Memolane, a Personal History Timeline Tool, is Beautiful & Wonderful

My birthday weekend, on Memolane. Click for full size.

What did you do on your last birthday, do you remember the details? I just transported myself back in time to my last birthday, thanks to the Tweets, Facebook messages, Foursquare check-ins and Flickr photos I posted that day, displayed on an attractive timeline from Memolane. Memolane is a venture-funded startup that hasn’t opened to the public yet, but if you look around online you can find some invite codes that are still valid. This is really cool stuff.

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The service makes it easy to scroll through your personal history, or the history of your friends who use it, and see a wide variety of social media activity data all bound together by time. Unfortunately, some of the dates were a day off in my imported information, but I could figure it out easily enough. Maybe it’s an international time-zone thing, I don’t know.

The history got a little spotty once I went back several years in the timeline (!) but it was already much better than nothing.

Memolane raised $2 million this Fall from August Capital and Atomico, the venture firm run by Skype founders Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, according to coverage by Jason Kincaid on TechCrunch. The service was brought to my attention by Bryan Lee.

I can’t get enough of stuff like this. I can’t wait until I get the music history feature working. Talk about a cool, accessible, example of value being built on top of user activity data. This is just the beginning of course.

If you’re unable to find an invite code for Memolane, perhaps its founders will show up here and provide some. Otherwise, I imagine the service will launch to the public soon. It looks good so far.

Hopefully an iPad version of this will be available, too. It looks like something made for the iPad.

See also Rememble, a similar looking service, and semi-related sites Dipity, MyTimelines and XTimeline.

Below, Robert Scoble recently did a 30 minute interview with the team behind Memolane, if you’re interested in taking a more in-depth look behind the scenes.