* OurStory taps into the business of family history
As many of my friends pass 40 and then accelerate recklessly towards 50 they have started to get interested in the past – they want to discover their family histories and document the events that shaped and defined their lives.
Now I have no idea whether this interest in personal history has been a common experience of mankind (flashback to Henry VIII: “Who was that wife I beheaded in 1536?”) or whether it is a “pop” interest of recent generations. Whatever the cause of this interest is, given the current popularity of pursuits such as scrapbooking (a $3 billion industry) and the very new DNA testing genealogy market (currently worth $75 million and growing at 5% per annum) we can safely say that interest in family histories is a big business.
Created to capitalize on this trend is a new service, OurStory.com due to be launched today, May 15th (which explains why I can only provide you with the site’s root URL).
OurStory provides a timeline into which you can plug stories (natch), narratives, notes, photos, and e-mail discussions. The timeline is an elegant visual device that starts with decades at the top level and shows photos that are included in the timeline. Zoom in a you go down to a timeline showing the years in a decade, then one showing the months of the selected year, and so on. This provides a simple and uncluttered top level navigation system.
You can restrict who can see your content at multiple levels. A useful feature is that if someone with an OurStory account has, for example, a photo you want to incorporate in your timeline and they allow you to access their content you can reuse that content in your own timeline. Content tagging is also available which makes for easy searching across all content you have access to.
The integrated e-mail feature is a major element in building histories as it allows users to send messages to one or more people and receive replies within OurStory creating logged and editable conversations that users create content from or that become content in their own right.
According to OurStory CEO Andy Halliday, sending a request about an event (“when did Uncle Dave get arrested”) to a group often triggers a wave of responses regarding associated events (“that was just for jay walking but did you know Uncle Bob went to jail for …”).
Initially OurStory will offer two levels of subscription: Free which will probably involve embedded advertising after the beta test phase, and Premium priced at $49 per user per year. The Premium service will provide a finer “granularity” of access control and allow histories to be archived to DVDs and output as bound books.
Three book creation services will be integrated through outside service providers such as Memento Press and Blurb. Pricing will range from around $50 to $150 per book
Future possible additions to OurStory may include integration of video and automatic face recognition to allow autotagging of photographs (“Hey, looks like ol’ Uncle Bob – you know, the one who went to jail – had another family!” “I’m not surprised, did you know he robbed a bank in Spokane?”).
I suspect that OurStory will be very successful if they can get the exposure in their target markets and particularly if they can provide an extension to the many friend finding and genealogy services.
