The amount of data that will get accumulated over the course of a person’s life will be huge. So the team experimented with chopping that all up into specific years. A Facebook hackathon project called Memories, for example, which was accidentally released to the user base briefly last year, did that very thing. Users navigated between various buckets of content by clicking on years.
But that didn’t achieve the effect Facebook wanted. That’s not how we remember our life, Felton says. We don’t remember it in chunks. We remember it as a stream. ‘I felt strongly that your life should be shown in one long continuum,’ Felton says.
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“Designers Behind Facebook’s Timeline: 5 Keys to Creating a UI With Soul.”
I think this is a very ideological way of thinking through the question of memory (obviously). Streams work well to tell stories, which is what Facebook is trying to have us do, but per Walter Benjamin, I believe the opposite: “History breaks down into images, not into stories.”
(via marathonpacks)
