Timelines

I love timelines.

I’ve maintained my own timeline in the Rukapedia for the last 5 years and it’s proved an invaluable tool for helping me keep track of my personal history – where I’ve lived, how old I was, who I was dating – and for giving me visual sense of my own march toward mortality (I use the excellent EasyTimeline extension to MediaWiki to manage it).

My favourite timeline of late is Memolane, a web application that slurps in a selection of time and location feeds from sites like Twitter and Flickr and displays them in a very pleasant right-and-left-scrolling visual timeline. I find it interesting to see these disparate items laid next to each other, and I find it especially interesting to scroll left and explore my recent personal history. Memolane is the binoculars to my life-long timeline’s telescope (although, as I’ve just discovered – there’s a “macro navigation” bar at the bottom of the page – Memolane has slurped in 10 years worth of my life, which is pretty telescopic).

Memolane is in a closed beta right now, but if you sign up on the front page you’ll eventually get an invite code.