4SquareAnd7YearsAgo, that emailed you your Foursquare checkins from exactly a year ago, has branched out beyond Foursquare. Now the service, newly re-monikered Timehop, includes your Facebook status updates, photos you updated, photos you were tagged in, as well as Twitter and Instagram posts from 365 days past.
The tech industry is starting to see a resurgence of products that play into social media nostalgia; Facebook Timeline, Memento and Memolane for example. “Everybody is starting to realize that there’s value in the past,” Timehop co-founder Jonathan Wegener tells me. He hopes that the startup will one day be the “ultimate” way people experience their content history online, despite the tight constraint of only showing anniversary content — which Wegener likens to Twitter’s “140 characters.”
In fact, when I covered 4SquareAnd SevenYearsAgo last year, I specifically told Wegener that he should let people search through all their past content. “Sometimes less is more,” he says about limiting the product, which expanded to including Facebook at the TC Disrupt Hackathon in May.
Wegener’s future plans for Timehop include expanding to other services, allowing people to share content more easily and supporting collaborative “history writing,” which would also include simultaneous content shared by friends.
“Its oftentimes the things that we don’t think twice about that are very powerful in retrospect,” says Wegener, “Everything is more emotional when it’s in the past.”