Two weeks notice before a service that was meant to help "privately remember your memorable days" deleted all of those memories? Time to find out who runs this and never trust them with anything again.
Two weeks is laughably short and disrespectful to your users. If at least they were open about the issue that forces them to shutdown, maybe users would be able to help out by donating to keep it online for longer? Shit like this makes me hate startup culture.
What if their development team found other jobs, giving the standard 2 weeks notice. Who will maintain the servers and code for those few months?
Sure, the code allowing for the export of data might seem trivial but you still need someone to maintain the system. It's almost guaranteed to need some kind of attention over a couple of months in use. Especially if the export feature was written quickly after the announcement was made.
Now, we've decided to maintain a couple of employees for 2 months to support user exports, where will those 2 people work? Will they work from home? Do you have infrastructure in place to allow them full access from home? No? That means they'll need to come into the office. Will it just be the two of them in the office all day on their own? Do they need some kind of HR? What if they find other jobs during this 2 month export process?
What about customer service? People will have questions about how to export the data or what to do with it. Does anyone answer those questions over the next few months? What if those people found other jobs. Do you hire and train someone new just for those 2 months?
It's not your/my/our job to wonder what resources might be needed to keep it running. If you build a service like this, you should have a user-friendly exit plan.
At the very least they could be open and honest about what is going on instead of pulling a "thanks for being part of this incredible journey, we've had our fun so now we will let you stand in the rain".
"thanks for being part of this incredible journey, we've had our fun so now we will let you stand in the rain"
There's nothing fun about shutting down a company and putting people out of work. Also, standing in the rain is being dramatic.
Yes, it's expected that a service provide you wait an export feature when they shut down but you also need to consider the ramifications of a company shutting down: people jump ship. And rightfully so. They have families that they need to take care of and looking for another job is #1.
If you're this concerned about being able to export your data, don't start using a company unless they already have data export feature available and publish a detailed user-friendly exit plan in advance.
Presumably, this company sent out emails to everyone notifying them of the closure and export feature. Yes, 2 weeks is a little short but I understand the complicated logistics of extending the export timeline.
Dump each user's data into a ZIP file with HTML content+all the images. Now you've reduced a "keep creaky web app running" problem to "host some static files with authentication" problem. Might even be able to stick it onto S3 or something and have next-to-no maintenance. Nobody needs to be fulltime to support that, just have an hourly sysadmin on retainer to fix issues that come up and keep on top of security patches, shouldn't be more than a couple hours a month tops.
All they would need is few KBs for every user. They can as well just email the exports to people in case they didn't turn up to collect the export themselves (maybe missed the email or are in the woods trekking or whatever). Either as attachments or hosted somewhere they won't delete in 2 weeks.
(Though it shouldn't be a problem for those who have it in their sent boxes, but some even wrote on the website sometimes like I did).
A couple of months at least notice before a service that was meant to help "privately remember your memorable days" deleted all of those memories? Time to find out who runs this and never trust them with anything again.
OhLife is private, ArchiveTeam archives public - whats your point? I'm pretty sure their customer base would feel pretty violated/enraged if private journals were uploaded to the Internet Archive.
This is why I think a service like Sandstorm[1] will eventually be huge for web app development. Like OhLife, there are tons of apps that are useful enough for many people to use, but can't easily be monetized due to hosting costs. If OhLife were available on Sandstorm, someone like me could click-install OhLife on my own personal server, much like the app store for iOS. In addition, I the user also benefit by keeping my data private, i.e. not on someone else's servers.
Even better if I were in their position I'd just opensource the entire site, or a part of it to sandstorm so it can be longlived for the customers who liked it, and possibly even get a bump in popularity.
If I'm already just going to scrap the code, might as well spend a week to give my customers an alternative, it isn't like the code is worth anything at this point.
I have 1161 entries dating back to my first on August 18, 2010. I really love the service, but understand if they have to shut it down.
Thanks to the founders for keeping such an easy-to-use service around for so long. I'm off to find an alternative. My list of features isn't long. A daily email with a reminder and a previous post from the last year, month or week. It's that simplicity that kept me using the service.
Interestingly, my usage dates back to around the same time (Sep, 2010) and the list of features that I use/need is identical. Just a daily email reminder with a previous post from the past year/month.
If the founder(s) of OhLife are reading this thread, I'd like to make an offer: I'll pay to host the infrastructure/servers (up to $1,000/month) as a contribution to the community. My guess is, a lot of people are using this app and would like to keep it around.
Ping me @dharmesh on twitter if you're interested.
Maybe a crowdsourced model might actually do better than a freemium model. You're right, it's the simplicity that makes it so nice. So they don't really need to iterate on features at this point.
I have offered to buy but they have not returned my emails, so we're going to build our own version and offer an import feature. Will be housed at http://everymoment.me as soon as we have something ready to go.
They never replied to email or social message, so we're building a replacement that will allow people to import Ohlife entries. We plan to make them a little more secure as well.
Neither 280daily or Penzu can get even close to the clean, fast, beautiful and simple interface of Ohlife. Specially It's large readable clean fonts.
Right now offline Secretpad seems like a viable alternative. or just the our old beloved notepad.
Yes, I would be very interested. I just signed up for an account with you. I would like the import for OhLife, but do you think there's anyway that you may be able to also include past responses in the near future. For instance, including what a wrote a year ago to the email I get sent today? Thanks!
I have also just joined DailyDiary per your suggestion & would LOVE import capability for my previous OhLife entries as mlsenn & others have pointed out!
The feature of the 'one year ago you wrote...' would also be incredibly great to have and would ensure I stuck with DailyDiary for the future!
Would LOVE this. I've been using it for nearly 3 years and desperately looking for a similar thing. Does yours email us with reminders of where we've been as well?
i start use ohlife from 08/26/2010, has 658 entries totally.
every night i will wait for your email and input what i think or meet today, and i can know what i thought one year ago, and i have the chance to remember the good/sad life i experienced before.
it's always in my daily routing and the habit, i also introduced this service to my family and friends, everyone like it very much.
I have multiple calendars (about 20), some log things to do with work, one logs all SMS messages and phone calls sent/received, another logs fitness/health.
At any time I can look at any day, and there is enough information in the calendar to tell me everything that happened that day and for me to recall the day clearly.
Most of this is recorded implicitly (IFTTT handles whatever doesn't have calendar intgreation), only a little is recorded manually. It used to be more manual, now it's more automatic.
I've been doing this for so long I'm not even sure when I started... let me look. Well, May 2006 I see densely filled out, but Google Calendar doesn't seem to like looking before that... I guess that Google must store info prior to that in a cold storage solution.
Even looking at 2006, wow. I see the day I met my first wife, the film I saw at the cinema a few days before, my weight, the bike ride I did, some work appointments and a trip to Gloucester, someone's leaving party at work, and that my finances were flush that month.
I remember the weather for almost every day in May 2006, and it makes me realise how much weather is also a signal to recall information. I think I'll add weather history for wherever I am too.
For Android https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.zegoggles.... backs up all calls and SMS to Google Calendar and Gmail respectively. IFTTT can copy the SMS messages from Gmail to Google Calendar. I label the GMails, and copy them to a distinct calendar.
I run an IFTTT to detect calendar attachments on email and copy those to a distinct calendar.
I run a personal calendar for personal appointments, and then other calendars for friends appointments. Another calendar tracks gigs, films, exhibitions and theatre visits.
I run a different work calendar for every employer/venture I've had.
I run different calendars for process based work, i.e. I have a calendar that tracks visa applications and progress, and I have another calendar that tracks key dates regarding all financial obligations (start of agreements, agreement expiry, cliffs for option vesting, etc).
It's just a slow accumulation of information into buckets that I consider to have time-based views of them.
The Google Calendar agenda/search results is usually how I find things, but sometimes I do the whole "browse to this month and see what I was doing then".
Precisely that... I view all calendars at once for the holistic view, but even zoomed out I can see from the density of each calendar's colour roughly what was occurring when.
Inspiration came from two things:
1) Hearing about Stephen Wolfram documenting/logging every conversation.
2) Learning to meditate, and my first attempt at this was to label every thought I had and collate things together in my head
I figured I could log the stream of events that occurred in life, and label everything and collate things.
There are lots of subtle advantages. And it does seem that the book you mentioned ( http://www.amazon.co.uk/Experience-Curating-Increase-Influen... ) is a very similar concept to what I'm doing. No, I hadn't read it or heard of other people (beyond Stephen Wolfram) doing anything like this.
I don't use spreadsheets though... I consider time as being the primary key for all information. From that point of view, the storage should be a time based system.
That stems from how I personally recall things. I recall consuming music as a chronology of life... play a song and I know what I listened to in the months before, months after, where I was, who with, how I felt, what I was up to. But time is the thing there, the expansion of the pinpoint into a line stretching forward and backward provides all the extra context. I log way more than I need to because it's so effortless to do so.
I should've added another of the small processes as I added a few bookmarks today and remembered that I hadn't mentioned this one. I use pinboard and bookmarks are pulled from the RSS and put into yet another calendar.
:( Been using this service for 4 years.. have grown so much thanks to it.
Everybody seems to be recommending Day One as an alternative, but that looks way more complicated than a simple daily email.
Edit: I take that back.. day one looks pretty awesome
Found https://twitter.com/kylesethgray/status/513476424955482112 which let me import all my OhLife data into this.. and this is backed by my DropBox account which makes me feel safe about my data
It's basically a 2 way SMS reminder system that allows for flexible and simple scheduling. I've been using it for months to SMS myself and record thoughts throughout the day. At the start of each day I get a link to my recent summary which gives me performance metrics along with past content (see screenshot)
I haven't really focused on how to make a business out of this and OhLife shutting down is another data point around whether or not this type of service can be monetized effectively. For me email would never work to get me to do this kind of activity. SMS does work because it's invasive enough, on a clearer channel than email, and even simpler to respond. (even though my response rate over the last week is as low as it's ever been :-)
Comments and thoughts welcome as to whether or not people would be into something like this. I've actually been working on another idea that uses this app as a foundation but I (along with a few others) do use it everyday for journaling.
I have been using this platform for a few months and suggested it to all my following. I find it a joke a are closing. I know that may seem harsh but the reality is you have had 4 years to get together a marketing/business plan and make this work. 4 years to setup strategic alliances with key and complimenting services/companies and yet here we are.
I can sum this up quickly, key players in the company (I know they only mention 2 on the about us page) lost interest and now its hurry up and shut down.
What the founders are failing to see is people remember these things and this un-thought out idea will haunt them for a long time. I personally have put them on my do not do business with list.
As for the tool itself, its uber easy to duplicate this so I will be making my own internal tool for myself and clients/students.
I really enjoyed OhLife. Reading your own writing is the best way to improve it. OhLife helped you do just that.
The one additional feature I'd like to see in an OhLife replacement is the incorporation of some cues about my day to help me get writing. Show me my calendar entries, photos, check-ins, etc. to jog my memory. This would be especially helpful when back-filling in entries a few days later. It would also discourage you from writing simple lists of what you did in your journal. These lists make for dull reading a year later. It's much better to write about stuff that won't be recorded otherwise: what you were thinking or looking forward to.
1032 entries that I'm trying to figure out an alternative for. Nov 2010. Funny timing on alot of folks parts. I used Oh Life as a daily photo / three sentence journal and then Day One across my Apple devices for my private thoughts. Seems like the logical move is to figure out the import tools you kind people have posted and go all in on Day One.
When I was initially looking around I tried Penzu and a few others but it was more than I wanted. I loved the simplicity of Oh Life and having the email sit in my inbox as a "to do" reminder. I suspect Day One uses Apple's built in reminders which wouldn't force me to clean up my inbox the way a dozen Oh Life emails does.
I've used OhLife for years and have hundreds of entries. Seeing their shutdown notice made me incredibly sad.
I don't want to lose my journaling habit, so I looked into every recommended replacement in this thread. Sadly, I found each one to lack the relentless simplicity of OhLife.
Since I couldn't find what I wanted, I rolled up my sleeves with a fellow developer and started building.
Our plan is to add exactly one feature to OhLife: non-optional paid plans. We hope this means our service won't just disappear due to lack of financial stability.
If you'd like to know when we launch, you can drop your email on this simple page: http://notify.trailmix.life/.
Any of you guys know what's gonna happen to the time capsule letters? I sent one I was supposed to receive 10 years from now and I'd be bummed if that got lost "in the mail" lol. I'm afraid I know the answer to this though :(
It's not just backing up those memories, you are talking about closing the door to making them. It shouldn't happen. There is always a solution. Please ask this from Ohlife founders. We can save it together. I simply couldn't find any thing as simple and functional as that.
Give people a chance to save OhLife. Set an amount for giving the server another year. Put this amount on your website or a crowd funding site like Ycombinator invite all of your users to donate to raise the fund just like what Wikipedia do every year. Don't simply shut it down without giving the users a chance for keeping the door open.
I found about OhLife 6 months ago and loved using it. I just signed up for http://www.idonethis.com so that I continue to journal and track my progress.
I knew this will happen. About 400 notes over past 3 years. I used to write directly online by just typing "oh" in the firefox's addressbar, which was the keyboard shortcut for https://ohlife.com/past, hit write button and start writing. That simple! Now every thing's about to disappear. This little sancuary where I used to hang with my memory. Things don't last but they should. at least till we are here.
I knew this will happen. About 400 notes over past 3 years. I used to write directly online by just typing "oh" in the firefox's addressbar, which was the keyboard shortcut for https://ohlife.com/past, hit write button and start writing. That simple! Now every thing's about to disappear. This little sancuary where I used to hang with my memory. Things don't last but they should. at least till we are here.
Part of what I loved about OhLife was getting a reminder of what was going on in my life a month ago. Does anyone have any replacements with that feature to suggest? Thanks!
If you don't want to worry about losing your data in the future, try Chronicle of Life. As a non-profit with an endowment fund, we're probably the safest guardian of your data.
You can already get a daily reminder email and hit reply to save your thoughts. We're currently reworking the website (long overdue), and will add the option to see a previous post in the reminder email by mid October.
I found OhLife super helpful as a way of keeping a train of thought going. Am planning an open source side project like OhLife but that supports a few unobtrusive power features like topics. Email me at elliott @trinket io if you're interested / want to help.
A project like this should be an open source side project we build because we want it, not a startup.
Very sorry they are leaving. I have been posting three years and have over 1100 entries. I recommended it to everyone. But respect the were they let us all know instead of going quietly in the night with all our data.
I downloaded everything I had so at least I have my postings. Definitely looking for an alternative. Good luck to those who made OhLife possible!
FWIW: I have tried to contact ohlife to ask about keeping the service up (on new servers / new domain etc. is all fine). I believe I have the time and wherewithall to do that before Oct 4th, especially if the costs can be shared.
(also: none of us - I assume - knows the back-story. I wouldn't judge before you do and have time to digest it)
I think the one thing that disappoints me most is that there's no rich text / mass-photo export option here. Almost every post I made on OhLife has a photo attached.
I started using OhLife after psobot wrote a clone for it. His clone is now unmaintained, but I do think he had the right idea.
Agree, it's easy to backup all even I can write some script to backup all, maybe they feel boring to write a rich text backup after decide shutdown it.
You can also export your ohlife-diary and import it into 'the little memory'. I use it and I love it.
Here's the link that explains how to do it http://blog.thelittlememory.com/
This is too bad. I used this for my journal entries, and it really helped me keep track of where my life was headed. I'll have to find an alternative method of journaling now.
Does anyone know anything about the founders or how they tried to make money? I never saw a premium option.
If you sign into the web interface and click settings, there's a "Premium" option for $24/year or $40/2 years. It would give you weekly text-only backups to Dropbox or email, increase the number of photos per post to 5, and allow you to customize your daily email.
A great service that I loved using, a shame to see it go.
I do appreciate the text-only export in a simple format, makes it easy to parse for future use.
I hope one of the many alternatives listed in this thread hop on providing import functionality.
Thanks for at least having the decency to give people notice and a chance to download everything. I still remember the shameful way in which Dailybooth handled its loss of interest in the space by leaving everyone hanging...
Would anyone be interested in importing their OhLife entries to 280daily.com? The feature doesn't exist, but if there's some interest, it might be worth doing.
Does anyone know if there's any way we can save this site? Its simple but does its job so well and its the only way i've ever been able to keep a diary.
Less functional in the sense that it doesn't support attaching a picture to replies and doesn't include a past entry in the daily reminder, but I'm happy to fast track both of those features if there's demand. Let me know if there's other features you'd like to see!
A past entry would be awesome to have. I actually never knew about the attach a picture feature until after OhLife got shut down, so I personally don't care too much about that. More importantly, in general the UI could use a facelift. It's not bad after you've already created a question but the form of question generation isn't really easy to follow at all. Also, as others have suggested, export of OhLife data would be awesome.
I have just joined daily diary (was on ohlife for 3 years). If you added the feature of emailing previous entries to us, that would be enough. Very exciting!
It's not that hard. I already work on a solution.
a few years ago I developed malidiary.net but now I develop a solution to host on your own server: http://owntools.de/index.php?id=1384105777.6149
It's not ready yet, but now that ohlife shuts down, I will speed up the development.
I've been using WordPress for many months now. You can change the privacy settings so only you can read it, and it has pretty much everything OhLife had - and more.
I wish the US govt. would sponsor something for citizens to store a bit about themselves and their family indefinitely. Even 20MB or 30MB per person, which seems modest and feasible, would allow people to pick a few of their most important photos and write a bit about their life for the next generations to find. I don't trust any private company to handle this well when you're talking about hundreds of years of future storage.
I see there's a few downvotes, no worries. What private company is going to be here in 200 years? in 300? I know the NSA-hate is strong here but it's not like you'd have to add the most personal information. Perhaps someone like the Library of Congress could handle it. I've seen far too many private companies delete data with little notice to trust them.
I'm not suggesting you treat it as a private diary of intimate details, more like a time capsule for future generations to read. How you viewed the world around you, how you viewed world events. Maybe allow people to put time locks on their posted info, so it wouldn't be public for X number of years.
Business fail and succeed all the time. Most of them fail and fade into oblivion. The government however continues to exist and rarely admitting that it has failed. Their solutions to their own created problems lead to more problems.
Without knowing the technology, costs, circumstances, etc, this is very naive to say. Don't armchair quarterback unless you understand all the circumstances.
Edit: And I got downvoted. I guess armchair quarterbacking is the right thing to do around these parts.
you have a big legal problem, either you shut down and discharge all the assets (sold or destroyed), or you keep the company alive and then you have to have a talk to your investors.
Startup owners in exchange for creditability had to give time - thats one of the main currencies in this scene. In this case I wont trust them from now on expecting them to do the same with any other new startup they will launch in future...
> Startup owners in exchange for creditability had to give time - thats one of the main currencies in this scene. In this case I wont trust them from now on expecting them to do the same with any other new startup they will launch in future...
Yeah, that's not how it works.
Committing time and money to a failed venture is the biggest mistake an entrepreneur can make.
That's really easy to say when you're not the one who is paying for it.
This is pretty typical. Every single business owner out there knows that the non-paying users generate more noise and complaints than an average paying customer.
The bullshit 'reputation' angle you are playing is a total non-sense.
Tell that to Max Levchin and 99% of other entrepreneurs that had to fail and fail hard prior to actually making it. I'm sure their 'reputation' is ruined.
Two weeks is laughably short and disrespectful to your users. If at least they were open about the issue that forces them to shutdown, maybe users would be able to help out by donating to keep it online for longer? Shit like this makes me hate startup culture.