I don't remember what I did last Monday, do you? I'd have to think pretty hard to remember what I did even on my last birthday, and that was only two weeks ago. That's depressing.
Enter Memiary, a startlingly simple diary service that prompts you to enter up to five sentence fragments about what you did today and lets you look back by date at what you did in the past. It's really simple, from the gracefully implemented account creation process to the AJAX item editing. I've bookmarked it and am going to try to fill it out daily for awhile; I'd sure like to be able to look back at any given day in my life and remember what happened. This is so simple I might actually use it.
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Memiary is a weekend creation from Sid Yadav, long-time app reviewer at the blog Rev2.org. Yadav wrote a good post about the process of creating the service, how fulfilling it was and how proud his first user (mom) was of him.
These kinds of projects can go well, or not. We wrote about the relaunch of Diary.com last month, where private diaries are now combined with "lifestream" aggregation of activity from around the web. That site claims 11k diaries have been created, a number lower than what you'd think they could have managed with that URL and no effort at all.
Twitter's not made for this kind of thing, either. That company gives and takes away access to users' own archives as it suits their scaling needs and people tend to send more messages in a day than is appropriate as a personal history.
Even more simple could be the way to go. That's what I'd like, I realize now, after checking out Memiary. Hopefully Memiary's Yadav will implement a simple XML data-export option so I don't have to resent the control he holds over my life, trapped in his website. I'd also like to be able to enter more characters per line than is currently allowed. Simple is good but so are complete sentences. I would also like a reminder to make my entries - for me that would work well as an IM at 5:00 PM.
Little services like this might not turn the world upside down, they might not take markets by storm or get acquired for tens of millions of dollars - but they can make a difference in the lives of the people who use them. Isn't that really why most of us are here on the internet, anyway?
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