Recollect’s Bertrand Fan, Timoni West, and Chris Martin want to give your ephemeral social media moments a permanent home. Photo: Tom Coates
Do you ever worry your Flickr photos may vanish? Or wish that you had a better way to browse your old Instagram photos? Or that you could easily jump to a past date and see where you were on Foursquare. Or that Twitter’s archive wasn’t such a miserable wreck and you could actually search your old tweets or, well, do anything useful with your messages that were more than a few days old? Meet Recollect. It’s here to save your social media, in more ways than one, and it’s officially in an open public beta now.
Recollect acts as both an archive to back up your tweets, photos, and check-ins, and as a discovery engine that puts a pretty web-facing skin on your social media services that’s both searchable and browsable by date. Right now, it works with Flickr, Foursquare, Instagram and Twitter, but the company says it has plans to add more services. Facebook, for example, is on its list of future services.
Recollect came from the founders’ vision that although we’re sharing so much as it happens, the things we post online tend to be ephemeral and largely vanish after a few days. ”We’re all sharing more now than anyone ever did in the past,” founder Chris Martin told Wired. “But for most of the services we use to share, the primary use is real time. But you’re telling your story, and we hope that Recollect can become a place where you can go back and revisit that story and all that content you created.”
Recollect works like this: Sign up for one of its (paid) plans and authorize it with your various services, and it imports all of your posts (or, in Twitter’s case, the most recent 3,200, the limit set by Twitter’s API), as well as the associated social data, such as comments and likes. After you set things up, Recollect continually collects your new tweets, photos and check-ins — as well as comments and interactions — and rescans your older posts. So if someone comments on one of your photos a few weeks after you posted it, Recollect will grab that, too. It’s built to take advantage of push APIs when possible, but it also has a nightly job that runs and checks for updates. It also lets you download all that data into a ZIP file to your hard drive.
Recollect not only archives your posts, but also people’s reactions to them.
Recollect has only three employees: Martin, Bertrand Fan and Timoni West. All three formerly worked at Flickr. Martin and Fan are engineers, while West heads up design. It’s a bootstrapped company, subsisting solely on revenue from customer subscriptions. The base plan starts at $6 per month for one account on each service and storage of up to 5,000 photos. For $12 a month you get three accounts and 25,000 photos. The top plan, at $24 per month, supports five accounts per service and 50,000 photos.
I discovered Recollect at the recent XOXO Festival, where I met West, and have been using the beta for the past few weeks. I really dig it. I was initially interested in it purely as a backup service, especially for Flickr, which I always sort of worry could go away. But thanks to a gorgeous, dive-in interface, I found that I spent a lot of time browsing through my past, finding things I’d long forgotten and remembering where I was at various times in my life. It’s much more like an interactive photo album that demands your attention, due largely to the lovely little interface. I came intending to backup but wound up diving in instead, which Martin says is the entire idea.
“Backups are a chore. You do them because you feel like you have to, but they’re like a black box and you just hope something never goes wrong,” he explains. “We didn’t want to be a chore. We wanted to make your history better.”
Source: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/10/recollect-gives-social-media-ephemera-a-permanent-home/
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