One-Liner Pitch: Back up all the posts you’ve shared on social networks to create a personal archive of your entire online life.
Why It’s Taking Off: Recollect solves two problems at once by providing a simple tool to archive your online data and search through it later to re-discover your old posts.
Social networks like Facebook and Twitter have created an odd predicament for users: The more information we share, the harder it can be to find any particular post later on and the more we have to lose if any of these networks ever disappear.
For more than a year, a trio of former Flickr employees have been working to solve these issues by building a tool that would give users a way to back up all their real-time updates, check-ins and photos shared on social networks for posterity and make it easier to search through these posts at a later date. The resulting service, fittingly called Recollect, launched in public beta earlier this week.
With Recollect, users can archive posts shared on Twitter, Instagram, Flickr and Foursquare – along with any comments on those posts from other users — and download a Zip file of all that data at any time. Prices for the service range from $6/month for 5,000 archived photos, one monthly data download and one account per social network, to a premium $24/month account that covers 50,000 archived photos, weekly downloads and up to 5 accounts per website. There is also an option to try out the service for 30 days, which gives users the ability to archive and download all their online data once for free.
“We felt that there was an underlying reason that we were using all of these services and part of that underlying reason was that we wanted to keep a history of our lives online,” said Christopher Martin, one of Recollect’s three co-founders. “Recollect basically creates one unified personal archive of everything you create.”
Martin and his co-founder Bertrand Fan both worked as engineers on Flickr’s web development team, while the startup’s third co-founder Timoni West worked as a designer at the photo-sharing website. For the beta release, the team decided to narrow their focus to working with just the four social networks mentioned above and building a set of four key features into the service, including the ability to archive posts, download data, browse through the archive and search for specific keywords.
Of these, the search and browsing features are in some ways the most appealing. If you can’t remember where you posted a particular update, you can just search for a keyword and retrieve results from across your social networks. Moreover, Recollect organizes your posts in chronological order, so you don’t have to scroll endlessly backwards on Twitter or Instagram to find older updates.
Several services have launched over the years to help users archive their data for specific social networks like Twitter, but Recollect supports a more comprehensive selection of websites. At the same time, Recollect offers a novel solution to what we might call the re-discovery problem — helping users categorize and unearth their treasure trove of old posts — which applications like Everyday.me and Timehop have tried to tackle as well.
The team hopes to continue improving on Recollect by building what Martin describes as a more “intelligent archive,” which will offer additional options for browsing and discovering older content. So when you come across one archived post, the service will be able to surface others that have some relationship to it, perhaps based on the location or users mentioned within.
Martin says the group also plans to incorporate more social networks into Recollect, including Facebook, which he says is “definitely next on our list.”
The three founders have been bootstrapping the project so far with no outside funding, other than an initial grant as part of an incubator program. Their hope is that as the project advances, the team will be able to lower its costs and pass those savings on to the user with more competitive pricing.
Images courtesy of Recollect and iStockphoto, Nikada.
Originally post in mashable.com
