
OhLife: A Personal Journal You Might Actually Keep Updating - hooande
http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/17/ohlife-personal-journal-email/
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cubix
Maybe I'm paranoid, but I would feel uncomfortable mailing my most personal
thoughts to a server I don't control, or even using clear text email at all
for that purpose.

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Setsuna
What is the alternative apart from paper journals?

/curious

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stoney
Store it locally on your computer? (being careful to back it up of course)

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jackowayed
Yeah, when reading this, between the fact that I love emacs and the fact that
I'm not too comfortable giving Ohlife (and Google, since I use Gmail) my
journal, my immediate thought was text/markdown files backed up to a private
Github repo.

But the email would remind me to do it every day, and it'll be easier to look
through old entries on Oh Life since it shows all entires on one page (though
I guess there's nothing stopping me from just having one super-long text file,
if that's what I want).

At least they have an export that looks solid.

~~~
cubix
Yes, I use Aquamacs to edit a super long text file that I keep on an encrypted
volume. I don't worry about reminding myself. I do it _when I feel like it_ ,
which turns out to be 2-3 times per week.

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kloncks
The design for this website is one the things that consistently gets me. It's
so simple and gorgeous.

Dustin Curtis, in a tweet, also agrees: "This is absolutely awesome:
<http://ohlife.com> Very well designed and very simple."

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Emore
Who is Dustin Curtis?

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hooande
[http://screenshots.dustincurtis.com/Quora_%2813%29_-_Who_is_...](http://screenshots.dustincurtis.com/Quora_%2813%29_-_Who_is_Dustin_Curtis%3F-20100211-161930.jpg)

~~~
pacemkr
Random fact. All of these "Some say..." references are made in a car show
called "Top Gear" [1] about their incognito test driver, "The Stig." [2]

[1] <http://www.topgear.com/uk/>

[2] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stig>

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alttab
I lasted 1 day before I stopped updating it. This is an interesting spin on
keeping a diary, but the fact that I was storing it someplace without a
privacy policy that I didn't implicitly trust made me walk away instantly.

~~~
yesimahuman
The emails asking you to update don't mention anything about privacy either.
Throughout the whole sign up process I wasn't given a solid indication that my
posts would be private.

~~~
alttab
Its different than a private LiveJournal or something like that because you
feel like LJ gets enough money/advertising/traffic from the community and the
users that they don't even care on the content.

Writing down my personal thoughts in a place where only "private" personal
thoughts are stored in the cloud is very counter-intuitive. The selling point
is "you'll actually do it because I'll send you a dynamic email" and the
incredibly styled web interface.

But after they get 1,000,000 free users - how are they going to make money?
The only thing they have that someone without a web-app does is a bunch of
personal information and thoughts.

Just seems weird to me. Cool concept though.

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mcxx
I've been using OhLife for some time now and really like it. Since the sign-up
I never visited the webpage, all my interaction with the service is done
through the email. This is absolutely brilliant. Every day, before I go to
sleep, I reply to the "how did your day go" email, looking back at the day. It
also improved my writting. Great work guys!

~~~
Setsuna
>It also improved my writting.

Sadly not the spelling.

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barmstrong
Great idea guys - I bet this could be really big.

I like private by default, but an option to make your stream public (or share
with family) could help. I'm sure you've thought of this though.

No idea how you'll monetize it, but I bet you'll get a nice base hit out of
this. Whoever is doing your design kicks ass. Congrats!

~~~
barmstrong
Oh one more thing I forgot to mention: have you guys split tested putting the
signup fields (email, password, timezone) RIGHT on the homepage instead of
behind a click? My gut says you'll get a better conversion rate with that (big
green sign up buttons are scary) but you never know.

Maybe even reducing it to a single email field on the homepage and putting the
password + timezone after clicking a confirmation link in the email.

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moconnor
Seems like there are some interesting monetization strategies. Collect my
entries for a year and then offer to sell me a stunningly-bound printed
collection of my last year's entries, perhaps interspersed with news snippets
relating to specific entries etc. Or let me select a particular range of
entries talking about the start of my new relationship and have them bound and
printed as an anniversary gift for my loved one a few years down the line.

I guess online sharing in a kind of mini-blog format for a few trusted people
is also an interesting premium service.

There must be dozens more of these...

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motters
It's a nice idea, except that you're placing an enormous amount of trust in
the web site owners not to leak/sell your private commentary to all and
sundry. The potential for blackmail with something like this could be huge.
Also, if you're living under a not so friendly regime web sites like these can
be obligated by diktat to hand over your information upon request. Imagine, if
you will, a modern version of Anne Frank.

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duck
This was announced on HN a couple weeks ago -
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1549115>

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grandalf
This is a cool idea. I started one page per day <http://www.onepageperday.com>
and have been amazed at how many writers choose to simply keep a diary (some
are quite fascinating). Check 'em out under the glimpses section :)

~~~
revorad
Nice! The first thing I thought of is sharing it with my girlfriend. But she
doesn't have a Google or Twitter account. Can you add Facebook connect? I
reckon you might get a whole lot of new users.

~~~
grandalf
Yeah I need to do that. I'll probably do so in the next week or so.

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crazydiamond
I've been doing something like this with shellscripts for a long time. The
shellscript opens up vim. It concats the file to one on the disk, adding a
timestamp, and posts the entry to my gmail account. A gmail filter labels and
archives the mail.

One can also create a private livejournal account and post to it using a
command-line program such as ljcharm.py.

You can create a private blogspot blog and post to it from gmail itself. You
can set a daily reminder for 8 pm in google calendar if you so wish.

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jvdh
I think it's a great idea, but before I would start using this, I'd like to at
least try to understand your business model.

How is this supposed to make money?

~~~
gwern
I don't think it needs to make a whole lot of money. How much bandwidth and
disk space could an email+plain-text-storage service possibly use up? With
minimal ongoing costs, they could use strange or very inefficient business
models.

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Setsuna
A personal journal is a personal thing. If I record my thoughts in this for
say 4 years straight and suddenly in the 5th year the company goes down, How
do I recover my valuable memories? (Personal journals are more precious to me
than photos)

~~~
mike
There is an export facility (link on the "past" page) that you could use for
backups.

~~~
Setsuna
This is pretty neat - exports as .txt files and even the filenames are named
as "ohlife_20100818" (ohlife_YearMonthDay)

Thoughtfully designed.

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statictype
I've been using this for about a week and a half. It works reasonably well. I
usually see the 'What did you do today' mail only the next morning after I
wake up, which is really, the best time to fill it out for me.

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vitaminj
Is there any way to change the settings so that I get sent an email once every
2-3 days instead of daily? I don't fancy writing a daily journal, but a twice-
a-week diary would be sweet.

~~~
Setsuna
You can ignore the emails (delete them perhaps)

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viae
Ohlife reminds me of a prettier, and less clever version of 100words.
<http://www.100words.com/>

There's some really interesting creative work coming out of 100words based on
folk's every day experiences. I'd recommend that HN folk check it out and that
the OhLife founders take a particular look at it to see how they might attract
and retain their own customers.

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Arun2009
I just keep a personal Wordpress blog hosted on my computer, and keep a link
to it in my home page HTML. I've found the scheme to work pretty well.

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foxtrot
The part of the article relating to Y's previous projects and one dying out.
Did Y do any post failure writeups on this? wondering what lessons they may
have learned or tips they could give to others.

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thingie
Well, I've turned back to the paper. I can write whenever I like and don't
need to have the computer with me. (And I've been keeping a journal since
2006, writing almost every day.)

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Setsuna
What are the possible ways a service like this can be monetized?

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brianwillis
It's very pretty, but I can't really see how it's better than a Google Docs
document.

~~~
lylejohnson
You're correct that it's not really about the writing interface per se. I've
been using OhLife for about two weeks now, and the fact that you get this
daily email prompt to write is the key.

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bravura
Surely it must be more than that, because you can just as easily add a daily
task on Google calendar with an email (and SMS) reminder.

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gwern
Certainly, but I don't see any automatic way way for a Google calendar
reminder to automatically include a previous entry. That would need a Labs or
something else more advanced.

~~~
crazydiamond
The rest of these features are just frills, like replying to an email, or
getting a previous random entry.

A simple shellscript does the main job. In fact, mine actually used to do a
"tail" of the existing file before prompting me for a new entry, but i found
that a bit annoying.

~~~
gwern
Are they frills? There is no before-after comparison, of course, but the
articles does say:

> It sounds far too basic, but the OhLife team says that it works: they report
> that 50% of users who complete their first entry have continued to add an
> entry at least once every other day. It probably helps that, despite the
> spare feature set, the site is very nice to look at. At this point OhLife
> isn’t doing anything to monetize, but if it can get traction then the team
> will consider freemium options.

