New Memolane Features Help You Share (Online) Memories With Facebook Friends

Founder Eric Lagier is hoping to make his Internet time machine service Memolane more social today by allowing users to create shared “lanes” with their Facebook friends.

The idea behind Memolane: People are usually sharing content on multiple sites, but it’s not always easy to browse old content, or to look at content from multiple sites in one place. So for example, after I sign up and connected various social network accounts, I can browse and search a single timeline with photos from Facebook and Instagram, mixed in with my tweets and Foursquare check-ins. I also get emails reminding me of what I was doing, say, three months or a year ago.

Lagier and his team introduced the concept of shared lanes last fall, where you and your friends, family, coworkers, or whoever can all contribute photos and other updates. (You can filter the photos and updates included in a lane based on things like tags and dates.) The goal, Lagier said at the time, was to make Memolane feel like less of “a museum” but instead “an amusement park.”

Initially, however, you had to be friends with someone on Memolane in order to create a lane with them. Now you can also create stories with your Facebook friends. That should make the process a lot easier, since you can start creating lanes without trying to rebuild your social connections on Memolane first, and that will hopefully lead to the creation of more lanes that are shared more widely. Plus, whenever users create a shared lane with people who aren’t already on the site, they’re essentially helping to recruit new Memolane users.

As an example, of what you can do with a shared lane, the Memolane team created one around a recent team outing to a San Francisco Giants game, which they created by just filtering by date and then connecting all the team members via their Facebook profiles. There’s also one called the Collaborative 366 Day Project, where participants share something “creative” every day.