketplace compared to social networking sites? How would you differentiate it?
The major social networking sites MySpace and Facebook allow users to set up a profile about themselves, upload photos (and sometimes other media), and communicate with each other through messages and through comments made about content on users’ profiles. The general purpose of these communities seems to be to express something about yourself as a way of representing or introducing yourself to many new people you are not already close to. These social networks are more about the present than they are about the past and the future.
In OurStory, users set up a profile about themselves, but that profile is equipped with a timeline organizer for their photo, video, or text entries that reaches back to when they were born. So the user “profile” on OurStory becomes much deeper over time, to include past events, experiences, people, and thoughtful, reflective writing about prior and present experiences. Capturing the current moment in the context of the longer journey of lifetime creates a new voice that is more conscious of its purpose in recording personal information. And while users collecting photos about their lives and writing about themselves can find new and interesting people in the OurStory community, the primary social network for a user in OurStory is their family and close friends, the people who matter most, the people most likely to respect the privacy around sharing revealing stories from a person’s life journey, and enjoy authentic expression of self.
How does OurStory.com fit in the marketplace compared to blogging sites? What features does it have that a typical blogging site might not have?
OurStory has most everything you would want and need from a blog. The form for posting an entry is very similar to blog “Compose” screens, you can subscribe to an RSS feed from any OurStory “blog”, letting you blog in OurStory and feed that simultaneously to any other webpage or blog online, or use RSS to subscribe to notification from others’ stories. OurStory shows comments added to an entry in the serial format with attribution and time-stamp that is familiar to bloggers. What is different is the timeline, the structure and prompting, the privacy features, the collaboration features, and the story presentation features. Let me address each in turn:
1) Timeline: Unlike blogs, OurStory’s timeline suggests and supports blogging about your past experiences, and organizes your entries as your personal history, something hard to do in a blog.
2) Structure and Prompting: OurStory provides frameworks for getting stories from your life written. A full question library lets you select and answer questions such as “Who shared your important teenage “firsts” with you”. Templates for organizing the places you have lived and the people you have known give structure to the essential collection of your life experiences.
3) Privacy: Few blogs allow you to control who can see what you enter into the blog, they are typically publicly viewable writings. With OurStory, each entry you make can be made public or made restricted to viewing by only the people you choose.
4) Collaboration: With OurStory, you can set up a timeline (your own, or a group timeline) to which anyone you invite can add entries including text, photos, and videos. So people you know can add directly to your photo-history, not just comment on it, or you could create a photo-history “blog” for the entire family and each member could add to this timeline of entries while also having their own personal OurStory timeline collection about themselves.
5) Story Presentation: Unlike blogs, which present entries in the order they were written, in OurStory you can select and sequence any series of entries as a presentation, which can then be viewed online as an album, can be printed into a bound book, or produced to DVD for storage and playback.
I have a genealogy/ancestry web site. How does OurStory.com apply to my type of customers?
Create a personal history timeline for each of the persons in your family tree. Use OurStory to collect and present the documents, photos, letters, and recordings about an ancestor, or about a relative still living. This can be an easy way to organize your media assets about a relative, and provide a way for others to add comments, photos, and memories about them to the timeline history. Create a printed book about each ancestor for the family bookshelf or the living room coffee table.
How would I use OurStory to tell the story of my parents or grandparents?
Create a new timeline/profile for your parent, grandparent, or a single timeline/profile for both parents or both grandparents together. Upload pictures you have of them and date them so they appear in the right year or approximate year on the timeline. Write what you know about the people in the photos, and about the events going on about when the photo was taken. As you remember events for which you have no photos, add an entry with text describing your recollections. You can click “Share” to send out an email with the text and photos of each entry that you want others in your family to comment on. They can add a comment simply by replying to the email. Or have them join OurStory and work with you to collect the memories of the prior generations.
Can you elaborate on OurStory's collaborative features that allow several of us to build a story together?
In OurStory you simply create a new timeline/profile for the collaborative story. Then send invitations to your collaborators from within that profile, and they will connect to it. Under “Settings” (at the top right of your pages) scroll down to Submission Controls, and select either “Accept Submissions with My Approval” or “Accept Submissions from my Connections, No Approval Necessary”
Now any of your collaborators can add a photo, video, story, or comment directly to the collective timeline. You can post requests for content contributions which will go out by email to all those connected, and they can respond by returning or simply by replying to the email.
Can OurStory be used as an online photo album? If yes, can you elaborate why it might be better than using a blog as an online photo album?
The best reason to use OurStory as a way of organizing and sharing your photos is that OurStory is designed to keep those photos for you as part of your lifelong collection, over many decades, and for the benefit of all those in your family who follow you. Think of it as a personal history archive in which you can add and share photos (and videos) along with notes or a full explanation of the people and circumstances in the media. Assemble your photos into a story, and get your family and friends comments on the experience of the events depicted. Keep the photos and words you love forever in this way, adding a little bit now and then, and finally you have a lasting, organized collection, a photo-history of your life.
What types of stories are being told on OurStory.com?
Women are telling stories about their childbirths, their first kiss, the trials of their youth with parents, their struggles with bad relationships, their joy at finding their soul mates, the passing of their parent’s generation, the movies that meant so much to them, their faith, the art or music they left behind or still practice even to this day.
Men are writing about their loves, their work, their experience in combat, their lifelong friendships, their devotion to wives and children, their travels, their beliefs, their fears, and their favorite things in life.
Couples are writing about their love story and wedding, Families are collecting stories for Reunions or Tributes to loved-ones passed on, and groups of friends are sharing experiences, and advice about those situations with each other. Professors and Teachers and groups of students are conducting discussions on OurStory, and a few Institutions and Military Units are collecting the history of their organization together online.
I have a wedding site. How does OurStory.com apply to my type of customers?
Couples can set up a timeline and list of those invited to the wedding, and communicate with any or all in that distribution list simply by writing an entry (e.g. “Don’t forget to call 800-234-5678 to schedule your tux fitting!” or “Here are Pix of the Wedding Shower”) and those they designate will receive an email with the text and photo links, and can comment or respond to that email. A separate profile for the wedding can be linked to the personal story timelines of bride and groom before they met, including their respective stories of their first meeting, first date, first kiss. And these stories flow smoothly into life together, where most Wedding Sites end at the end of the Honeymoon.
I have a baby web site. How does OurStory.com apply to my type of customers?
When parents find out they are expecting, they can set up a timeline and profile for baby, and list all those they want to have receive correspondence and photo-updates about baby’s life. Each time Mom or Dad add a photo or story to the timeline, an HTML email is sent to everyone on the list, and they can add their comment to Baby’s Story just by replying to the email. This profile will be kept throughout Baby’s life, not just until the baby is age 3.
When Baby is born, Dad can take a picture with his phone, email it to his unique email address in OurStory (username@ourstory.com), and have it placed in Drafts, or published automatically and sent by email to everyone waiting for the news.
From OurStory, Mom and Dad can create multimedia stories and print them in books to be sent to relatives and friends, or present photo-shows online, PLUS there is an email Q&A “collection” system built in to support and remind Mom and Dad when they are at their busiest in life.
Mom selects from a library of questions about Baby and OurStory delivers HTML emails weekly, which prompt Mom to reply and collect her experiences, her thoughts or the milestones about baby in answer to questions. Questions like...How often is Baby kicking this week? What new sounds did Baby make this week? Or what was Baby enjoying most to eat?
When busy Mom gets the email, all she has to do is hit reply and answer in a few words...this becomes a draft or an entry in the history of that child’s life. When she replies (and can attach a photo to that reply), emails with that information can go out to everyone among family and friends who are connected to her so everyone stays informed and up-to-date...PLUS when THEY reply to these emails they receive about, for example, “Baby’s first solid food”, their comments are added to the record...so Grandma Jones delight, and Aunt Nancy’s congratulations are there for posterity.
So in the OurStory system, you can select and schedule questions you want to have sent to you by email, so that by answering the periodic emails, your replies become the “answer” content that is added to the timeline and collection of stories. The system can send periodic questions to a user to prompt content collection into their story...and users only need to reply to the email to add content.
I have always wanted to write my autobiography. Can OurStory.com guide me through the process?
Yes, OurStory includes a library of thousands of questions for each of 7 stages of life. Just answering a small selection of these over a year would result in a fine autobiography. The timeline itself structures the decades of life past, and reading what other people write about their lives prompts your own recollections of similar events in your own experience. Just start, and you will soon find that in OurStory, you have a place that will foster your own life-story collection in words, photos, videos, and before long, it will clearly be the best collection of your own creative writing and memorabilia that you have, and a pleasure to return to.
Can OurStory.com be used like an online journal/diary?
Yes, you can make entries daily or many times a day, capturing exactly what is going on in the moment, and have this as a permanent record of your days and weeks and years. You can also send an email into your OurStory email address, and the text and any photos attached will be added to Drafts in your timeline. Send a picture from your phone to your OurStory email (username@ourstory.com), and it will be waiting for you there.
Can you expand on how the timeline in OurStory.com works?
The Timeline shows the pictures attached to the entries you have made in each decade, year, or month depending on what Period scale of the Timeline view you select. Mousing over the pictures or video thumbnails shows the Title of the entry. Clicking on the picture takes you to the entry. You can add a story or photo right from the Timeline view by clicking Add Story below the Period column you want to add to (for example, 1971). You can adjust the Timeline to show a different number of pictures in each period, and any overflow is shown by mousing over the “Total Number” to the right of the period label (1971). This brings up an overlay with all titles in that period, and mousing over the titles displays the associated pictures.
Video is a very active topic on the web. How does OurStory.com work with videos?
OurStory offers video file uploads (any digital format) and one-click web cam recording of videos, with each video limited to 5 minutes length, but no limit on the number of videos you can upload. Using an inexpensive web cam ($50-$100), you can record yourself telling the story of an event with one click, or record yourself speaking to someone you love for his or her private review. Getting your voice in personal expression to those you love is a very precious keepsake. And you can upload videos from your camcorder or digital camera anytime just by dragging that file onto the Video Upload box.
-Andy Halliday, Founder/CEO of OurStory | 